How to read the Paston Letters #1

Welcome to the world of a fifteenth-century Norfolk family

The Paston Letters are the earliest surviving great collection of private letters in the English language.

We have chance to thank for their existence. The Pastons themselves – upwardly mobile Norfolk landowners in the mid-fifteenth century – weren’t unusual in writing letters to one another, although they may well have written more letters than most: long-drawn-out legal battles over estates they held or claimed during the convulsions of the Wars of the Roses meant that members of the family were often communicating at a distance, between their homes in Norwich and the Norfolk countryside and various lodgings near the law courts in London.

Bodleian MS Douce 208, f.1r, late fifteenth century

But it was the end of the family that saved the letters for the future. When the Pastons died out in the male line in the eighteenth century, local antiquarians rifled through the chaotic contents of the muniment room at Oxnead, the dilapidated Paston country seat. Much had already been lost, or was destroyed at that point – the estate accounts, which would have been historically invaluable, have disappeared completely – but just over a thousand letters and other documents remain: ‘the most curious papers of the sort I ever saw’, Horace Walpole wrote in 1782. Five years after that, when a selection was edited and published for the first time, the Paston Letters became an instant bestseller.

Title page of the first volume of the Paston Letters, edited by John Fenn, 1787

There have been many editions since then, and many books published about the letters and the family who wrote them. One of those books is mine: Blood & Roses came out just over twenty years ago in the UK, and just under twenty years ago in the US (long story, two different versions). Back then, the Pastons’ world was my world. I’d been working on the texts for so long that I could tell where individual letters belonged chronologically by ‘feel’ as much as forensic detail.

Now that two decades have passed, I’m an outsider again – but I still love the Pastons and the words they wrote, just as much as I ever did. I’ve been thinking it’s time to go back.

What I’m proposing to do in regular posts – once a month or so – is to look at an individual letter, or sometimes two. I’ll make my choices in chronological order, and explain as much as I can about characters and context, in order to build up a sense of the family and their evolving story, moment by moment.

But I’d also like to do something I couldn’t in the book: to give the whole text of a letter in the original spelling – as well as a modernised version – so that we can get as close as possible to hearing the voices of the Paston men and women, their friends and servants, speaking through centuries-old ink, parchment and paper.

I’ll explain as I go how I’m piecing together names, dates and details. I’m not a linguistic specialist, and I’ll be honest whenever I come across words I’m struggling to interpret or identify. Please chime in with questions or answers!

But I hope, as we move from letter to letter, that the language will become more familiar; that sentences which might seem difficult initially will resolve themselves into something recognisable. One thing that helps, always, is to read out loud: sound is usually clearer than unpredictable fifteenth-century spelling.

(And apologies, therefore, to anyone listening to this post rather than reading it, because I can’t even attempt late medieval pronunciation – so the two versions of the letter will sound pretty much the same in audio form.)

I’m working with texts from James Gairdner’s ground-breaking edition of 1904 and Norman Davis’s superb new edition of 1971-6, updated and completed by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond in 2004. Following the example of all these scholars, words abbreviated in the original manuscripts – abbreviation being standard practice in late medieval writing – have been expanded for legibility and ease of comprehension. Basic punctuation, of which late medieval writers used very little, has been added for the same reason.

The texts also include a letter that’s been lost from modern English: a letter called ‘thorn’ – þ – which corresponds to a ‘th’ sound. (It was already falling out of use by the time printing arrived, so was usually rendered in movable type by the substitute letter ‘y’. That’s how we end up with the archaic spelling ‘Ye Olde Worlde’, where what looks like ‘ye’ isn’t ‘ye’ at all, but an olde-worlde version of ‘the’.)

And what do we need to know about the Pastons? The founder of their fortunes in the early fifteenth century was William Paston, the son of a prosperous peasant farmer in the north Norfolk village from which the family took its name. William’s parents, Clement and Beatrice, found the money to send him to school. He was a bright boy who pursued what turned out to be an immensely lucrative career as a lawyer and, eventually, a high-court judge.

By 1420, when William was forty-two, he had made enough money to buy a portfolio of Norfolk estates that would turn him from a lawyer, earning a rich living from his professional skills, into a gentleman, a member of the landed ruling classes – and to snag a Norfolk heiress named Agnes Barry, a young woman more than twenty years his junior, as his wife. In October 1421 their eldest child, a boy named John, was born.

Almost two decades after that, John – now in his late teens – was the recipient of the first brief letter I’d like to look at.¹

Let’s begin.

On the outside of the folded letter is written:

To þe worthy and worshipful ser and my good maister John Paston of Trynyte hall in Cambrigge

And then on the inside:

Right worthy and worshipfull ser and my good maister I comaund me to yow. Like it yow to witte þat on þe Soneday next after þe Ascencion of oure Lord in þe high weye betwex Cambrigg and þe Bekyntre toward Newmarket I fonde a purs with money þer jnne. þ’entent of þis my symple lettre is þis þat it please to your good maistership by weye of charite and of your gentilnesse to witte if ony of youre knowleche or ony oþer swich as yow semeth best in your discrecion have lost swich a purs and þe toknes þer of told he shal have it a geyn what þat ever he be by þe grace of oure Lord who ever have yow in his blissed kepyng. Wretyn at Sneylewell þe Moneday next after þe seid Soneday. By youre pover seruant John Gyn

I’d love to know how easy or difficult it is – or somewhere in between – to understand this letter if the spelling and the mode of expression are new to you. If so, please leave a comment?

