God's Own Gentlewoman E-Book

Diane Watt

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The remarkable story of Margaret Paston, whose letters form the most extensive collection of personal writings by a medieval English woman. Drawing on what is the largest archive of medieval correspondence relating to a single family in the UK, God's Own Gentlewoman explores what everyday life was like during the turbulent decades at the height of the Wars of the Roses. From political conflicts and familial in-fighting; forbidden love affairs and clandestine marriages; bloody battles and sieges; fear of plague and sudden death; friendships and animosity; childbirth and child mortality, Margaret's letters provide us with unparalleled insight into all aspects of life in late medieval England. Diane Watt is a world expert on medieval women's writing, and God's Own Gentlewoman explores how Margaret's personal archive provides an insight into her activities, experiences, emotions and relationships and the life of a medieval woman who was at times absorbed by the mundane and domestic, but who also found herself caught up in the most extraordinary situations and events.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-164-0

eBook: 978-183773-166-4

Text copyright © 2024 Diane Watt

The author has asserted her moral rights.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am hugely grateful to my agent, Clare Grist Taylor, for encouraging me to write this book, and to my editors and the team at Icon Books, especially Kiera Jamison, who identified the potential of this project at the beginning, and Connor Stait and Ellen Conlon, who saw it through its later stages and who were such attentive and thoughtful readers.

I was introduced to the Paston letters some 35 years ago, while studying at the University of Bristol. I have such happy memories of my time there, where I was taught by John Burrow, Ian Bishop, Myra Stokes and the inimitable Basil Cottle, and studied alongside my fellow ‘Cottlers’, including Susannah Chewning, Helen Clarke, Jonathan Glasspool and Martin Nesbit. My interest in Margaret Paston’s letters was rekindled a few years ago, when I supervised Jane Clayton’s PhD thesis on the letters and wills of some of the other women in the collection. The title of this book was inspired by Colin Richmond’s description of Margaret Paston as ‘God’s Englishwoman’.

Over the past few years, I have spent many weeks in Norfolk visiting sites mentioned in this book and was made to feel very at home in this beautiful and tranquil county, especially at the lovely Heath Cottage in Hickling. The villagers of Mautby were particularly welcoming, and special mention should be made of Maureen Clarke and her son-in-law Simon Bond and daughter Tammy, June Pratt, Emma-Jane and Mark Siddell, Shirley Travis, and Sam Howard’s daughters and son, Janet Harper, Trish Durden and Richard Howard. I am also grateful to Sue McGrath and the staff at Blo’ Norton Hall, where I enjoyed a magical visit while writing the epilogue to this book.

Thanks are due to the Paston Footprints project, especially Karen Smyth of the University of East Anglia, Rob Knee of the Paston Heritage Society and James Mindham of JMgraphix, and to the Norfolk Historic Buildings Group and Ian Hinton. Several archaeologists and historians offered me encouragement and were patient enough to discuss aspects of my research with me, and special mention must be made of Patricia Cullum, Kate Giles, Jane Grenville and Rachel Moss. Two distinguished literary scholars, Elaine Treharne and Marion Turner, were also generous in their support. All mistakes are of course my own. I am also grateful to the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Great Yarmouth Local History and Archaeological Society, Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, the Norfolk Record Office and the University of Surrey Library. Jessica Murphy at the Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, answered my queries about MS Ballard 19. The artist Katie Spragg kindly supplied me with photographs of some of her work. The Halls, Norwich, granted us access to photograph the Paston donor doors at St Andrew’s Hall. The Church of St Peter and St Paul, Mautby, allowed me to include the photograph of the ruined barn or ‘chapel’ at Hall Farm House, Mautby.

The research for this book was supported by a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (RF-2023-045/1), by visiting scholarships at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and Wolfson College, University of Oxford and by a sabbatical from the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey.

Boydell and Brewer granted me permission to quote from my translations in The Paston Women: Selected Letters.

The artist Gail Reid worked with Icon’s designer, Anna Morrison, to produce the beautiful calligraphy on the cover – thank you so much Gail. My wife, Heike Bauer, accompanied me on our trips to Norfolk with our dogs, and took most of the photographs that illustrate this book. I could not have written it without her support.

This book is dedicated to my sister, Lynne, and to the memory of our mother, Pat, and grandmother, Annie, and to all our mothers who went before.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Introduction

1.‘The gentlewoman from Reedham’

2.‘You have left me such a reminder’

3.‘Not easy in our hearts’

4.‘Crossbows and windlasses’

5.‘A pot of treacle’

6.‘Something for my neck’

7.‘Remember my sister’

8.‘Only backgammon, chess and cards’

9.‘They act as if they were expecting a new world’

10.‘May God make a good man of you’

11.‘Captainess’

12.‘The cost and the trouble are too horrible’

13.‘Only a brethel’

14.‘Remember what trouble I had’

15.‘Rather a good secular man than a foolish priest’

16.‘It is too far to the church and I am unwell’

17.‘The marriage of my cousin, Margery’

18.‘As long as I live’

Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Notes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My first encounter with the original manuscripts of Margaret Paston’s letters, rather than modern print versions, was some twenty years ago, when I was working on an edition of letters by the women of the Paston family and their connections. Margaret’s letters are to be found in four out of five bound volumes in the British Library.1 My immediate impression was that the volumes resembled old family photograph albums. The history of the Paston collection before it came to the British Library explains why this is the case.

