The Paston Letters are a collection of more than
1,000 items of personal and business correspondence documenting three generations or about
90 years (ca. 1422–1504) of the wealthy Paston
family of Norfolk. The letters, many of which were
written during the War of the Roses (1455–85),
have long been valued as a source for the political
history of that turbulent period. The fact that
most of the letters deal with everyday lives of the
household also makes them an important source
for the domestic lives of people of the Pastons’
class. Furthermore, the letters are of great linguistic value, providing important illustrations of
written English immediately before and after the
development of the printing press.
The documents begin with the career of the
judge William Paston, who makes the family fortune through marrying Sir Edmund Berry’s
daughter, Agnes. Their son, John, marries the lady
Margaret Mauteby, and becomes a gentleman with
significant political connections. Some 60 percent
of the documents in the Paston Letters date from
1440 to 1466, the year of John’s death. While there
are letters dealing with Yorkist lords trying to recruit John to their faction in 1454, and letters dealing with the long mental illness of the Lancastrian
king Henry VI, the most notable letters concern Sir
John Fastolf, famous soldier, Knight of the Garter,
and reputed LOLLARD, who was cousin to John’s
wife, Margaret. When Fastolf died in 1459, he left
vast estates in Norfolk to John Paston. Litigation
concerning the estates carried over into the time of
John’s son, John II, when two of Fastolf’s executors
sold the manor of Caister, where the Pastons lived,
to the duke of Norfolk, who besieged the estate in
1469.
But aside from these political events, domestic
affairs take up a good portion of the letters. Often
these involve marriages, which for an upwardly mobile middle-class family like the Pastons were allimportant in consolidating land, money, and influence. We learn, for instance, of John II’s engagement
to Anne Haute, cousin to the queen, and the subsequent annulment of the engagement in 1477. We
also learn of the marriage of Margery Paston to the
family’s head bailiff, Richard Calle—a match never
condoned or recognized by the family. The letters
also demonstrate the effective management of the
great estate by women, such as Margaret Paston,
who are consistently left in charge when their husbands are away from home for long periods of time.
Margaret deals with terms for tenants on the Pastons’ land and arranges marriage as well, though it
has been pointed out that her own letters are in
many different handwritings—the women of the
Paston estate seem to have dictated their letters,
which some scholars have suggested shows an inability to write, or at least to write well. However,
these women most certainly could read, as evidenced by mention of books in their possession. In
fact, the variety of people who wrote the letters contained in the Paston documents indicates a high literacy rate among the nonlaboring classes of
England in the 15th century.
The Paston Letters stayed in the family until the
18th century, when they ultimately came into the
possession of James Fenn, who published them in
1787 and 1789. A third volume of the letters came
out in 1823. However, the originals of the letters
were lost until 1865, when many of them resurfaced. Four separate parts of the collection were acquired by the British Museum between 1875 and
1933, and that is where the bulk of the original
documents are held today.
Bibliography
Colin, Richmond. The Paston Family in the Fifteenth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990.
Davis, Norman. “The Language of the Pastons.” In
Middle English Literature, edited by J. A. Burrow,
45–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. 2
vols. Edited by Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971–1976.