Status Updates From An Accidental History of Tu...

'Yet fires were only fatal under certain conditions and killed, for ex-ample, about the same number as attacks by cattle. Escape from a slowly burning building of one or two storeys was usually possible and victims were often those less able to get away. One in three was a child - sometimes left shut in a house by busy parents - and others were elderly or blind.'

'Drowning became a major threat as soon as children could move, claiming three-quarters of victims aged two and three. Most fell into open water, usually near the home, but dozens fell into containers in the house or yard, most often wooden tubs. They could hold as much as five or six gallons and be up to two feet deep.'

'Thomas and Joan Gelder fared very differently. Walking the five miles from Worksop to Carburton on a February evening, he abandoned her at the foot of Sparken Hill, where she died of the cold and, the jurors were not shy of saying, lack of care from her husband.'

'Epilepsy, the falling sickness, loomed large for those explaining accidents, as it did for those offering healthcare. Lady Grace Mildmay, one of the formidable gentlewomen who counted it their charitable duty to offer medical help to their neighbours, placed it first in her list of conditions to be addressed ‘because it is frequent . . . lamentable to behold and difficult to cure’.'

'Deeper questions were raised by accidents. The hotter kind of Protestants sought zealously to detect the providential hand of the Almighty at work in the everyday. So was random misfortune sufficient explanation for a fatal mishap, or even the kind of pragmatic reasoning so prevalent in the jurors’ verdicts, that an accident occurred because a riverbank was too slippery or a horse too restive?'

'Some deaths tested the boundaries. Here the wording might take pains to show which side of the line an incident fell. Jane Stonarde, for example, fell into a pond by misfortune and against her will, not meaning herself any harm. Her drowning was definitely not suicide.'

'We can find other useful fictions. From the 1580s a suspicious number of those who drowned washing horses were said to have slipped off the back of the horse and tried to swim to safety, lessening the likelihood that the horse would be judged forfeit.'

'Apart from stillborn infants, the youngest whose age we know was eight-day-old James Swyft, who fell out of bed and into the fire while sleeping with his drunken widowed mother. The oldest, said to be about 106, was John Wynde, a thatcher understandably described as old, weak and debilitated, who fell from the roof of a stable when reaching out for his thatcher's needle.'