In 1735, a local clergyman and historian, Francis Blomefield, discovered the letters and documents, which are now in the first four of the British Library volumes, in the muniments, or records, room of Oxnead Hall in Norfolk.2 Oxnead was the former home of the debt-ridden William Paston, 2nd Earl of Yarmouth, who had died three years previously. It was in a ruinous state when Blomefield visited. Subsequently, Blomefield purchased the letters from the executors of the estate, and, over the next couple of hundred years, they passed through the hands of various owners before the British Museum bought them at auction in 1933. The letters in the fifth volume have a different trajectory, having seemingly been handed down through descendants of the Paston family until the British Museum procured them at the end of the nineteenth century.

Although the British Museum rebound all these volumes after their acquisition, the first four retain the eighteenth-century paper mounts, which is why they resemble albums. Within the volumes, the viewer can see both sides of the documents, which are numbered, annotated and marked with the British Museum stamp. The appearance of the individual letters and documents varies considerably. Some are rough drafts, others carefully copied final versions. They are written in a range of hands, some professional, others decidedly less learned. The paper on which they are written is of different sizes and shapes.

To give just one example, let me describe the letter composed by Margaret to her husband, John, on 14 December, around 1441.3 Margaret dictated its contents to an unidentified member of her household, and the letter’s appearance suggests that the scribe then read it through, making occasional amendments. This letter itself is almost square, measuring, roughly, nineteen centimetres by eighteen centimetres. The handwriting is neat, but some words have been erased or scored through, and a few words and phrases have been added between the lines. It looks as if the scribe started to run out of space towards the end of the letter, because the writing in the lower lines is more crowded, and there is only enough room for a brief valediction and the initials ‘M.P’ in the bottom right-hand corner. The name of the addressee, ‘To my right reverend and worshipful husband John Paston’, is written on the back of the sheet, so we know it was dispatched. Traces of red wax on the inverse indicate that the letter was locked by folding and sealing. No address was required because the letter would have been carried by a messenger, most likely a servant or another member of the family.

Reading the original letters is more challenging than reading an edited or modernised version; not only is the handwriting difficult to decipher, but there is far less interpretative apparatus. Reading the original letters, however, brings with it its own rewards. Seeing on the page the corrections and changes, no matter how seemingly insignificant, gives these missives an immediacy that is lost in print or online. Reconstructing the act of folding and sealing is a reminder of how vulnerable they were to being lost, damaged or misappropriated. The very fact of their preservation reveals that the letters were valued by both sender and recipient. Letters and letter writing certainly mattered a great deal to Margaret. Alongside other documents such as inventories and wills, letters contained crucial information about the family and its estates. They were also a vital means of communication between Margaret and her husband, her children, especially her sons, and her neighbours and friends. Margaret must often have spent several hours a day reading or having her correspondence read out to her and dictating her replies.

These letters were generally not meant for a wider audience, and they are situation- as well as person-specific. Whether deliberately or not, their meaning is sometimes obscure to the modern reader, and it can be hard to make sense of the events being described or to work out who were the people involved. This book aims to provide enough historical, cultural and literary background to make Margaret’s letters accessible and her life comprehendible. The challenges are only exacerbated by medieval naming practices. Within four generations of the fifteenth-century Paston family, there are four William Pastons, and within two generations there are three John Pastons, two Edmonds and two Margerys (one of whom married into the family). I’ve tried to find as simple a way through this as possible. I call Margaret’s father-in-law Justice William, to distinguish him from his son, grandson and great grandson of the same name. Her husband is simply John. Her two eldest sons who share a Christian name are, according to convention, referred to as John II and John III. For the others, especially Margaret’s daughter and daughter-in-law, both called Margery, the contexts in which they appear will, I hope, suffice.

The letters were first edited by a Norfolk antiquary, John Fenn, and published between 1787 and 1823 in five volumes under the title Original Letters, Written during the Reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV. and Richard III. by Various Persons of Rank or Consequence. The first scholarly edition was by the archivist James Gairdner, who published the four-volume Paston Letters, 1422–1509 in 1872–5, and another edition in six volumes in 1904. The definitive academic text is the two-volume Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, first published in 1971–6, edited by Norman Davis, J.R.R. Tolkien’s successor as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. An additional third volume was edited by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond and published in 2005. In 2015, the British Library made the digitised letters accessible online via its website. Davis’s dating and ordering of the letters are considered more accurate than those of his predecessors, so this is the version to which the British Library defers, and it is the one I usually draw on in this book, alongside my own edition and translation of The Paston Women: Selected Letters, which was published in 2004. To make the letters and other medieval material more accessible I have modernised the language throughout.

