So, it’s the 388th anniversary of the burial of Thomas Parr, a humble farmer who met the King, got married at 80, did penance for committing adultery at the age of 102, was widowed at 112, remarried at 122, and died at 152 of… er, being in London after a lifetime in the country.
Yes, of course it’s all true! What do you take me for? Look, here are the portraits Van Dyck and Rubens did of him when he went to London to see the King, in which he is clearly 150+.
The story goes that Parr was born in 1483, and had enjoyed the reigns of Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, when Thomas Howard, 14th earl of Arundel, heard about him.
When Howard “learned of this ‘remarkable piece of antiquity’,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he
paid for Parr to be brought to London on a litter … in easy stages, [with] admiring crowds turning out en route to gape at the old man.
At this point, apparently,
Parr was blind and had only one tooth, but his beard was neat, his hearing and digestion were good, and he slept well.
Unfortunately, despite his apparently shenanigan-filled life, he did not prove to be all that entertaining at Court
…but the various unreliable versions of his life are filled with incident. Jeremy Beadle’s Today’s the Day! A chronicle of the curious, for example, has him pulling the Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape trick — successfully.
After three leases of land had expired, Parr persuaded his landlord to grant him another lease for the duration of his life. He reluctantly agreed but on hearing that Old Parr had gone blind, sent his son to reclaim the property. As soon as he was told who was approaching the house, Parr told his wife to put a pin by his right foot. As soon as the lad started arguing about the lease, Parr pretended to spot the pin, bent down and picked it up. The boy went scurrying back to his father and told him that Old Parr’s sight had been miraculously restored.
Most of the stories of his life first appeared in the year he died in what the ODNB calls a “colourful” account, which has a marvellously imaginative title (and whose contents were “further elaborated” in “two anonymous broadsides”).
Better still, the story is told in verse, of a standard William Topaz McGonagall would have admired greatly.
It’s here that we learn
A tedious time a Bachelor he tarried,
Full eighty years of age before he married”
Then we hear that “in’s first wife’s time, / He frailly, foully, fell into a Crime”. One Katharine Milton “did inflame so far / The Ardent fervour of old Thomas Parr” that he had to stand in a sheet in a church at the age of 105 to be “purg’d” of the sin of being an old goat. So, he sounds a… vigorous sort, but this was 30 years before he was in London — and six weeks after he got there, he was a goner, allegedly from the wicked metropolis’s rich food and drink, and pollution. ODNB again:
At the king’s command, the royal physician, William Harvey, conducted an autopsy. Uncritically accepting that Parr really had been 152, Harvey noted that his organs of generation were in a healthy state; this seemed consistent with the story of his adultery and with his second wife’s report that he had had regular sexual intercourse with her until about twelve years previously. Harvey attributed Parr’s death in part to his sudden exposure to rich food and strong drink after a lifetime’s diet of cheese, buttermilk, and coarse bread; but he identified the main cause as the effect of London’s atmosphere, polluted by people, animals, and the smoke of coal fires, upon someone accustomed to the healthy air of Shropshire.
This is probably complete balls, and we’ll come to exactly why later. He almost certainly died of being really very old, just not of being 152. A record has been found showing that he got a lease for his cottage and land in 1588, which “corroborates one episode in Taylor’s account of Parr’s life, but throws no light on his likely age”.
Apart from the purely practical possibilities (his records getting confused with his grandfather’s, perhaps) there are two explanations for the tales of his longevity. ODNB says:
In a semi-literate society the exaggeration of age was a common practice, particularly when it brought people attention and respect.
But also:
John Taylor gave Parr’s supposed longevity a moralistic slant: Parr was an emblem of old England, subsisting on a simple diet and hard physical labour, and uncorrupted by metropolitan luxury. His sudden demise on arrival in London proved that it was intemperate living which explained why people could no longer emulate the longevity of the biblical patriarchs. In the age of the French Revolution the story of Parr’s death was reinterpreted in a tract for labouring people (Cheap Repository. Old Tom Parr: a True Story, 1797?), to show the folly of seeking to depart from one’s allotted station in life.
i.e. know your place, plebs, and you could live to 152 and still get some action. 18th-century #LifeGoals, I guess.
There’s more about him in this piece in what would now be his local paper (including a picture of his cottage):
…and you can now rent his cottage. Well, you can stay in the rather less decorative thing that was put up in its place when the more flammable thatched original burnt down in the late 1950s, anyway.
