The Paston Letters with Helen Castor

Matt Lewis and Helen Castor uncover the romantic entanglements and perilous struggles of the 15th-century Paston family, whose personal correspondences reveal intimate details of love, ambition, and survival during the Wars of the Roses. Through the incredible archive of letters we meet the indomitable matriarch Margaret and her sons John II and John III, as they navigate political turmoil, defend their home in a dramatic siege, and experience forbidden love. A rare glimpse into the past through thrilling stories of medieval romance and danger preserved through centuries. MORE Real Medieval Women with Philippa Gregory https://open.spotify.com/episode/2bGP4HAgsUgVkazs2Dkdyw Richard II vs. Henry IV with Helen Castor https://open.spotify.com/episode/6FwoVILnFD15Q5S7Qm3WhP Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 1:52Speaker 03

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• 2:29Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 3:05Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. If you have any interest in the Wars of the Roses, you might well have heard of the Paston Letters. If not, this episode is going to put you right. The Letters are a goldmine of correspondence that shed light on a relatively, but not entirely, normal family from the 15th century. The people spring to life from their pages. The stories range from the mundane to the dramatic to the touching. I happen to know that Helen Castor is very fond of the Pastons and their letters. Her 2005 book, Blood and Roses, tells the family story from their letters.

• 3:47Matt Lewis?

  And recently Helen has been focusing on the letters in her Substack, The H-Files.

• 3:53Matt Lewis?

  If you're not already subscribed, I highly recommend it. I've lured Helen back to Gone Medieval with the promise of Pastons. And fortunately, she's agreed to come and tell us why we should all love the Pastons and their letters.

• 4:10Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Helen.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 4:14Matt Lewis?

  It's wonderful to have you back again to talk about something that I'm really, really keen to talk about. So we're going to chat about the Paston Letters, which is a phrase that people might hear around a little bit. If you're into medieval history, you may have heard of the Paston Letters. But I wondered if you could give us a little bit of an idea to start off with about what they are and why they're important.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  The Paston Letters are the earliest surviving great collection of private correspondence in the English language.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  And what I need to emphasise there is private because we have huge volumes. In fact, I think people get surprised sometimes when they find out quite how much documentary evidence does survive from medieval England. We have government records, administrative records, legal records, but it's almost all formal. It comes from the public processes of government and law and then public chronicles, monastic chronicles, that kind of thing. What we almost never have is a way to get behind closed doors, behind the closed doors

• 5:23Speaker 04

  of a public life, or find out what it's like for what we might want to call more ordinary people living through the Middle Ages. So that's why the Past and Letters matter. They're one of our first chances to hear people speaking in private.

• 5:41Matt Lewis?

  The common complaint to the medievalists is that no kings wrote diaries or anything like that, but this is us getting a little bit closer to something like that, what people were thinking behind closed doors, and more about their thoughts and their everyday life rather than how they wished to be seen by the public.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  That's right. Writing to each other in private, sometimes of course worried about whose hands their letters might fall into. Because the other thing to say about this great collection is that it comes at a particular time in English history. In the middle of the 15th century, when, as we know, but they didn't, at the point the letters start surviving, England is about to experience the terrible bloody upheaval of civil war, the Wars of the Roses. And so there are moments in the correspondence where you can see that particular members of this family are having to be a bit more careful about what they're saying or how

• 6:42Speaker 04

  they're saying it. Just in case the letter falls into the wrong hands, perhaps not naming an enemy that they want to refer to, or there's one instance where one member of the family, instead of signing himself John Paston, signs himself in a letter to his mother, John of Geldiston. Geldiston being the place where he was born, which he knows and she knows, but might provide a little bit of cover if the letter's being read by the wrong person.

• 7:13Matt Lewis?

  And I guess we ought to just say who the Paston family are. Where are they and what kind of level of society they're operating at?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  The Pastons were a family from North Norfolk. The village of Paston is right on the coast of, almost on the coast of Norfolk. And they are a family that rises pretty quickly and pretty spectacularly from the ranks of the peasantry in the mid 14th century, up into the ranks of the landed gentry by the middle of the 15th century. So they're a really interesting. Of course, they would never have seen themselves as a case study, but for us, they offer an extraordinary perspective

• 8:00Speaker 04

  into what it's like trying to make your way in the world, trying to climb the social ladder and the political ladder at a time when all sorts of upheavals are going on around you from the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century, which of course gave so many members of the peasantry a chance to rise because it killed so many people that the ones who survived had more of a chance to gain land, to gain employment, to gain money, to gain status. And then what it's like.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  In the course of that rise, which happens first via professional success, William Paston, the first founder of the family fortunes, very bright boy who got sent to school to learn the law, ends up as a High Court judge, starts buying up lands and manners in an attempt to turn his family into landed gentry. And then when his son John Paston takes over, trying to accelerate the family's rise, but at a point where the world is falling apart around them.

• 9:05Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And what kind of volume of letters are we talking about here? Are we talking dozens, hundreds?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  All in all, the archive, the surviving Paston archive from this period of the 15th century is about a thousand documents, which to modern historians might not sound very much, but to a medievalist, as you know, Matt, it's it's an unbelievable treasure chest of wonders because a thousand documents over the course of end to end, about 70 years, but most of them concentrated in the period from around 1440 to around 1480. It really is an extraordinarily rich means of seeing inside this family's experience and their perspective on the world in which they were struggling to stay afloat.

• 9:56Matt Lewis?

  It's like peeking through a window of a family home when all the other curtains are closed. This is the one we actually get to see into a little bit, isn't it?

• 10:02Speaker 04

  It is.

• 10:03Matt Lewis?