INTRODUCTION

The idea for this book came to me around the time of the death of my mother. Although she had been housebound for the last few years of her life, my mother’s final decline took only a matter of months. Admitted into hospital with pneumonia in February 2019, she defied the physicians’ initial prognosis that she had only a few days left, and some weeks later moved into the nursing home that would be her last place of residence. After an initial improvement over the spring and summer, which saw her once again enjoying reading detective novels, her daily crossword puzzles and watching Wimbledon, as the nights grew longer and darker her own light began to fade. Unable to fight off yet another chest infection, she passed away with her two daughters and eldest niece by her side, less than a month before her 84th birthday.

During those last few days, sitting holding my mother’s hand and talking to her about her family and our lives together, I was unaware of the Covid-19 pandemic still to come, and of a more personal crisis when I was diagnosed with breast cancer some ten months later. Rather, I thought back to the generations of women before me who must have found themselves in a similar position. Living on the west coast of Scotland, some 180 miles away, my mother was unable to be with my grandmother when she passed away, but I do know that my grandmother nursed her mother, my great-grandmother, in her final days, as was the norm in previous centuries. The ensuing rituals of death and mourning also seemed timeless, from the funeral and wake to the reading of the will, and other, more personal acts of memorialisation.

My mother’s death also gave me a new perspective on her life as a young woman both before and with my father, who had died a couple of decades earlier. Going through their letters, papers, photographs and books, and listening to the memories of other older members of my extended family, I suddenly found myself able to understand better, or at least to imagine, their young adulthoods and the early years of their marriage. Often, we can only conceive of our mothers and fathers as we have known them – as parents to us or grandparents to the next generation – but now I started to see the young woman and man who managed to make a life together over the years.

In my grief, the idea of writing a book retelling the life of Margaret Paston began to take shape. Perhaps, unconsciously at the time, I perceived some similarities between Margaret and my mother, both intelligent, forceful, canny, competitive women, who had strong views about how others should live their lives and who weren’t afraid to fall out with people with whom they disagreed, even members of their own immediate families. Disputes over inheritance and property loomed large in both their lives, if on different scales. Perhaps this book stands in place of my mother’s biography.

Who was Margaret, and why write a book about her? Margaret Mautby was born in the village of Reedham, about twelve miles from Great Yarmouth, in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. She was well-off – her parents, Margery Berney of Reedham and John Mautby of Mautby, were from established and prosperous landowning families – and she married into the upwardly mobile Paston family. She and her husband, John, had seven surviving children: John (II), John (III), Margery, Edmund, Anne, Walter and William. Others may have died at birth or in infancy. What is so remarkable about the Pastons is that, somehow, so many records relating to four generations of the family (from John’s parents down to his grandchildren) have survived. Indeed, the Paston letters and papers make up the largest collection of medieval correspondence relating to a single family in England.1 These documents provide vivid insights into the lives of the gentry classes in late medieval England and include eye-witness accounts of legal disputes, political conflicts and in-fighting in fifteenth-century Norfolk during the turbulent decades of the Wars of the Roses. They describe at first hand forbidden love affairs and clandestine marriages, cruelty and kindness, friendships and animosity, childbirth and child mortality, family arguments and neighbourhood conflicts, battles and violent assaults, sieges and kidnappings, and fear of plague and sudden death. Even more remarkably, given the low levels of literacy of women at this time in history, there are more letters from Margaret than from anyone else in the family.

Although Margaret doesn’t seem to have been able to write (she dictated her letters to scribes), she was a prolific correspondent. In total 106 items, including her draft will, are attributed to her in the collection, spanning a period of four decades in the mid- to later-fifteenth century. Until the death of her husband, he is the main recipient. Thereafter, she principally writes to her two eldest sons. The letters are not evenly distributed across time. There are far more from the last two decades of her life, with a marked concentration in the 1460s, a particularly tumultuous time, both nationally and closer to home, with John Paston’s disputed claim on the will of the wealthy Sir John Fastolf, the outbreak of civil war, John’s death, and, at the end of the decade, the decision of Margaret and John’s daughter Margery to marry the family bailiff, John Calle, against Margaret’s will.

It is then no surprise that, like my parents, in my mind, Margaret Paston is fixed in middle age. I think of Margaret as a truculent newly widowed woman in her forties or fifties, who apparently has little time for pleasure, and less still for displays of affection, but who is always focused on the business at hand and the next job that needs to be done. Yet, rereading her letters, I am reminded that there is much more to Margaret than this. The early letters reveal a young woman who loved and worried about her husband, who enjoyed the support of female family members and friends, including her mother-in-law and close companion Agnes, and who was excited by her pregnancies. The later letters tell a different story, as we encounter an ageing widow who increasingly turns for comfort to her chaplain and to her religious devotions, one who fears the spread of plague and struggles with her own ill health, and one who is frustrated by or anxious about her sons and daughters, their behaviour, and their futures. What Margaret’s letters offer us is the opportunity to experience something of the course of her adult life from her own perspective; to follow her from marriage and young motherhood through to her widowhood and old age.

