Letters give insight into medieval life

August 6, 2004

MARGARET PASTON AVENUE (Mile Cross Road)

“FOREIGN enemies had landed and held people at Yarmouth and Cromer to ransom.

They had also been seen ‘playn’ on Caister sands as ‘homely as they were Englishmen’ and ‘folks been right sore afeared that they will don much harm this summer’.”

Caister Castle where the Pastons lived in the 15th century.

This is an extract from a letter written by a mother and housewife to her husband as she struggled to survive in Norfolk of 1450.
Margaret Paston loved to write and somehow many of her letters survived over the centuries to provide us with a graphic account of life in the turbulent 15th century.

Born Margaret de Mauteby, a relation of the old Sir John Falstaff of Caister Castle who led our archers at Agincourt, she was heiress daughter of John de Mauteby.

She married into a controversial family of Norfolk landowners and letter writers.

The Pastons, thought of by many of the wealthy as upstarts, found fortune in the early 15th century when William, the son of a peasant farmer, studied law, became a judge and married an heiress, Agnes.

The bulk of the celebrated Paston letters were written by William and Agnes’ son, Sir John, his wife Margaret and their children.

Margaret was a formidable woman and it is her letters to her husband Sir John and her two sons, both called John, that tell us so much about life in the 15th century.

The Pastons were able to rise in society partly because the Black Death killed so many, leaving land available to buy.

They had a town house near St Peter Hungate, the Norwich church they restored, and Sir John became MP for Norfolk in 1460.

Margaret wrote to her husband soon after they were married: “Ye have left me such a remembrance that maketh me to think upon you both day and night when I would asleep.” Many of the letters were written to him while he was away in London and they often asked him to bring things she couldn’t buy in Norwich.

Once she asked for a brooch so she could wear it when Queen Margaret of Anjou visited Norwich. She once pleaded for John to send crossbows and steel arrows so she and her family could defend Caister Castle.

But, if they ever did arrive, they didn’t help much. The Duke of Norfolk besieged the castle. He became the “king of the castle”, but eventually the Pastons got it back.

Her letters and many others from members of the Paston family came to light when the last member of the family died as a recluse, without any money, in Oxnead in 1732.

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