  Is there any particular reason why the Paston letters are so well preserved? There must have been other families who had this kind of correspondence going on, letters going backwards and forwards. Why is this one so well preserved?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  It's such a good question and such an interesting one because as you say, we do know that other letters were ricocheting around England during this period. There are a whole series of chance circumstances, basically, that feed into the story of how and why these letters still survive. First of all, There's the fact that they were written in the way they were written to start with. It so happened that during this period, from the 1440s onwards, key members of the family were separated at key times and for quite a long time. So quite often, there was one member of the family in London, trying to pursue the family's business in the law courts or with the government there.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  And then another important member of the family would be back at home in Norfolk, whether in Norwich or at one of the family's manorial houses there. So for a start, the letters are surviving in consistent number or are being written in consistent number in a way that wasn't true necessarily for everyone else. Then, because a lot of these letters relate to important legal business as well as other things, but there's important legal business to do with their properties involved, they get filed and kept. So those are the first two stages. Next stage is that the family dies out in the male line in the early 18th century at a point where

• 11:42Speaker 04

  the monument room is still full of all sorts of family papers going back centuries. And at that point, local history is beginning to be a thing. So the last member of the family, the husband of the daughter of the last male heir of the Paston line, is trying to sort out the house so he can sell it. And he brings in a local antiquarian called Francis Bloomfield and says, please, will you have a look at everything that's in the monument room? The rain's coming in, half the stuff is getting mouldy, we need to know if any of it needs keeping. And there's an extraordinary letter from Francis Bloomfield, once he's had a look at what's in the archive, saying, well, yes, there's a lot of stuff there. I've

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Separated it into piles. I mean, a lot of stuff's been ruined by the rain. But I've tried to separate into piles. Some of it's just family stuff. You probably don't want to keep that. But some of it has to do with the course of history and might be worth keeping. I don't know whether you want me to burn the rest of the stuff, at which point, of course, we're all going, oh, no, because it is clear that there was a lot more that hasn't survived. For instance, there are no estate accounts for the Paston lands. If we had the estate accounts to go with the letters, the insights we would have would be even more extraordinary than they are at the moment. But we don't know whether anything was burned, but it seems quite likely that

• 13:12Speaker 04

  destroyed or discarded, there was originally a lot more. But these letters were of interest to local antiquarians and a significant number of them were sold off, passed through different hands, and eventually came into the hands of a gentleman named John Fen. And we're so lucky that they did because Fen was an unusually sensitive and rigorous historian. A lot of other collections of papers got destroyed by antiquarians who cut them up for references to things they were particularly interested in, threw away the rest. Fen didn't do that. Fen knew what he was looking at and

• 13:54Speaker 04

  showed them to various people, including Horace Walpole, a great man of letters, and was encouraged to prepare them for publication. And in seventeen eighty-seven, the first two volumes of the Paston letters were published in an edition prepared by John Fen with the original spelling on one side and then modernized in the terms of seventeen eighty-seven version on the facing page. Even then,

• 14:24Speaker 04

  The Odyssey of the Paston Letters wasn't over because this was a publishing sensation in 1787. It was the hit of the season. And Fen was told that the King would like to have these letters for the Royal Library and that he could have a knighthood in return. So he goes to the palace, turns over the letters that he's published so far, gets his knighthood, keeps going with the other letters he's got at home and the ones he's published so far disappear out of sight. It's not until the 19th century, when they haven't been seen for ages and suspicions are beginning to be raised about whether they were forgeries perhaps in the first

• 15:03Speaker 04

  place, that they are eventually rediscovered, some of them in the attic of Fen's descendants because he died before being able to complete his publication and some in the home of the grandson of the private secretary who'd encouraged Fen to hand over the letters to the King in the first place. It doesn't seem the King really wanted them at all, this other chap did. So we're extraordinarily lucky that at that point, the British Library stepped in and acquired them all for the nation or soon after that point. And so now they are almost all what we think of as the Paston Letters in the British Library

• 15:48Speaker 04

  with some associated documents in some other archives, particularly the archive of Magdalen College, Oxford, which has papers relating to a particular group of properties that the Pastons were trying to acquire. It's a long saga.

• 16:05Matt Lewis?

  I think I had to pick myself up off the floor about four times. When you're talking about finding collections of letters and just burning the stuff that doesn't seem like it's interesting and cutting the rest up just to get the interesting bits out of it and throwing the rest away and, you know, just let the rain get it and let it go mouldy. I mean, it's, it's just horrific, the stuff that might have been lost, you know, it's there's a huge what if there, isn't there? What else could we have known?

• 16:26Speaker 04

  There really, really is. It, it, it doesn't bear thinking about too much, but in a way, it's an important thing to remember, I think, that these letters are, as you've said, not the only letters that were being written in 15th century England. They are the tiny tip of a very large iceberg and we have to remember always.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Everything that we're not seeing and hearing by which they would have been surrounded at the point where they were written.

• 16:55Matt Lewis?

  So to get back to the family, could you give us an idea of who are some of the key figures? We've talked about William as perhaps the founder of the family's growing fortunes. So who are some of the key pastons? And I guess, why are they all called John?