I am not the first author to have been inspired by Margaret Paston’s letters. In 1929, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote movingly about the absences in history and fiction of what she called the ‘infinitely obscure lives’ of women in the past:

For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.2

But even as she wrote these words, Woolf already knew of Margaret Paston’s correspondence and the rare insights it offers into the everyday life of a medieval gentlewoman. Woolf’s copies of James Gairdner’s four-volume edition of the Paston letters3 were sold by Sotheby’s in 2011: they are signed ‘Virginia Stephen’ and dated to 1905.4 In fact, as early as 1904, she informed a friend about her plans to write a ‘large’ work on the Paston collection.5 The following year, she urged her cousin Emma Vaughan ‘to visit Paston on the Norfolk coast’6 and in the summer of 1906, Woolf took Margaret Paston as her inspiration when she composed the short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’7 while staying in Blo’ Norton Hall, a sixteenth-century manor house in Norfolk. Woolf discussed Margaret’s letters directly two decades later in her essay ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, published in The Common Reader in 1925.8

Woolf’s short story is narrated in part by an unmarried and bookish young woman living in Norfolk in the time of the Pastons, but there is a clear focus on the Martyn matriarch, modelled on Margaret Paston herself. Joan’s mother is a woman of considerable authority in the household, who can write but not read, and whose closest confidant is the family priest. In the words of Joan Martyn, ‘It is a great thing to be the daughter of such a mother, & to hope that one day such power will be mine. She rules us all.’9 In Woolf’s essay, ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, Margaret (Woolf’s ‘Mrs Paston’) also controls the household. She is a brave woman, but she does ‘not talk about herself’, and she feels angry and frustrated at her eldest son, who rather than attend to his business ‘would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming …’. Woolf, it seems, was fascinated by Margaret, even if she didn’t entirely sympathise with her.10 Woolf was of course drawn to strong women, but perhaps she also found in Margaret her opposite, a woman who didn’t seem to have time for literature or the world of the imagination.

Throughout much of my life, I have shared Woolf’s fascination. I first encountered the Paston letters when I was a postgraduate reading Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. As an undergraduate I had developed an interest in medieval women’s writing and studied mystical and visionary works such as TheRevelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwichand The Book of Margery Kempe. The letters by Margaret and other women that I found within the Paston collection offered me something else: the perspective of secular women and insight into lives in which religious experience, although still important, did not entirely dominate. Significantly, my first published essay was on the Paston letters, and it included in its title a quotation from ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’: Woolf’s description of Margaret’s letters as ‘no writing for writing’s sake’. Some ten or eleven years later, I returned to the family and their correspondence, and produced a modernised edition of some of the letters of the Paston women. Since then, I have found myself revisiting them on many occasions.

Despite my enduring fascination with Margaret and the other Pastons, it was only a few years ago that I first followed Woolf’s footsteps and travelled to Norfolk to visit the village that bears their surname, and other sites where they had lived or where they were buried. One blustery day in the late summer of 2017, my wife, Heike, and I found ourselves retracing the former road (now marked by a lychgate in the corner of the churchyard), which, to the consternation of their neighbours, was blocked by a wall that Margaret’s mother-in-law, Agnes had built because it came too close to one of their homes. Paston Hall has been almost completely rebuilt over the centuries, most recently in the 1800s, so there was little to see there, at least from the outside. Likewise, the notable Great Tithe Barn dates to the later sixteenth century: a stone over the lintel of the south door reads: ‘The Bild[in]g of this Bearn is bi Sir W Pasto[n] Knighte.’ The barn is home to a breeding roost of rare barbastelle bats.

On the same visit, we took a walk around the flint church of St Margaret. The Paston village church is not a grand affair. Like the Great Barn it is thatched, with a timber nave roof and carved rood screen, and it is adorned with medieval wall paintings, which include a large late-fifteenth-century image of a bearded St Christopher carrying the Christ child. Remains of a representation of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ are also visible, a popular late medieval memento mori narrative about three royal or noble hunters who encounter three decaying corpses, the hunters’ dead ancestors, which admonish the living men for their sins and for failing to commemorate them in masses and prayers. John Audelay, a cleric from Haughmond Abbey, Shropshire, who died only a few years after Margaret was born, wrote a poetic version of the story in English.11 One of the pew’s ends is carved in the shape of a griffin, a mythological creature, half lion half eagle, that the Paston family chose as their heraldic symbol. In its east end, alongside some later Paston monuments, the chancel contains a chest tomb that is thought to be that of Margaret’s husband John.12 When we arrived, the church was empty, but someone had recently placed a candle and a stone on the lid, presumably in his memory.

