The Plantagenets - a Docu.

He was over 6 ft tall, unusual for mediaeval times, and equally unusually for the times, lived to a then ripe old age of 72.

Actually neither was as unusual in the 12th century as they are popularly supposed to be.

Archaeological excavation all over Europe from the mid-20th century onwards has yielded many thousands of skeletons, providing a large enough statistical sample to form a reasonable estimate of the average population height during the last two millennia. And the results are quite consistent; in the 12th/13th centuries the average height of the population everywhere in Europe was only about 1 inch/2.5 cm shy of what it is in the same places today. (Average height dropped considerably in the Little Ice Age of the Early Modern period and Industrial Revolution.) It is also clear that - as we would expect, given that it's still true today - the better-off and therefore better-fed sectors of the population were taller than the poor. So while William's reported 6 feet would certainly have been a good height, it was in no way freakish for an Anglo-Norman nobleman of his day.

Nor was 72 an unusually old age for his time. Average age expectancy at birth was indeed very low; hard to put a figure on it but most historians reckon that around 35 years is probably about right. But, that's because a very large proportion, maybe 1 on 4, or even as many as 1 in 5 of all children born died in infancy, and many more didn't make it out of their teens. It's estimated that for anyone who survived to the age of 20, average life expectancy was around 45 years. But that didn't mean that people died of old age at 45. Life was risky for people in their twenties and thirties, too; huge number of young women died in childbirth, and young men died in war and working accidents. And of course there were famines, epidemics, all sorts. Anyone tough and lucky enough to avoid all of these dangers, particularly if they were well-off enough to eat adequately and not have to do backbreaking labour all day and every day, wouldn't appear or be considered 'old' till their sixties, and could easily live to 70, 80, or beyond. Of William's contemporaries:

- Eleanor of Aquitaine herself lived to 80 or 82 (we don't know exactly when she was born) and was still campaigning two years before her death!

- William the Elder, Marquis of Montferrat, when aged 68 handed over his fief to his sons and went to the Holy Land to oversee the interests of his 6-year-old grandson who had just become King of Jerusalem. William fought in the campaign against Saladin and was taken prisoner, but survived all that and died in 1191 when he would have been around 76.

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