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Some more very good questions. William we need to know about because he really is the founder of the family fortunes, this great legal brain. And there were so many men like him in late medieval England. We think of it as a very stratified society, and it was. But the potential was there for extraordinary social mobility, whether through the church or particularly in this period through the law. So bright boys who could get themselves an education could get onto the bottom rungs of the ladder. And if they were good at what they did, they could rise very far, very fast. And what William did was be very canny. He married an heiress, Agnes. And one of the things

• 17:56Speaker 04

  that's so striking is that he waits until he's in his 40s to get married. And he marries an heiress who's 20 years younger than him. And in part, that's because he wants to have built his fortune up to a point where he can snag an heiress. But the other thing that occurred to me very late in the day when I was looking at the whole history of the family, is that William also waits until both his parents have died before he marries an heiress. And you begin to wonder, is he waiting to have a big society wedding at a point where his slightly embarrassing parents, because they were both of peasant

• 18:37Speaker 04

  stock, who allowed him to rise from these very humble beginnings, but perhaps couldn't be trusted not to give the game away at a big society wedding, waiting until they were safely out of the way. It's an interesting, if rather, rather touchingly sad thought. But William and Agnes then set about having children. The eldest of whom is called John, they have three more boys and a girl. But John, as the gentleman son of a gentleman lawyer, is married off much younger than William had married. So at the age of eighteen nineteen, he is betrothed and then married to another heiress called Margaret Mortby,

• 19:19Speaker 04

  the heiress to Somme lands in Norfolk. And here too, we see the

• 19:28Speaker 04

  pros and cons of William's decision to wait to get married till later in his life, because by the time William dies in his early sixties, John is only in his early twenties. So William has waited for very good reasons, but it means his son, to whom he's given the finest education William can afford, is left as a very young man in charge of the whole family and all the family's estates, when he really doesn't have much experience as opposed to education under his belt. But by this stage, he and Margaret, who really are the first two characters that we begin to see in real three dimensional detail, they've also started having children. And here's where we come to your second

• 20:13Speaker 04

  question, because their first son is called John after his father. He's born in fourteen forty-two. Their second son, born in fourteen forty-four, also called John. It's almost as though they're doing it on purpose to make life difficult for us, because we have three Johns in two generations. And what historians do, which we know no contemporaries, no people who knew them, none of their relatives did, we call them John one, the father, John two, the elder son, John three, the second son. So it's a kind of historical code, but

• 20:53Speaker 04

  There's no sign of nicknames, there's no sign of Jack or Johnny or anything. They're just John Paston Esquire, who is the father, John Paston the elder, who's the elder son, and John Paston the younger, who's the second son. And they really will be our main characters through the decades when we're following the family's fortunes in real gritty detail.

• 21:20Matt Lewis?

  Bizarre decision to just call your two sons, two years apart, the same name. It's just odd.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  It's very inconvenient. The best guess I have is if you look around the family circle, very significant numbers of the men who were closely related and or important to the family were called John. John Paston's relative by marriage, one of Margaret's relatives, a very rich childless knight who's going to become very important in their story. John Fastow is right there. Margaret has a relative called John Bernie. They have a great family friend called John Dam. So wherever you look, there are potential godfathers to these two boys.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  And there was a tradition for babies to be named after a chief godparent. So while deeply, deeply inconvenient, it may not have been so odd to contemporaries to have a whole succession of children in the same family called the same or similar things.

• 22:30Matt Lewis?

  So all the wealthy relatives that you might inherit from are called John. So you give everyone a John that they can leave something to. There's a John for you and a John for you.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  I can see that you're getting into the mindset straight away.

• 22:41Matt Lewis?

  And who are the significant people that the Pastons are writing to? Are these letters contained to within the family or do they write to external people as well?

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Not entirely contained to within the family, often the most personal and most revealing ones about the individuals concerned are within the family. So we have a lot initially between Margaret Paston, usually in Norwich or at one of the family homes in Norfolk, and her husband John, who's often throughout the 1440s and 1450s in London, trying desperately to proceed with the family's business, either on the fringes of the court or in the law courts. And then as the years go on, the two boys come into the correspondence, they write to each other, they write to their parents. After John I's death, Margaret is

• 23:33Speaker 04

  writing in no uncertain terms to her two sons. John II by that stage is often in London, John III often at home, either with Margaret or attending to family business. But there are other letters to family friends, to family servants who are doing the family's bidding, whether in Norfolk or in London, sometimes to patrons of the family, that members of the family are trying to get favours from or to get information from. So you do get a huge range of perspectives coming through, as well as the really close-knit sense of

• 24:15Speaker 04

  how these family relationships within the immediate family are developing as time goes on.

• 24:21Matt Lewis?

  And I guess the two kind of main areas that these shed light on are sort of national politics and more local matters. So I wonder if we could start with the national events. And you mentioned that these focus around the period that we call the Wars of the Roses. So what kind of events are they detailing? What does the family know about those big national moments where the throne is changing hands?

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Sometimes, rarely but sometimes, members of the family are actually there. So, for example, in 1468, when Margaret of York, the sister of Edward IV, marries Charles of Burgundy, she goes over to Bruges for this lavish wedding.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Both of the Paston Boys, I always think of them as the boys, but of course they're grown up by this stage. John two and John three, they're both there because John two is in her entourage. And John three has got himself a place in the entourage of the Duchess of Norfolk, who's one of the great ladies who's accompanying her over to Bruges. So you'd think that we would get a blow by blow account of everything that happens. Actually, John three, who's the one who writes about it, is so overwhelmed by the extraordinary experience that he seems a bit lost for words. He says, I know of nothing like it save for King Arthur's court. And I don't have the wit or remembrance to tell you what happened really.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  But we do know they were there and we also know, for instance, that they were at the Battle of Barnet in fourteen seventy one, they were fighting in the entourage of the Earl of Oxford on the Lancastrian side, which meant that they were, or what is by then the Lancastrian side, the side of Warwick the Kingmaker. And that therefore is the losing side. And again, we hear from them about a week after the battle because John three has been wounded in that battle. And John two writes to their mother to reassure her that he is, he's in no danger of death. He is recovering and trying to tell her that it'll all be okay. There we do get a bit more sense of