We then travelled a couple of miles (an easy walk and easier ride for the Pastons) to the remains of the once-imposing Bromholm Priory, which in the Middle Ages was famed for its relic of the Holy Cross. This is where John was originally buried with great pomp and expense, following his death in London in 1466. Margaret presumably oversaw many of the arrangements for the funeral feast. As Nikolaus Pevsner notes, it ‘involved 13 barrels of beer, 27 of ale, 15 gallons of wine, 1300 eggs, 20 gallons of milk, 8 gallons of cream, 41 pigs, 49 calves, etc’.13 In her later years, Margaret was angered by her eldest son’s delays in the completion of his late father’s sepulchre. Evidently, he didn’t heed the warning of the three skeletons on the Paston church wall to remember his predecessors. It is just as well Margaret did not have to witness the Protestant reformers’ destruction of the priory which took place in the century after her own death. At least someone seems to have thought to rescue John’s remains.

It was only then, when I started to explore these Norfolk villages and their medieval remains, that I began to recognise the importance that other, more material remnants of the family’s history might come into play in making sense of the textual evidence that was already so familiar to me. This journey led me to wonder what more I might find, if I were to visit other villages, towns and churches mentioned in Margaret’s letters and associated with her life – places like Mautby, Walsingham, Norwich – and what they might reveal to me about the world in which she lived. Somewhat uncannily, when I opened my copy of Pevsner’s guide to North-East Norfolk, it fell open at Reedham, Margaret’s birthplace.

This book is not simply a biography. Rather, by focusing on carefully selected letters written by Margaret across her lifetime, from the years immediately following her marriage to those leading up to her death, I take the events described in each of these letters as the starting point for a broader exploration of late medieval social and cultural history and late medieval life, exploring subjects especially pertinent to women, such as love and marriage, childbirth and childcare, running a household, recipes and cooking, trade and shopping, sport and games, and medicine and religion. I pay attention to, if not quite, as Woolf has it, the cooking of the dinners, the washing of the plates and cups, and the sending of children to school, then at least some of the details of Margaret’s everyday existence within and beyond the household. But I also try to do much more than this, discussing Margaret’s experiences alongside the history of the Paston family and the lives of some her family, friends and even enemies. I include accounts and anecdotes of my travels around contemporary Norfolk, in search of remaining traces of the castles, manors and chapels described in Margaret’s letters, and I include my reflections on what light these visits throw on her correspondence.But most importantly, I try to recreate the world of late medieval England as viewed from the perspective of a courageous, intelligent and forceful woman who lived through, and survived, battles, plagues and family conflicts.

1. ‘THE GENTLEWOMAN FROM REEDHAM’

20 April, probably 1440 (Agnes Paston to her husband, Justice William)

The church of St John the Baptist, Reedham, with its distinctive chequer-patterned exterior, stands in relative isolation some way outside of the modern village above the River Yare. It is an ancient Christian site, dating back to the seventh century, but although there is evidence of reused Roman building materials, most of the existing structure dates to the thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Reedham was where Margaret Paston’s mother’s family lived, but the medieval hall has not survived, although the church tower was built in Margaret’s lifetime, paid for by a legacy in the will of her uncle Thomas Berney.1 In a copy of her will, written a couple of years before her death, when she was in her early sixties, Margaret left a bequest for repairs to the Reedham church, specifying that this was ‘where I was born’.2

When Heike and I visited Reedham one quiet Sunday in midsummer, the churchyard was open, but the building itself remained closed. Below the rainbow ‘Welcome’ sign on the door hung another notice, informing us that access was possible only on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Because much of the medieval interior was destroyed by a fire in 1981, the loss was not so very great. We were able to walk along the paths cut through the unmown grass, dense with ox-eye daisies, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace and cow parsley, and around the outside of the church, where a gathering of bees clamoured for access through a gap in the stonework, high on the south-facing wall.

Sitting on a bench looking across in the direction of the Yare, I enjoyed listening to the chatter of the rooks, almost drowning out the birdsong and the crowing of a cockerel on a distant farm. I was reminded of the soundscape of my late mother’s home in North Yorkshire where the birds conversed loudly from the rookery high in the trees of the manor house opposite. But I didn’t have a strong sense of Margaret’s presence. And indeed, without her letters as guidance, it can seem as if her life didn’t start with her birth but began only two decades later, when arrangements were being made for her marriage in the spring of 1440, or thereabouts.

