How to read the Paston Letters

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.