• 26:29Speaker 04

  what it might be like to have survived such an appalling experience. And the terms in which he writes to me seem very human and very touching. We're used to thinking of these events as Shakespearean drama. But what the Paston Boys are telling their mother is the world is right queasy. In other words,

• 26:53Speaker 04

  we're all at sea and we don't know exactly what's going to happen. So sometimes they're there actually in the thick of historical events. But other times you get glancing reports that give you a sense precisely as we were saying earlier of what is going on behind closed doors that. What is perhaps not being said out loud on the great public occasions. So, for example, during the fourteen fifty s, during the great power struggles at Henry VI's court, Henry VI being this king who is turning out to be such a vacuous nonentity that government is imploding

• 27:32Speaker 04

  round the black hole that he is becoming. His wife, Margaret of Anjou, is beginning to assert herself in the name of their very small son, Edward the Prince of Wales.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  And it's a Paston correspondent who says, for example, she, Margaret of Anjou, desires to have the whole rule of this land. Margaret behind closed doors, and it's increasingly obvious in public, but here we have a direct statement from one of the Paston's correspondents that Margaret is maneuvering to try to take control of her husband's regime. So it it it's not that we get a whole narrative of events as you would in a chronicle, precisely because the Pastons and their correspondents are living through this from day to day. And what we get is what is useful to them or what is relevant to them and the things that they are trying to

• 28:30Speaker 04

  maneuver around or manage. But therefore, these are the kind of perspectives and insights that we don't tend to get in the great chronicles that are written with some amount of hindsight or with some amount of a political agenda. Of course, the Pastons have their own agenda, but it's a private one. Not these great public narratives or official governmental pronouncements.

• 28:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, because those public documents give us the kind of, I guess, you know, the center of the jigsaw. We can see what the picture of the jigsaw is meant to look like. But the Paston letters give us those tiny little pieces around the edge that just make a little bit of a difference. You know, you can suddenly see a bird that you would have known was there if you hadn't put that piece in.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And that's why, as you say, that almost anyone who's read about the Wars of the Roses, about this great period of tumult in the fifteenth century, will probably have heard the name Paston because these moments, these fragments, these voices from the wings of the great political drama can suddenly give us piercing insights that we wouldn't have had in any other way.

• 29:39Matt Lewis?

  And I guess they give us a different perspective as well, because we're used to hearing from the big players. We hear from the kings and we hear from the deposed people and we hear from the kingmakers of the world. But here, we're getting much more of a local, middle-class, for want of a better term, they're not middle-class, I know, but a local, middle-class view of what's going on. It's like someone today outside the Westminster bubble, talking to you about what's happening in politics.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  That's precisely it. And what it also therefore gives us is a sense of how difficult all these upheavals at the centre, even before actual civil war breaks out, but quite how difficult it is to stay afloat in these increasingly choppy political seas for a family that does have their own ambitions and has their own needs and wishes and hopes for the future, is engaged in conflicts over properties they're trying to either acquire or hold on to. And if the government at the centre is imploding, it's increasingly

• 30:47Speaker 04

  difficult to be sure where you can turn for help, where you can turn for support, whether the law is actually going to be upheld. If more powerful people than you decide they rather like the look of some property that you think is yours, is anyone going to be able to stop them from just taking it? So the way in which events at the centre have a ripple effect that can threaten to become a tsunami for people much lower down the social chain, and what decisions and actions those people end up having to take or make

• 31:31Speaker 04

  in order to try and survive, it gives us a perspective that we wouldn't have in any other way.

• 31:53Speaker 02

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• 34:23Matt Lewis?

  And I guess the other side of what they tell us is a lot of stuff that's going on at a local level and what concerns them about what's happening in North Norfolk around them.

• 34:34Matt Lewis?

  And it always strikes me that the Pastons don't seem to get on very well with almost anybody else. They seem to be permanently arguing with their neighbours, but maybe that's just the way I read them. But are they good at telling us what preoccupies a family that we might in air quotes call more "normal" for the period than the voices that we normally hear?

• 34:54Speaker 04

  They are, so long as we interrogate what we mean by "normal". First of all, as we've said and as you're indicating, they are not an ordinary man in the street in the sense that they are landed gentry, recently risen, trying to rise further and higher and faster. So they are already in the upper echelons of society, not at the level of the nobility, but they are dealing with the nobility in their everyday lives. And therefore, you know, in other words, we shouldn't be thinking of them just trying to scrape a living at village level. That's not where they are. They are very well off. But the

• 35:36Speaker 04

  other thing to say, which relates to your point about the arguments they get into almost constantly, is that this business of trying to climb the social ladder is one that comes with a lot of risks. And Norfolk at the time is a county that's full of families trying to climb the social ladder. It's a very rich county, lots of trade wealth, lots of legal wealth, full of lawyers, Norfolk and Norwich. And as we know... Lawyers can often start an argument alone in a brown paper bag, and that's certainly true of a lot of people the Pastons know. They are in very immediate competition for land, for influence, for power in the region

• 36:21Speaker 04

  that they're trying to establish themselves in. And in particular, they get very ambitious during the 1450s because of their connection with this very curmudgeonly old knight called Sir John Fastolf, who's made an absolute fortune in the French wars, doesn't have any children, has built himself an all-mod-cons, up-to-the-minute, sophisticated mega mansion called Caster Castle in North Norfolk, and is trying to decide what to do with this after his death.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  He wants to set up a religious college of priests to pray for his soul in perpetuity after he's died. But who is going to be in charge of that? How's it going to be set up? And what happens when Fastolf dies in 1459, which, as anyone who knows anything about the Wars of the Roses will know, is precisely when England really starts to implode politically. Fastolf dies and John Paston claims to be his heir. So just at the wrong moment politically, John Paston is claiming this huge estate with this incredibly desirable castle at the centre of it, which every single other person of

