The Oldest Man in the World: the 152 year old Thomas Parr

Among the graves of kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, the memorials to military heroes of the 18th century, and close by the burials and plaques of Poets’ Corner is a small, white, rectangular gravestone (reproduced above).

This is where lies buried Thomas Parr, ‘Old Tom Parr’ of Winnington in Shropshire, reputedly born in 1483, who turned up his toes in 1635, which would have made him 152 years old, living from the end of the Wars of the Roses through the entire period of the Tudor monarchs up to the time of Charles I.

As his gravestone reads:

THO: PARR OF YE COUNTY OF SALLOP,  BORNE IN AD: 1483. HE LIVED IN YE REIGNES OF TEN PRINCES VIZ: K.ED.4. K.ED.5. K.RICH.3. K.HEN.7. K.HEN.8. K.EDW.6. Q.MA. Q.ELIZ. K.JA. & K. CHARLES. AGED 152 YEARS. & WAS BURYED HERE NOVEMB. 15. 1635.

The legend of Old Tom included his first marriage at the age of 80, a second marriage at 122, and a child fathered as a result of an affair when he was 100. Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel, on whose Shropshire lands Parr lived, heard about this marvel of longevity and arranged for him to visit London. Parr, who had been blind the past twenty years, was accompanied on the journey by his daughter in law and a jester provided by Howard to keep him entertained on the way. 

In London he was something of a celebrity with crowds turning out to see him and with him being given an audience with King Charles I, but either the journey or the capital didn’t agree with him, and he died on 13 November 1635. A post mortem was carried out by surgeon William Harvey who found all his internal organs to be in a perfect state, and concluded that the change in diet and the pollution of the city are what had done for Parr.

It is, of course, extremely unlikely (to put it in the mildest terms) that Parr was 152. There was no system of registering births at this time, so the best anyone has to go on are individual parish records of baptisms. It is known that Parr had a grandfather with the same first name so it seems probable that the two Thomases were conflated and the ‘younger’ Parr (though pretty old) was endowed with another couple of generations that weren’t his own.

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