At that time, the wealthy Norfolk ‘husswyf’ Agnes Paston wrote to her husband a brief, and somewhat cryptic, letter recording the first meeting between two young people, Margaret Mautby and their eldest son, John.3 The term ‘huswyff’ – in modern English ‘housewife’ – described a woman, usually a wife, responsible for a family and its servants.4 In the case of Agnes and her husband, William, her dominion extended to several manors and estates across Norfolk and extending into Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Suffolk. The meeting was important to both Agnes and William, because both families were hoping the two would marry. John was not only being given the opportunity to assess his future bride; Agnes was, in effect, interviewing the woman who would become her successor. This is also our first encounter with Margaret, and although it is Agnes who provides this first-hand account, we can choose, if we like, to see Margaret through John’s eyes: a strong, perceptive, confident and resourceful young woman who, as she stepped through the doorway and moved her hood back from her eyes, quietly began to assert her authority over the household which she would, in due course, come to control.

Agnes liked Margaret. That much is clear from the letter that Agnes wrote to her husband. But, in her letter, Agnes doesn’t mention Margaret Mautby, as she was then, by name. Instead, she refers to her as ‘the gentlewoman, whom you know of, from Reedham’. The marriage arrangements for Agnes and William’s son, although apparently progressing as smoothly as might be hoped for, were at a sensitive stage, so discretion (or secrecy) was paramount. A good bride was a precious commodity and letters could be intercepted or lost and then fall into the wrong hands. It wasn’t worth taking unnecessary risks. Agnes reports to William that Margaret addressed her prospective husband ‘kindly and courteously, and said he was truly your son’. Despite the brevity of this description, Margaret’s charisma is already evident. With her first greeting, a mere handful of words, she demonstrated grace and sensitivity, good manners and diplomacy.

William was a formidable figure, a successful lawyer and a Justice of the Common Pleas who owned extensive estates in Norfolk. John had followed his father into the law. He was educated at Trinity Hall and Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge, and, at the time this letter was written, had recently been admitted to the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court in London. John and his parents would all be delighted to hear that he took after his father. But, nevertheless, in this account, John remains in the shadows. Agnes has nothing to say about him, or about his reaction to being introduced to the woman with whom he would expect to spend the rest of his life, the woman who would, it was hoped, give birth to and bring up children, who would run the household and manage the servants, and with whom he would share oversight of the family manors and estates. Perhaps Agnes doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t need to. William could confidently assume that his son would quite rightly be impressed by any woman his parents might choose for him. Perhaps John had suggested the match himself, having heard of Margaret and her suitability through mutual connections. Perhaps it didn’t really matter what he thought.

Agnes is confident that the negotiations will be swiftly resolved. The parson of Stockton, who was going to conduct the ceremony, was also involved in the discussions, even down to the details concerning who would pay for the bride’s clothing. The parson had reassured Agnes that if William would buy Margaret a new gown, Margaret’s mother would give her a fine fur. But the colour of the gown mattered to Margaret: it must be either a fine blue or a bright sanguine, that is, a vibrant blood red. William was in London, while Agnes was at home in the village of Paston (whence the family took their surname), so he regularly assumed responsibility for any purchases that couldn’t be made locally but had to be brought back from the metropolis. Still, he sometimes made mistakes, so it was imperative to give him unambiguous instructions. Agnes also asks him to buy her some gold thread for hair decoration. It isn’t clear if this is for herself or for Margaret. Almost as an afterthought she adds a reassurance that William’s fishponds are doing well.

It might seem surprising that, in the lead-up to this special event, Agnes should wish to update William on the state of the ponds, but fish were a valuable resource, and the Paston ponds an indicator of the family’s status and wealth. Fishponds were an essential aspect of the managed and agricultural landscape in late medieval England. They would be carefully constructed with a system of dams, sluices, leats and causeways. Some survive to the present day, for example at the moated manor house of Hindringham Hall, around 25 miles northwest of Paston. The ponds would be grouped together and stocked with different species of fish such as bream, carp, perch, roach and eel. Eels were popular throughout Europe, and they were a dietary staple in Norfolk where they thrive in the fens and waterways. Ely, in the neighbouring county of Cambridgeshire, derives its name from the ‘Isle of Eels’. Le Ménagier de Paris or The Good Wife’s Guide, a famous late-fourteenth-century French guide to running a household, includes a variety of recipes for eel sops, eel in white garlic sauce, eel pasty and ‘reversed eel’, which is a little more complex and involves ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and grains of paradise.5 These last are seeds from the plant aframomum melegueta, a member of the ginger family, related to cardamom. They were commonly used in medieval cooking and medicinal recipes.

Rural Norfolk was one of the most thriving areas of late medieval England. It was characterised by swathes of fertile arable land, where crops of barley, oats and rye were grown. The coastal towns grew wealthy from overseas trade, especially wool from the county’s pastures. Bishop’s Lynn, modern-day King’s Lynn, was the first British town to join the Hanseatic League, a defensive trade federation centred in Northern Europe. Situated inland, Norwich was a staple port, a centre of import and export, which enjoyed specific rights and privileges. It was also one of the largest and most prosperous cities in England, second only to London. Walking along King Street as it runs parallel to the River Wensum, with its restored medieval trading hall, the Dragon Hall, it is possible to get a sense of this busy centre of commerce. Further along King Street is a distinctive pink building known as the Music House or Wensum Lodge, the earliest parts of which date back to the twelfth century. It was owned in the early thirteenth century by Isaac of Norwich, a financier and prominent member of the Jewish community, and over two centuries later bought by one of John and Margaret’s sons. The Paston family, with its extensive manors and estates, was certainly well placed, quite literally, to accumulate further wealth, and thus to rise quickly up the social hierarchy.

