Welcome to our read-along of the Paston Letters, the correspondence of a fifteenth-century gentry family who lived through the Wars of the Roses, one letter at a time.
We started here; and you can find every instalment so far here. If you’d like to join us, please sign up.
First things first: today’s letter is long.
That’s because a great deal was happening, suddenly and all at once. In the spring of 1448 events were hotting up – not in a good way – for England, for the Paston family’s ‘country’ of Norfolk, and for the Pastons themselves.
The date isn’t recorded in the letter, but in a Latin note jotted in one corner by its recipient, John Paston. ‘litere termino Pasche anno xxvi’, the note says: ‘letters, Easter term year 26’.
‘Year 26’ identifies the regnal year of England’s king, Henry VI. The king’s father, Henry V, had died on 31 August 1422, and the 26th year of Henry VI’s reign therefore ran from 1 September 1447 to 31 August 1448.
Meanwhile, ‘Easter term’ refers to one of the four terms of the legal year, the periods during which the king’s law courts were in session. Easter term began seventeen days after Easter Sunday, and continued for three or four weeks. (Michaelmas term fell in October-November; Hilary in January-February; Trinity usually in June and July.)
In 1448, Easter term began on 10 April. John’s jotted note suggests that he used the large sheet of paper on which this letter is written as a wrapper for further correspondence received during the term. It therefore seems plausible to assume this one arrived soon after term began – so let’s pencil in April as a date and see if the contents offer any corroboration.
They begin on the outside with the address:1
To my ryth wurchypful hwsbond Jon Paston be þis lettyre delyveryd jn hast.
Or, in modernised spelling:
To my right worshipful husband John Paston be this letter delivered in haste.
Straightaway we know who’s dictating the letter. John and Margaret are now 26. They’ve been married for almost 8 years, and are the parents of two little boys, John and John, with a baby daughter, Margery, either just arrived or on the way.
But these days there’s no room in Margaret’s news from home for the kind of private, personal asides she once sent her young husband.
We’ve already seen in previous letters how vulnerable the death of John’s father, Judge William Paston, had left the family to opportunistic attacks by local rivals keen to get their hands on the Pastons’ valuable estates – lands which, since they had mostly been bought rather than inherited, were particularly vulnerable to confected or atavistic claims made by the heirs of previous owners.
And we’ve also seen how much more dangerous such challenges were made by the vacuum of power at the top of government. The king, a young man exactly the same age as John and Margaret, was a non-entity, a waste of political space, incapable either of leading his kingdom in the increasingly disastrous war against France, or of upholding justice within England itself. He was putty in the hands of anyone who could get to him – and that meant the law was becoming a plaything for those with access to the corridors of power.
All of which was bad news for the Pastons.
Let’s take a look at Margaret’s first paragraph. There’s a lot of it – more lines than she devotes to any other business in the letter – partly because it relates to an estate of Margaret’s own inheritance, and partly because John has left her in charge of managing the difficulties it presents.
You’ll see that the clerk taking Margaret’s dictation has very particular habits of spelling, which might take some getting used to. For the letters yogh (ȝ) and thorn (þ) see here and here, and – as always – try reading out loud if you get stuck.
Here we go.