• 37:43Speaker 04

  influence or power in East Anglia and beyond also wants to claim or would love to acquire. So the Pastons have set themselves, John Paston, the father at this point, has decided to do something extremely risky, extremely ambitious. I think he truly believed Fastolf wanted him to be his heir and that he was the person best placed to fulfil Fastolf's dying wishes. But that doesn't mean it was going to be easy and it doesn't mean that other people weren't going to see things extremely differently. And that really helps set the scene for the Pastons' experience of the Wars of the Roses

• 38:27Speaker 04

  all the way through, that try as they might to keep their head down. On the national stage, they can't because they are at the local level desperately trying to secure their possession of this hugely valuable, hugely desirable

• 38:50Speaker 04

  set of lands and possessions that would catapult them far up the social hierarchy. And they're finding they have very, very powerful enemies.

• 38:59Matt Lewis?

  It must have felt a bit like this was the payoff for calling all of the kids John. You know, here's a John who wants to leave the family all of their money. But actually, it turns out not quite to be as wonderful as they might have thought it was. And for those who don't know what happens with Caster Castle, I wonder if we can stick with that for a little bit because it's a hugely dramatic story, isn't it?

• 39:16Speaker 04

  It really is. It starts out as a legal battle which becomes vicious and bitter immediately as soon as Fastolf has died because it divides all of Fastolf's friends and supporters. So even within the Pastons' own circle, there is immediate division, but it really gets bad by 1469. Again, listeners who know about the Wars of the Roses will recognise that date because that's just when the new regime set up by the young Edward IV, who's managed to get the throne from the vacuous and inept Henry VI back in 1461 with the help of Warwick the Kingmaker.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  In 1469 is just when that alliance and that new regime in turn implodes. And that's the point where the Duke of Norfolk decides he would rather like Caster Castle for himself. And he is going to send an army to besiege the Pastons and their household and servants inside Caster. So within this more general outbreak of civil war, you have mini-localised war going on at Caster, where you have John III, the younger son, with

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Some of the Paston servants and four professional soldiers who they've taken on in fear of something like this happening behind the walls of Castor, trying to defend it against an army with guns. I mean, there are guns on both sides, sent by the Duke of Norfolk to besiege them. Margaret is elsewhere in Norfolk, Margaret, their mother, desperately worrying about what's going on at Castor. John two, John three's elder brother, because John the father is dead by this stage. John two is in London, doing everything he can to curry favour politically.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  But of course, the political world has collapsed into chaos. So quite where help might come from is not clear. It's one of the most dramatic moments in the whole story, right down to the tiny details. One of the Paston servants who's with John three behind the walls of Castor is called Thomas Stumps. And it turns out that Thomas Stumps is called Thomas Stumps because he has no hands. But loyal Paston servant that he is, he's insisting that he can still fire a crossbow. If you're hearing shades of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and it being just a scratch, I am too. But clearly they needed all the support they could get

• 42:06Speaker 04

  from the household men and the servants who were with them, vastly outnumbered though they were by the men the much more powerful and much richer Duke of Norfolk had sent to attack them.

• 42:17Matt Lewis?

  I guess it must have driven home for them the dangers in the social climbing that they're trying to undertake. They've perhaps slightly, they've either overstretched themselves or they're coming to something that, you know, is a leap ahead of where they maybe ought to be. And suddenly you're appearing on the radar of someone like the Duke of Norfolk, who simply has far more resource that he can throw against you. So you've suddenly gone from being a small, local family to someone the Duke of Norfolk wants to send an army to destroy. It's a weird thing about social mobility, isn't it? They've either overstretched or just accidentally been catapulted too far.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  That's precisely it, and at a moment where the unforeseeable has happened, that is, Edward IV, who had set about during the 1460s imposing his control on a kingdom that had become extraordinarily disordered during the 1450s and the breakdown of Henry VI's rule. This is just at the moment where Edward IV has been effectively taken prisoner by his erstwhile ally and supporter, the Earl of Warwick, Warwick the Kingmaker. So Norfolk too is seeing his moment, seeing his opportunity that suddenly with the effective authority

• 43:35Speaker 04

  of the crown removed in terms of its peacekeeping force, here's his chance, he can say, no, Caster's mine and I'm going to take it. And not only is Warwick occupied with everything, Warwick is trying to do essentially a version of the same thing in central government, but at the point where Edward manages to free himself temporarily, actually what Norfolk has done is quite useful to Edward IV in the sense that Norfolk is showing that peace cannot be kept without him. So who is going to restrain Norfolk at this point? And it becomes clear that really no one is coming to rescue John III and the past and servants

• 44:19Speaker 04

  there. It's the letters from this point are some of the most dramatic and the most touching because Margaret is so terrified. She's hearing terrible things about people being killed at Caster. She's writing to John II in London and there's one letter he writes back to her at this point where she's saying, two people have been killed at Caster. This is appalling. We've got to do anything we can to rescue them. And it's the only letter in the entire collection where John II, her eldest son and her favourite, although he drives her up the wall in various ways, doesn't start a letter to her with most reverent mother, most worshipful mother, I recommend me to you, all the polite forms. He starts a letter, mother.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  I suppose that you can't have had any more recent news from Catesden than I have. And last time I heard, they were all safe and well. Turns out, in fact, neither of them is right. One man, a very loyal old family servant, has been killed. So they're both right and they're both wrong. But just finding those fine tuned differences of language, a letter starting "Mother", really is extraordinarily sharp for the polite forms of address in the mid 15th century.

