Courtier: Sir John Fastolf, 1380-1459

Sir John Falstaff, the rollicking buffoon of Shakespeare's Henry V, is one of his more memorable characters.   Falstaff may have been based in part on a real man with a similar name, Sir John Fastolf, KG, 1380-1459, courtier, soldier, landowner and man of letters, among other things.  He was born in Norfolk, of a country gentry family.  As a boy, he may have journeyed to Jerusalem in the company of Henry of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV.  This would account for the three cockleshells on his coat of arms, shells being the sign of a pilgrim.  Young John served as a squire to the Duke of Norfolk and later under Thomas of Lancaster, Duke of Clarence, in Ireland in 1405-6. 

John married well, Millicent Tiptoft, which brought him a healthy yearly income.  He served in Gascony and later in northern France, though in 1415 he was at the Siege of Harfleur and thus missed Agincourt.  He became the Duke of Bedford's Master of the Household and was made a Knight of the Garter in 1426.  He was also a Knight of the Golden Fleece.  He was dispatched by the Duke of Bedford in 1429 to reinforce the English besieging Orleans, where Joan of Arc was spoiling for her first encounter with the enemy.  She was said to have told the French commander that if he didn't let her know of Fastolf's coming she would have his head cut off.  Jeanne and Fastolf would cross each other's paths several times battling for control of the Loire valley. 

The Battle of Patay in 1429 was a disaster and Fastolf was accused of cowardice after his men broke and fled the battlefield.  Ineptitude by more senior commanders was more likely the cause of the catastrophe, but Bedford blamed Fastolf and had him suspended from the Order of the Garter.  It would take him until 1442 to clear his name formally and be reinstated to the Order, but the scandal lingered for the rest of his life.  Personally, both Bedford and Richard of York continued to trust Fastolf with important commands and he continued to serve in France.  He returned to England in 1440.  During Cade's Rebellion in 1451, he was charged by the rebels with having contributed to the losses in the Hundred Years War through diminishing the garrisons in Normandy.  Part of what created the suspicions against him was that he had managed to become quite wealthy during the war, liquidating his properties in Normandy and transferring those funds home to England before losing them to the eventuality of French victory.

Besides being thought of as avaricious and cowardly, he was considered to have had a cruel and vengeful disposition.  How much of any of this was true and how much was slanders from enemies will never bee known for certain.  He was distantly related to the Paston family, and used his influence at court to help the Pastons in their land and legal disputes with the Duke of Norfolk, and also with Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, something that probably didn't win him very many friends.  Not that he cared, Fastolf had managed his own and his wife's assets such that he was a wealthy man who could work his way through the intrigues of the Wars of the Roses without losing his money or his life.  Though he privately sympathized with the Yorkists, he was careful to keep on the side of the Lancastrians when that was necessary.  He was fond of writing memoranda on military strategy and giving unsolicited advice to government officials in London, he also patronized scholars and had several manuscripts created specifically for his own library.  He finally died in 1459 at Caistor Castle in Norfolk, never knowing how famous he'd become through Shakespeare's character and the preservation of the Paston Letters. 

Slice of Life: the Paston Letters

A vital primary source for any time period are personal letters and family documents.  Unfortunately, for the Medieval period, these are rare.  Charters, parliament rolls, court records, parish registers and chronicles abound, but personal letters between members of a family or to and from a historical person are rare.  Paper is perishable, it was often reused and recycled for other purposes, and a cache of letters can easily be hidden in an abandoned trunk or attic, to be found if ever only centuries later.

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.