Notes

1. Quoted from Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life, 2nd edition, 1996, London, Weidenfield, pp. 137-8.
2. See Michel Allard, Victor Lèbre [physician] and Jean-Marie Robine, Les 120 ans de Jeanne Calment, doyenne de l'humanité, 1994, Paris, Cherche-midi, and for expert testimony Leonard Hayflick, How and Why we age, 1994, New York, Ballantine, pp. 147-9, etc.
3. First printed in Peter Laslett, The World we have lost, 1965, London, Methuen.
4. Though not apparently in English until 1847; see William J. Thoms, The Longevity of Man: its facts and its fictions, 2nd edition of a book which appeared in 1873, p. 308, for the translation.
5. Evinced also when he told John Aubrey of a woman "who bare a child every day for five days together".
6. See "Old Meg of Herefordshire", a pamphlet reprinted in David N. Klausner, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, 1990, Toronto University Press (reference to this and to Carew owed to Patrick Collinson).
7. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. XIX, No. 221, 1696, communicated by Dr Tancred Robinson, FRS.
8. See Thorkild Kjærgaard, Alleged Danish Centenarians before 1800 in Bernard Jeune and James W. Vaupel, eds. Exceptional Longevity from Prehistory to the Present, 1995, Odense Monographs on Population Aging 2.
9. Hans Lundström in Jeune and Vaupel (Eds.), p. 73.
10. Hermippus Redivivus: or the Sage's Triumph over Old Age and the Grave, London, J. Nourse, 1749, copy in the possession of the author.
11. For people's knowledge of their ages in pre-census times, see E.A.Wrigley, "Baptism coverage in Early Modern England: the Colyton area", Population Studies, 29, 2, 1975, pp. 299-316, and for late ages in the census period, George Alter, "Old age mortality, and age misreporting in the United States, 1900-1940", and its references. (Working Paper 24, University of Indiana, Institute for Research and Teaching, 1990).
12. See Richard Stone, Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences, 1650-1900, 1997, Cambridge University Press, and Peter Laslett, "Gregory King, Thomas Malthus and the origins of English social realism", Population Studies, 39, 3, 1985, pp. 351-62, and its references.
13. Or knew them when prompted by members of the family or acquaintances, or particularly by the parson or official making out the listing.
14. Only since the establishment of the Kannisto/Thatcher data base at Odense University has there been a fund of tested data on these latest ages reliable enough to correct these omissions.
15. John Wilmoth et al. in The Gerontologist, 36, 6, 1996. See also the chapter of Skytthe et al. in this volume which includes new information on CM.
16. See for example Neil G. Bennett and L.K. Garson, Extraordinary longevity in the Soviet Union: fact or artefact, The Gerontologist, 26, 4, 1986, 358-61. This note covers the Vilcabamba claims as well.
17. "Centenarian studies" would be a more explicit title linking it with the historical story and placing it within the established context of publicity and grant-attracting purposes. But the possibility of confusion with the centenarian cult itself has to be reckoned with. An attempt to substitute age 98 for 100 as the point of entry into latest life has had to be given over as clumsy and inconvenient.
18. See the discussions in recent works on the biology of ageing, for example Robin Holliday, Understanding Ageing, Cambridge, 1995; Leonard Hayflick, How and Why we age, Ballantine Books, New York, 1994; and L.A. Gavrilov and N.S. Gavrilova, The Biology of the Human Life Span, Harwood, London, 1994. In the last book cited, it is stated that a fixed length of human life is no more than a dogma accepted because of confident repetition.
19. Entry written before 1900 by one Edward Irving Carlyle, apparently the only account of Thoms, though it contained no appreciation of his historical significance in studies of long life.
20. On the differential reliability of values for late life ages issued by Governmental Statistical Offices, some of them in the most advanced countries, see Väinö Kannisto's book Development of Oldest Old Mortality, 1950-1990 - Evidence from 28 developed countries, Odense Monographs on Population Aging 1, 1994, and his contributions in the present volume.
21. See Thatcher et al. The Force of Mortality at Ages 80 to 120. Odense Monographs on Population Aging 5, 1998 for a suggested model combining the statistical analysis of length of life with fixes on certain very high attained ages in the past going back for nearly a millenium, which he accepts as having a high probability of being accurate. Especially important is also Thatcher's The long-term pattern of adult mortality and the highest attained age. J.R. Statist. Soc. A, 1999.
22. Carew's discussion in relation to Cornwall (Survey, ed. F.E. Halliday, 1969, p. 135) is perhaps the one exception, somewhat disconcerting since his comment is the earliest in date. His claim that 80 or 90 years were ordinarily attained in his day is contrary to the findings of historical demography. Moreover he seems to imply that his super-centenarians were ordinary people.
23. J. Hynes, The Oldest-Old in Pre-Industrial Britain: Centenarians before 1800 - Fact or Fiction? in Jeune and Vaupel, 1995. Her two Clwyd cases survive all the validation tests to which they are susceptible. Her evidence from thousands of professional and educational records where self-reported ages are set out, bears out the statements made above about such data and its approximate reliability.

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