• 45:36Matt Lewis?

  It's amazing just how the one word at the start of a letter can just tell you so much about where they both are in terms of their frame of mind at the moment, where politics is. You know, you can imagine John is so busy, he's like, I actually haven't got time to be polite. Just shut up, mother.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  And I'm really frustrated. I'm doing everything I can, mother, and you're making me stop to write back to you when I'm trying to. It is extraordinary. And in the book I wrote about the Pasts, and I was trying to use the letters as much as I possibly could so that you're climatized to not only the individual voices of the characters, but also precisely what is usual in terms of form of address so that you can then tell what's not usual. And one of the great joys of one of the things I'm doing at the moment is to go back to the Paston letters in my Substack and go through, among other things I'm doing, but one letter a month

• 46:36Speaker 04

  in its entirety so that people can see the letter in the original spelling, which looks very difficult when you first see it and you're not used to it. But actually, if you read things out loud, you get your eye in, you start being able to see through this extraordinary spelling, spelling in no sense standardized in the 15th century, and you start to be able to see and hear. These forms of address and the voices that are speaking. And so what I'm doing is then giving a a modernized version and discussing all that. But to see a letter as a whole, which obviously in in my book about the past, since I couldn't do, I was having to use sentences and paragraphs. They are a joy, these letters.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Possibly not for poor old John two, John three and Margaret as they were having to write in the circumstances of 1469. But it puts you right there on the spot. It's absolutely immediate and visceral.

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• 49:12Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I've been enjoying reading your Substack about it. So for anyone who doesn't know, head over to Substack, find the H files, subscribe to Helen's Substack. It's absolutely packed with medieval goodness. I think we probably ought to put Castor Castle to bed and not keep people hanging too much longer. What happens? Do the Paston keep it?

• 49:29Speaker 04

  They do in the end, but at great cost, both financially and personally. Or at least they keep it, they've still got it in the 17th century when they end up, first of all, on the wrong side of another civil war because they're out and out royalists. And so they don't do very well initially, but then when the Restoration happens, they become Earls of Yarmouth. They actually make their way up to the nobility in the 17th and early 18th century. But by that stage, having lost almost all the wealth that would have supported that status, which is one of the reasons they end up more or less bankrupt

• 50:09Speaker 04

  and the family ends up dying out. So it's a long story, full of extraordinary ups and downs and vicissitudes. But by that stage, yes, when they emerge the other side of the Wars of the Roses, poor old John II has died, broken his mother's heart by dying, by never getting married. The relationship between Margaret, the mother, John II and John III, I think, is the most touching and my favourite bit of the whole correspondence. Bear in mind that you've seen Margaret from the age of 18, as a young girl getting married,

• 50:54Speaker 04

  an arranged marriage, but it is pretty clear that John and Margaret did grow to love one another. And seeing her cope with everything that life threw at them both during the fourteen forties, fourteen fifties. Margaret herself, as a young mother, had been on the receiving end of more or less a siege in the late fourteen forties. There's a wonderful letter from her that survives to John in London, saying, yes, I probably need some poleaxes and some ammunition and crossbows because we can't use longbows in the house, the windows are too low, we can't draw a longbow. And could you get me some almonds and also some cloth to make clothes with? You know, it's a shopping list of an extraordinary kind.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  She was so brave, Margaret, and she'd had to find the fortitude to withstand so much that by the time the fourteen seventies come and she's already lost John, her husband, whose health, it seems clear, has been broken by this, the strain of his attempt to secure the fast health inheritance. And then she's watched her favourite son, John II, who is a very charming figure. He's a would be Chevalier Knight, very dashing. He loves books, he loves women, he loves being in London, he loves being at court. He doesn't always get things right, drives his father round the bend.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  His father sends him to court to try and represent the family's interests in the early fourteen sixties. And you have to fight to remember that John II is actually the same age as Edward the Fourth, when Edward, more or less the same age, when Edward the Fourth takes the throne. And Edward the Fourth is this authoritative, golden figure who's won the battles that have brought him to the throne and is bestriding England more or less like a colossus. John II is getting everything wrong and his father writes these letters to Margaret, saying he's a drone amongst bees, he's no use to anyone, can't get anything right. Margaret is always defending him to her husband, but he exasperates her as well.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  But then when he dies, young and unmarried, you can.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  Feel Margaret's heartbreak. Meanwhile, John III, the loyal son who stayed at home, who's warm and charming in a very different way, having to get on with everything, try and hold the whole family together. He and his brother are very fond of one another, but again, get exasperated because they are having to deal with different ends of the same problem. He is then the one who has to step up and he is so capable and he's really the one that steers the family out of the end, the complicated end of the Wars of the Roses and establishes them on a much firmer footing. He is such a safe pair of hands in the end.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  There's a wonderful moment, sorry, I realise I'm going on, but I could, I love them so much, I could go on forever. But there's a wonderful moment in the early 1470s when all of this is, you know, they, they've had to withdraw from Caster. It's not clear what's going to happen. But one of the things that's been a source of hope throughout all this is that the Duchess of Norfolk has a really soft spot for John III, who she's encountered at home in Norfolk. And that soft spot carries on throughout all the conflicts. It's a great help to the Pastons that she will always put in a good word for them because she likes him so much. And poor old John III then has to contend with this moment where

• 54:34Speaker 04

  John II, his older brother, who fancies himself as a dashing knight, has bumped into the Duchess of Norfolk in the street at Great Yarmouth, I think it is, but somewhere in, in Norfolk. And she's almost eight months pregnant. And John II tries to pay her an elaborate dashing compliment about what a fine figure of a woman she is and what a fine baby she's sure to produce. Basically, it came out all wrong. And he managed to make it sound as though he was calling her fat. And there's this anguished letter from him to his brother saying, "They say I said she was great and large and, and that looked as though it was going to be easy for the baby to get out." And he's clearly got it completely wrong. And poor old John III is having to deal with,

• 55:18Speaker 04

  "Oh, for goodness sake, this was, she's our one hope and you've, you know, but..." You so sympathise because who can say the right thing to the Duchess of Norfolk when you bump into her in the street in Yarmouth? It's almost impossible.