Norfolk, at the end of the Middle Ages, was also a centre of culture and a hotbed of religious enthusiasm. The anchoress Julian of Norwich is well known today for her two written accounts of the ‘showings’, or divine visions which she received in 1373, when she was 30 years old. Julian lived in strict isolation, confined to a cell or anchorhold attached to a church situated in the heart of the old city. To find the church, which was rebuilt after the Second World War, with its reconstructed anchorhold, you can turn off King Street down a narrow alley which now takes her name, just a stone’s throw from the Dragon Hall. Julian may not have been a recluse at the time of her first mystical experiences, but she was formally enclosed in her later years. Around 1413 she was visited in her cell by another famous local visionary, Margery Kempe, whose Book records her spiritual life and adventures, including her pilgrimages in England and to Rome and Jerusalem. While we don’t know for certain whether Julian was a nun, Margery Kempe certainly wasn’t. As a reasonably well-off laywoman (her father was a former mayor of Norwich and member of parliament for Norfolk) whose religious fervour took precedence over her sense of responsibility to her husband and family, Margery Kempe enjoyed considerable freedom from the ties of domesticity.

The late fourteenth century saw the emergence of the non-conformist Lollard movement, which is sometimes seen as a form of proto-Protestantism. ‘Lollard’ was a term of abuse, which is thought to come from the Middle Dutch word lollaerd (‘mumbler’ or ‘mutterer’).6 It was applied to those who followed (albeit to varying extents) the reformist teachings of John Wyclif and who held a range of beliefs antithetical to the dogma of the Roman church, including denying the divine authority of priests and the sacrament of the Eucharist and denigrating practices such as confession, pilgrimage and the worship of the saints. William Sawtrey, a priest at St Margaret’s Church in King’s Lynn (now the Cathedral), was the first heretic to be executed on English soil when he was burned at the stake in 1401. Between 1428 and 1431, William Alnwick, Bishop of Norwich, led a sustained campaign against the Lollards that resulted, notably, in the trials of Hawise Mone, who came from the village of Loddon, not far from Reedham, and Margaret Baxter from Martham, located further north in the direction of Paston itself. Both were redoubtable women, ardent in their beliefs, who had little fear of the ecclesiastical authorities. Despite having been subjected to a series of brutal public floggings, Baxter was rearrested only six months after her first trial. Both women seem to have managed to escape execution. Many others did not. The site of the Lollard executions in Norwich is commemorated today in the name of the Lollard Pit Pub, across the river from the Cathedral on the far side of Bishop Bridge.

The family into which Margaret Mautby was to marry did not share the heterodox beliefs of some of its Norfolk neighbours. On the surface, it was a far cry socially from those of the Norwich Lollards, who were on the whole lower-class craftsmen and artisans. But, in fact, the Paston riches had only been recently won. According to one document from the time purporting to describe the family ‘Kin and Ancestry’, Justice William’s father, Clement, was ‘a good plain husbandman’, who had only 100–120 acres of land to plough in the village of Paston and a ‘little poor watermill running by a little river’; in other words, Clement’s farmland was around a tenth of the size of a small medieval manor.7 It claims that he ‘drove his cart’ to the market at the coastal town of Winterton to sell his grain ‘as a good husbandman ought to do’. The same document describes Justice William’s mother, Beatrice, as ‘a bond woman’, a peasant woman and indentured servant, in other words as someone from one of the very bottom rungs of medieval society. It was Beatrice’s brother, Geoffrey Somerton, who provided his nephew with the opportunity to rise in the world. Geoffrey had found a way to escape servitude and to qualify as an attorney, and he helped Clement pay for William’s education and legal training in London.

The ‘Kin and Ancestry’ record was produced in the years immediately following Justice William’s death, and clearly by, or on behalf of, someone who resented the Pastons’ rise to a position of considerable power and influence. Its assertions concerning the family’s roots are completely at odds with the genealogy drawn up in the later seventeenth century by one of William and Agnes’s even more socially elevated descendants, Sir Robert Paston, Viscount Yarmouth.8 This family tree traces William’s pedigree back almost to the invasion of 1066, and a man called Wulstan, cousin to a Norman earl. Despite its evident anti-Paston bias, the earlier account is the more authentic. Justice William did not have exalted ancestors, but he had benefited from the patronage of his successful uncle and made good on the investment in his education. He also purchased land, especially around the village of Paston, establishing it as a manor, and accumulated extensive estates across the county.

