That's why the Paston letters, a series of letters and family documents written amongst and to members of a Norfolk gentry family between 1422-1509 are so important. They cover the last years of the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, the demise of the Plantagenets and the rise of the Tudors from the viewpoint of a family who actually lived to tell the tales. But these letters are not all idle chitchat, in fact many of them are quite dry and dull. Most of them are about family business, and the family business of that era was land and estates and the acquisition and management thereof. Nobody would've dared to put their true thoughts about certain public figures down on paper, lest those writings be used against them. And sweet nothings between lovers and spouses were best left said in person.
The Paston family took its name from a village in Norfolk. Clement Paston, a prosperous yeoman farmer, had a brother-in-law who became a lawyer and was able to provide the funds for education for his nephew William Paston, who became a wealthy lawyer. He was able to buy land in the family's home village of Paston as well as Gresham Castle, and married an heiress of a local knight. Their son John, also married a wealthy woman and spent most of his time at his law practice in London, leaving his wife Margaret to manage their estates in the country. Many of the letters are back and forth between Margaret and John, but also include their son, another John, as he grew up and went into the family's twin businesses of law and land management.
The Paston family legacy of Gresham Castle was seized during the Wars of the Roses by a rival landowner, but was saved eventually through the family's connection to Sir John Falstaff, a kinsman of Margaret Paston. Margaret also had to reckon with Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk and granddaughter of Geoffrey, who was using her royal connections to lay claim to other Paston holdings. This despite the fact that the two women had once been friends. The Pastons, an up and coming gentry family on the cusp of turning minor nobility, were constantly at the mercy of greedy nobles, who would use any pretext to rip off a manor, or even a castle, of which the Pastons had managed to acquire more than one.
John Paston eventually became Sir John Paston courtesy of his loyalty to Edward IV. Later, Sir John switched to favor the Lancastrian side and his younger brother, yet another John, was killed at the Battle of Barnet. Meanwhile, there were more struggles over titles to estates and land. The Pastons continued their rise in the ranks of English gentry and on in to the nobility
, always on the fringe of historical events. Eventually, a Paston married the biological daughter of King Charles II, but they were childless and the main line of the family died out on the crest of glory. The letters remained in the possession of William Yarmouth, 2nd Earl of Yarmouth, and were purchased by an antiquarian. His estate later sold the letters to Sir John Fenn, who decided to edit and publish volumes of the letters in 1787. There were two other volumes published, one in 1789 and 1794. Fenn died before he could complete the collection.
The letters continued from estate to estate, along with the printed volumes. They were a lost for a time, and some historians believed they were hoaxes. A three volume set totaling approximately a thousand letters was published in 1896, and a six volume set was published in 1904. They were published again in 1971 and revised in 1971. There are also two biographies of the family, Blood and Roses, by Helen Castor, in 2004, and A Medieval Family, by Frances and Joseph Gies, 1998.
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