• 55:32Matt Lewis?

  Well, it's also for five and a half centuries ago, that's such a relatable family dynamic, isn't it? You know, the the older son who annoys his dad but is the apple of his mum's eye and the younger son who probably feels like he's actually doing all of the hard legwork and keeping everything together while his brother's off, you know, getting everything wrong, living the high life and yet the sun shines out of his backside. It's just so relatable even today, isn't it?

• 55:55Speaker 04

  It really, really is. And I don't know if you were going to ask me about this, but it gets even more relatable when you add their sister into the whole equation because, again, right at the heart of this whole period where things are so complicated. In fact, while the siege of Castor is going on in 1469, they end up with a family, a purely personal family crisis on their hands because their younger sister Marjorie, who's at home with Margaret elsewhere in Norfolk, while John III is behind the walls of Castor, John II is in London. An enormous crisis erupts because it turns out that Marjorie,

• 56:36Speaker 04

  who's at this point around 20, has fallen in love with the family bailiff, a man named Richard Cowell, who's probably almost 20 years older than her and has been an absolutely essential family servant for many, many years. He's extremely intelligent, he's a lovely man, he's very good at his job. Running the family estate without him is unthinkable. But not only has Marjorie fallen in love with him, but he's fallen in love with Marjorie. And by the time it comes to Margaret's attention that this is going on under her roof, not only have they fallen in love, but they have got married, which is something that you can

• 57:20Speaker 04

  do just by making vows to each other. At this time, you don't need witnesses or a priest for a valid marriage. And the problem Margaret has when she discovers this and tries to get Marjorie to say, no, no, no, we're not married after all, drags her in front of the Bishop of Norwich to say, please, Bishop, make clear to her that she's not really married. Marjorie, who's Clearly inherited a lot of her mother's temperament, says, I am married and if by some technicality I'm not, tell me the words I need to say and I'll say them now. I am married. And this is all going on while everything else is imploding. And this is one of the

• 58:05Speaker 04

  moments where we see quite how desperate John Three feels about everything, but also one of the few moments where to modern ears, he suddenly doesn't sound quite so sympathetic because he is outraged at the threat to the family's status, that his sister marrying a family servant who is the son of a shopkeeper, what that might do to their campaign to secure all the ambitions that they and their father have been working so hard for over the years. And he writes a letter saying, she will never have my goodwill, he will never, she and Cal will never have my goodwill to make my sister sell candle and mustard

• 58:48Speaker 04

  in Framlingham. In other words, this is downward social mobility that he will never accept. But he has to because they're married and they're in love. And we know how much they're in love because one letter survives that Richard Cal has written to Marjorie while they're separated. And he says, burn this immediately. She clearly doesn't because it's fallen into the family archive. In other words, her mother clearly got her hands on it. It's a love letter saying, I can't bear this separation. I don't know what's happening with you. I don't, it seems like a thousand years since I spoke to you. It tells us just how intelligent Richard is, just how much he loves Marjorie, just how

• 59:32Speaker 04

  impossible this situation seems, except that in the end, there's nothing the family can do. And Marjorie is allowed to go off and marry Richard. And not too long later, Richard is so indispensable, they bring him back into the family employment. He's never quite where he was in terms of a position of trust, but they have no choice but to go along with it.

• 59:55Matt Lewis?

  There's got to be a soap opera series in the Past and Letters somewhere.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  There has.

• 59:58Matt Lewis?

  It sounds like Dallas, it's peak Dallas or Dynasty or something, isn't it?

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  It really is. If you look at, I mean, I was thinking, when I was thinking about talking to you today, this family saga of political intrigue, revolting ambition and family crisis. I mean, whether we're talking Dallas, whether we're talking The Godfather, whether we're talking succession, it's such a familiar trope, if you like, but this is real and we can follow it in real time in the voices of the people who are living through it.

• 1:00:31Matt Lewis?

  Well, if any TV producers are listening, you know, Helen and I are probably willing to talk.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  We are, I think, aren't we?

• 1:00:38Matt Lewis?

  On the, on the matter of love as well, one of the things about the Past and Letters that fascinates me, and, and again, talks to that, that little piece in a jigsaw, is this is where we get our first ever mention, because somebody preserved this set of letters, our first ever mention of Valentine's Day as a day for love and for lovers, comes from the Past and Letters.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  It does. It comes from the late 1470s, 1477. And so pleasingly, given everything we've said about what John III had to put up with, it comes from his courtship of a young woman named Marjorie Bruce. She was the daughter of a very suitable gentry family, but she wasn't an heiress. She was quite a bit younger than John III and negotiations are going on between the two families for them to marry. But what becomes clear from the surviving bits of correspondence we have is that Marjorie, I do wish again there were slightly more different names, because this isn't the two Johns sister Marjorie.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  This is John III's prospective bride, Marjorie Bruce. But there are letters between John III and this Marjorie, which make it absolutely clear that they've fallen head over heels in love. Everyone is trying to make it work. There are letters from Marjorie's mother to the pastor and saying, she's making it very difficult for me because she's petitioning me day and night to make sure this works. But there is a letter from Marjorie to John where she talks about him. She addresses him as her good, true and loving Valentine.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  So by this, we can be pretty sure that the language of love around Valentine's Day was well established. It's not that Marjorie is inventing this as a language of love to use to John three, but this is the first surviving example we have of a letter addressed to someone as a Valentine. And it's so heartwarming. They are so desperate to be together. It's also, I mean, I was saying that the sister Marjorie's marriage to Richard Cowell was one of the few times we see John three being a bit prickly and spiky and saying, I can't approve of this.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  This negotiation is one of the few where we see John two being prickly and spiky, which is partly because John three is pushing so hard for a settlement of lands that will make Marjorie's family agree that she's being looked after well enough as his bride. But you can't help but suspect that at the same time, there's a sense in John two's mind that he's losing his brother. His brother has been his best friend and his right hand man and the one he could share private family jokes with. And he hasn't got married, but now his little brother has fallen in love.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  And, and there is a sense, as well as the very real practical things, that he is going to have to agree to. A divvying up of some of the family lands to support this new couple properly. He also feels, I think, as though he's losing his brother. It's very, very touching.

