Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel, visited his estates in Shropshire in the year 1635, and met a tenant farmer who had recently celebrated his 152nd birthday. Impressed, he insisted that Thomas Parr accompany him to London, where the old man stayed at the earl's home, met the king, and enjoyed high-class dining and sumptuous accommodations. But within months, he died. Parr's story was recorded in a poem by John Taylor, and then picked up by writers, artists, and storytellers of all kinds. Thomas Parr left no descendants, but his name and fame lived on for hundreds of years.
No one at the time seemed to question Parr's advanced age, but there was much speculation about how he lived so long and why he died. Was it the foul air and water pollution of the city? Or was it the rich food and luxurious lifestyle that he wasn't used to? Two hundred years after Parr's death, Herbert Ingram appeared to have figured it out when he produced Parr’s Life Pills, one of the earlier patent medicines that promised a long life. It was marketed as being a mixture that Old Parr himself discovered but shared with no one during his lifetime. Read about Thomas Parr and his postmortem fame at The Public Domain Review. -via Nag on the Lake