ng
the adult as during the callow years. Especially did public opinion
insist on children marrying according to the wishes of their parents.
Among the nobility child-marriage was common, a mere form, of course,
not at once followed by cohabitation. A betrothal was a very solemn
thing, amounting to a definite contract. Perfect liberty was allowed
the engaged couple, by law in Sweden and by custom in many other
countries. All the more necessary, in the opinion of the time, to
prevent youths and maidens betrothing themselves without their parents'
consent.

[Sidenote: Health]

Probably the standard of health is now higher than it was then, and the
average longevity greater. It is true that few epidemics have ever
been more fatal than the recent influenza; and on the other hand one
can point to plenty of examples of sixteenth-century men who reached a
crude and green old age. Statistics were then few and unreliable. In
1905 the death-rate in London was 15.6 per thousand; in the years
1861-1880 it averaged 23 per thousand. It has been {512} calculated
that this is just what the death-rate was in London in a healthy year
under Elizabeth, but it must be remembered that a year without some
sort of epidemic was almost exceptional.

[Sidenote: Epidemics]

Bubonic plague was pandemic at that time, and horribly fatal. Many of
the figures given--as that 200,000 people perished in Moscow in 1570,
50,000 at Lyons in 1572, and 50,000 at Venice during the years 1575-7,
must be gross exaggerations, but they give a vivid idea of the popular
idea of the prevalent mortality. Another scourge was the sweating
sickness, first noticed as epidemic in 1485 and returning in 1507,
1517, 1528 and 1551. Tuberculosis was probably as wide-spread in the
sixteenth as it is in the twentieth century, but it figured less
prominently on account of worse diseases and because it was seldom
recognized until the last stages. Smallpox was common, unchecked as it
was by vaccination, and with it were confounded a variety of zymotic
diseases, such as measles, which only began to be recognized as
different in the course of the sixteenth century. One disease almost
characteristic of former ages, so much more prevalent was it in them,
due to the more unwholesome food and drink, was the stone.

Venereal diseases became so prominent in the sixteenth century that it
has often been thought that the syphilis was imported from America.
This, however, has