Agnes’s background, in contrast, was far more distinguished. Agnes was something of a trophy bride for William, if such a thing can be said to have existed in fifteenth-century England. When they married in 1420, Agnes was only around fifteen years old, and William was some 27 years her senior. Agnes was the daughter and co-heir of wealthy Sir Edmund Berry of Horwellbury, Hertfordshire, so in order to secure this socially and financially advantageous match, William agreed to gift his bride the manor of Oxnead. William’s investment was a good one; following her father’s death in the 1430s Agnes inherited the manors of Horwellbury, Marlingford and Stanstead. The marriage between Agnes and William seems to have been a successful one, but it is striking that in this, the only surviving letter from Agnes to her husband, her tone is respectful, but almost brusque. She addresses him simply as ‘Dear husband’ and abbreviates the formulaic opening, ‘I recommend myself to you, etc.’. By way of comparison, one of Margaret’s first letters to her new husband, John, begins, ‘Right reverent and worshipful husband, I recommend myself to you with all my simple heart’.9 It would be a mistake to read too much into these greetings, governed as they are by the strict epistolary conventions of the time. Nevertheless, Agnes, by now some twenty years married, clearly felt able to circumvent some of the formalities and get directly to the business at hand. After all, her letter was signed off with, ‘Written at Paston in haste’. Perhaps that is one reason that the marriage worked so well: husband and wife recognised the importance of cutting to the chase and prioritising the family interests above everything else. They expected their children to do the same.

Because we first meet Margaret in the letters when she was around nineteen years old, we know relatively little about her childhood and young adulthood. Her father’s family was from Mautby, where Margaret lived towards the end of her life, where she died, and where she was also buried. There is no space in her letters for reminiscing about her early years, and other evidence about them is sparse, but it is possible to imagine something of her life. Her infancy was spent in an exceptionally beautiful part of the world. Reedham is in what is now the Norfolk Broads and is rich in bird and animal life. The Broads themselves, which today are such an important feature of the area, were formed where peat had been dug for fuel in the Middle Ages, leaving behind pits which gradually filled with water, and there isn’t any documentary record of their existence before the fourteenth century. Our current understanding of the Broads as human-made rather than natural occurrences can be credited primarily to the botanist Joyce Lambert, who studied them in detail in the mid-twentieth century.10 Located east of the Broads, and just a few miles from Great Yarmouth, Mautby sits at the edge of the marsh, also lovely, but bleaker, at least on the rainy day we first walked there with our dogs, spotting hen and marsh harriers in flight, and listening to the call of the golden plover and the cry of the curlew. Margaret’s father, John Mautby, owned estates across East Anglia, so Margaret certainly would not have experienced any physical hardship or deprivation. Quite the opposite. Her family enjoyed high status as well as riches. Her mother, Margaret or Margery Berney, had a genuine claim to illustrious family links as she was related to the wealthy soldier and literary patron Sir John Fastolf, whose family also were from Reedham, a man whose death was to have a huge impact on Margaret, her husband and her sons.

Nevertheless, despite being born into such privilege, Margaret’s options would have been severely curtailed simply by dint of her sex. While not all young women of her social class chose to marry, the alternatives were largely limited to entering a convent or into service in the household of another, higher-status, family. Some women, single or married, entered trade and were able to run their own business (as her older contemporary, Margery Kempe, did for a time, trying her hand at both milling and brewing, although with little success), and the less well-off might learn a skill such as needlework that would help them find employment, but these options wouldn’t have been available to someone of Margaret’s standing. In fact, according to canon law, her parents could have arranged for her to have married when she was as young as twelve, because by then she would have been considered to have reached adolescence, although her consent (and that of her husband) would still have been required. It would have made sense to wait for a few more years, not least because that would mean her parents could hold off from providing her with the expensive dowry that would prove crucial in the transaction. When Margaret was only around ten or eleven, her father passed away, leaving her his sole heir. There was therefore even less incentive for her mother, who subsequently remarried, to rush into finding her daughter a husband.

Unlike her university-educated future husband, Margaret wouldn’t have received a formal education. Her mother would have taught her prayers such as the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, instructed her in the rudimental tenets of the Christian faith, provided essential training in morality and conduct, and introduced her to the skills needed to run a large household and estate. We can get a sense of some of the guidance the young Margaret might have received from her mother from medieval conduct literature, a genre that included works like Le Ménagier de Paris,intended to introduce its readers to appropriate social norms. Another example, written in English in the century before Margaret was born and also aimed specifically at women, is the poem How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter. In this work, the character of the Good Wife provides advice on married life and housewifery. While we should be wary of taking the text too much at face value, it does provide us with insights into the sort of counsel Margaret’s mother might have provided. Margaret’s own first words to her husband are certainly in keeping with the Good Wife’s recommendation that ‘If any man proffer thee to wed, / A courteous answer to him be said’.11