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at what John Gyn is saying.

We should start with the form of address. This short note begins with an elaborately polite – to modern eyes, even obsequious – genuflection to its recipient. Twice over, Gyn calls John ‘worthy and worshipful sir and my good master’; he adds another ‘your good mastership’ in the middle, before signing off ‘your poor servant’.

But in fifteenth-century terms this is appropriate courtesy, not grovelling. In its content – as we’ll see in a moment – this is a practical note, confidently communicated. I haven’t yet been able to discover who John Gyn was, but the letter was ‘written at Snailwell’, a manor in Cambridgeshire bought by William Paston during his professional rise. Most likely, Gyn worked for the family there. His letter properly acknowledges the status of the young master, the heir to the Paston estates, but its structure is standard formality: think of an extended version of ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Yours sincerely’.

Standard formality is full of social meaning, though, and the key word here is ‘worshipful’. ‘Worship’ – or, originally, ‘worthship’ – was the core of a gentleman’s social standing: a term incorporating both the honourable qualities characteristic of gentility, and the respect in which someone who displayed those qualities was held. It’s a term reinforced by Gyn’s mention of ‘your gentleness’ – meaning, in this context, not softness, but the state of being a gentleman.

The significance of these words was all the greater for a family that, just one generation ago, hadn’t been gentlemen at all. It’s entirely possible that William Paston waited until he was in his forties to marry Agnes Barry not only to maximise his financial chances of securing the hand of an heiress, but also to avoid the social embarrassment of his parents’ presence at his upmarket wedding. (His mother died in 1409, his father in 1419; William and Agnes married in 1420.)

By the time John Gyn wrote his note, however, all was going well: it was addressed to John Paston at Trinity Hall, a college in the University of Cambridge founded in the middle of the fourteenth century by the bishop of Norwich for the study of civil and canon law. His son and heir, William was determined, would be a gentleman, but a gentleman with a useful education.

We don’t know exactly in which year Gyn was writing, but it seems (by cross-checking with information about where John Paston was in other letters) to have been before 1440. Certainly he tells John (and us) that he took up his pen on the Monday after the Sunday after the feast day of the Ascension. The Church calendar was the usual point of reference for dates, its rhythm and structure so familiar and inescapable that it was second nature to everyone concerned – but not to us, more than half a millennium later. And in this case, Ascension Day doesn’t help us much, because it’s a movable feast: the Thursday after Rogation Sunday, which is the fifth Sunday after Easter. If we knew the year, we’d be able to pinpoint the day using this invaluable book, first published in 1945:

(I’ll show you how it works when we get to a letter it works on.)

But as it stands, we can’t pin down the date of Easter, which means we can’t identify Rogation Sunday, or Ascension Day, or the Monday that followed it – all of which means that we can’t say more about the date of John Gyn’s note than that it must have been early summer.

So, at some point in the late 1430s, on a Monday in early summer, what did John Gyn want from John Paston?

Before I give you the letter again, in modern spelling with a little more punctuation, there are two unfamiliar meanings I should explain: to ‘wit’ is to know or to find out – here, more or less to ask – and to ‘seem’ (in this context) is to deem, i.e. to think or to judge.

Here goes:

Right worthy and worshipful sir and my good master, I commend me to you. Like it you to wit that on the Sunday next after the Ascension of our Lord, in the highway between Cambridge and the Bekyntre [Becontree?] toward Newmarket, I found a purse with money therein. The intent of this my simple letter is this: that it please to your good mastership, by way of charity and of your gentleness, to wit if any of your knowledge or any other, such as you seem best in your discretion, have lost such a purse; and, the tokens thereof told, he shall have it again, what that ever he be, by the grace of our Lord, who ever have you in his blessed keeping. Written at Snailwell the Monday after the said Sunday. By your poor servant John Gyn.

In other words, this is the equivalent of one of those posts on Twitter or Facebook: I’ve found someone’s wallet in the street. Can you ask around and help me find its owner? If anyone comes forward to claim it, I’ll give it back if they can describe it and its contents (‘the tokens thereof told’).

I’m left with two questions. Becontree – a place in Essex originally marked, as its name suggests, by a tree – seems the obvious transliteration of the Bekyntre; but it’s fifty miles south of Cambridge, which doesn’t fit well with ‘toward Newmarket’, a town that lies to the east. Am I missing something?

My second question is whether or not the two Johns, between them, put the purse back in its grateful owner’s hand. I’d love to know. But we never will.

1. Gairdner’s no. 29; Davis’s no. 438.