Elves are physically better than humans in every way I can think of. Better eyesight, better reflexes, better hearing, stronger, etc. They were simply made of finer stuff than the men were. Plus they have magic. But they do still get sick sometimes, and there are things they can't cure.

They don't really have different life stages. I can't think of anything that's different anyway. (I will have to think more about the kisór, I've only really thought about the khírrón. The kisór boys have some sort of important coming-of-age ritual when they are 16 but that's all I know.)

There's an age when children become no-longer-quite-children and they start imposing some boundaries between boys and girls and start introducing them into the rituals of adults, but they aren't considered adults for a few years yet, so in a sense they have a teenager-hood. And at that age the kids really form themselves into a peer group and spend a lot of time among themselves, without smaller kids or without adults. Like high school.

Among the khírrón the ideal marriage age for girls is 16 but tends to be quite a bit older for the boys. Boys get "betrothed" practically at the birth of their future wife (in fact the girl's mother is practically ordered to make a baby girl for such-and-such a boy), so if you're already 8 or 10 at the time, you have to wait till she's 16 to get married. However, either way, they're not fully adults till they're married, so even if a guy doesn't get married till he's 25, he's excluded from certain rituals and stuff.

You are supposed to have your first child as soon as you get married. Their weddings coincide with their fertile period so you're really expected to have your first baby nine months after your wedding.

After marriage you usually have a second kid a few years later, and then that's it. That space between the wedding and second kid is seen as a kind of special time that the older elves get all nostalgic about and sigh over. Ah, youth!

After the second kid though, you're grown up and done, and there's no age where you're like a "senior citizen" or something. The elders are granted special status, but there's not a point at which you "become" an elder... your status just gradually increases as you age and the older elves day, until one day you just look around and realize you're one of the oldest. If there happen to be eight or ten elves over 90, and you're 75, then you won't be considered one of the elders.

Otherwise the life stages are mostly like humans. They hit puberty and menopause around the same time, and so on.

The crime rate in Lothere is actually not so bad. There are a lot of widows and therefore very few unmarried men, and basically anyone who wants a farm can have one, which helps keep the crime rate down quite a bit. (Domestic violence isn't a crime, after all.) The roads are mostly safe, though the area around Acanweald (Britmar's castle, where Irene is living now) is getting pretty wild.

The biggest types of crime are mostly poaching and thievery and the black market. Osh's role as a knight will actually be to patrol the Duke's forests against poachers and incidentally robbers.

There are occasionally murders, as we just saw, but few enough that they're all noteworthy, and the King deals with them personally.

To find out how many farms there are, I did a search for all Lotherians who were heads of households and don't have an occupation, and I came up with 682. So if you assume that everyone who doesn't have another job is a farmer, then there are about 650-700 farms in Lothere. I suppose some of those people may be shepherds, but let's just assume.

Lothere does do a bit of trading, particularly in wool and fine woolen fabrics. As we saw recently with Magog, they do have their own coins now. Their valley is quite fertile, so they probably do manage to trade in food a bit with the surrounding areas, but mostly their trade is due to the fact that--after King William laid waiste to Northumbria a few years back--it's the most "civilized" and stable area for miles around. The only bookbinders and goldsmiths in the area are in Lothere. Also there are a lot of pilgrims that come, and that helps trade.

However, although the river flows to the sea, it is not readily navigable as far as Lothere, and therefore they have no ports. For trade with the rest of Europe (wine for example), Sigefrith relies on ports like Hwitsands and Haeringtun, which are not under his control. (And that drives him WILD. He grew up a sea lord, and now he doesn't have a single ship, nor a place to put it if he did.)

And he relies on the goodwill of whoever is controlling the seas at the moment, which at present means Whitehand in name and Eirik in fact. Looking back, when young Sigefrith got Hilda pregnant and brought her back to Lothere with Eirik and Estrid in tow, that was perhaps the luckiest thing that has happened to Sigefrith in the last 15 years.