• 1:04:02Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's also so human and, and like I said, so relatable. I feel like we could talk about the Paston letters all day, but we probably ought to draw this chat to a close. I'm sure you've got other things you would like to be doing.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  Well, as you can tell, I could probably go on for hours, but I'm very grateful for the time we've had.

• 1:04:18Matt Lewis?

  Kind of quick questions to end on that may be unfair. Do you have a favourite member of the Paston family?

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  It's such a hard question. And I do, as you will have been able to tell, love the two boys as I think of them, John two and John three. But if I have to choose one, I think it has to be Margaret, their mother, because she really is the centre of the whole family. We do see the whole sweep of her life from her first meeting with John, where she, Agnes, her future mother-in-law calls her the young gentlewoman that you know of. The first meeting went quite well, I think. We see her from that age at 18, all the way through to her will, which was recently on display at the British Library as part of the British Library's wonderful exhibition about medieval women.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  And Margaret's will is an extraordinary document. It's a long, long, long scroll because it goes on in such detail and it looks like new. It could have been written yesterday and in it, among the bequests she leaves are nothing to her daughter, Marjorie, who had gone so wrong by marrying the family bailiff. We don't in fact know if Marjorie is still alive at that point, but she does leave the quest to her three grandsons, her cow grandsons who Marjorie has had in this bad marriage, this disapproved of marriage. So we get to see Margaret's whole life.

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  And she's so brave, she's so characterful, she has such fortitude and she's such a strong willed woman of a kind that we don't often see because women couldn't exercise power in public life so easily. I think she has to be my favourite.

• 1:06:03Matt Lewis?

  I don't know if this is more or less unfair than that question, but do you have a favourite kind of moment or incident from the letters?

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  I think I probably talked about them in the sense that I do love the telling the Duchess of Norfolk, she looks fat. And I do love the whole story of Marjorie's marriage to Richard Cowell. Have I used up all my favourites? No, because I've got far too many. I think there is a wonderful letter from Margaret to John when they're very young. And he's away in London. And London or Cambridge, anyway, he's at one of the places where he's studying or understudying his father. And she's writing with news from

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  home where she's living with her mother in law. And you gradually begin to realise as the letter goes on, why she's saying what she's saying. Because she says at one point, I can only fit into one girdle that I've got. And could you make sure that the new gown that I've asked your dad for, he's with his father in London, I think, could you make sure that gets bought? And you gradually realise, she says, I can only fit into one girdle because I'm grown so elegant that only one of them will fit me anymore. You gradually realise she's pregnant with their first baby. She's really excited about it. She's really nervous about it. She says, somebody we've never heard of called

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Elizabeth Peverill has had sciatica for weeks and weeks and she's really worried. But she says she'll come when she's needed, even if she has to be pushed in a wheelbarrow. And we gradually realise Elizabeth Peverill is the midwife. And Margaret is really nervous about her first labour. And it's such a human.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  Moment from a young woman in what we think of as an arranged marriage, but we're beginning to see that this is a relationship that has grown into real love. And she ends the letter, please wear the ring with the image of Saint Margaret on it that I gave you as a remembrance. And what we need to know is that Saint Margaret was the patron saint of pregnant women. And then she says, you have left me such a remembrance that I must think about you day and night, even when I want to sleep. In other words, it's really hard to sleep when you're pregnant. And this is such a lovely way of saying, you'd better be thinking about me because I'm having quite a hard time over here.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  And yeah, it's just such a wonderful intimate moment from a woman that we will later see having to grow into being a very battle hardened wife and mother. And to have seen her at this vulnerable moment in her first pregnancy is just heartwarming.

• 1:09:03Matt Lewis?

  I mean, there you go, TV producers, there's character development there. It's got everything, everything you want, everything. Well, thank you so much, Helen. It's been wonderful to get into the meat of these Paston letters to understand why they're so important. And it feels like get to know this Norfolk family who we might otherwise have forgotten had not some 18th century antiquarian decided not to burn their letters because they might be quite interesting. So thank you so very much for joining us. It's been wonderful to talk to you.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:09:32Matt Lewis?

  You can find Helen's book, Blood and Roses, wherever you buy your books and Helen's blog, including More Pastons and Much Besides, is on Substack at the H files. You can listen to Helen's last visit to Gone Medieval to talk about her book, The Eagle and the Heart, which tells the stories of Richard II and Henry IV in our back catalogue. And there's plenty of Wars of the Roses episodes in there too, if you'd like to find out more about the period in which the Paston letters are set. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

• 1:10:16Matt Lewis?

  You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit podcasts ad-free. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.