The status of the Paston family itself indicates social movement and change. Clement Paston was married to a bondwoman (albeit she became, by a medieval paradox, heiress to her brother who was an attorney) and owned only a small farm in Norfolk; by dint of saving and borrowing he managed to send his son, William, to Eton College. In turn William Paston became a lawyer and was eventually appointed to be Justice of the Common Pleas; although his mother had been technically a villein he married into a gentry family. The next generation of the Paston family were themselves members of the gentry, and the male Pastons became knights of the shire. Within three generations the family had been transformed. This was a characteristic feature of English society.
Details in the Paston correspondence, assembled together, open up the world. ‘I pray you that Pitt may truss up in a chest which I left in your chamber at London my tawny gown furred with black and the doublet of purple satin and the doublet of black satin, and my writing box of cypress, and my book of the meeting of the Duke and the Emperor …’
You can also hear the people speak. ‘Forsooth when I came into the chamber there the first word I heard was this that you said to my Master, John Paston, “Who that ever says so, I say he lies falsely in his head.” ’
‘Ya. You should have told what moved me to say so to him.’
‘I could not tell that which I had not heard.’
‘You should have examined the matter.’
‘Sir it did not belong to me to examine the matter, since I knew full well that I should not be a judge of the matter for it belongs only to a judge to study illam Sacre Scripture clausam where Holy Job says “Causam quam nesciebam diligentissime investigabam”.’ So men were inclined, and able, to break into Latin when addressing one another.
Latin was also used for the ruder moments. Of two men in close alliance it was written that singuli caccant uno ano or ‘they shit out of the same arse’. There is much talk of ‘worship’, meaning personal honour, and ‘disworship’. Those in authority suggest that they will ‘prove a good lord’ or otherwise to their supplicants. It was a world of gossip, with many ‘flyting words’ passing around London. It was also a world of plots and machinations, of convenient alliances and accidental events, of endless litigation and pleas for patronage.
Domestic aspects of the Paston correspondence suggest that the nature of human life is not greatly changed. Margaret Paston wrote to her husband while pregnant that ‘I pray that you will send me dates and cinnamon as hastily as you may … From your groaning wife.’ In a previous letter she wrote, ‘I pray you be not strange [slow] of writing letters to me between this time and when you come home; if I could, I would have one from you every day.’ ‘Forgive me,’ one man writes, ‘I write to make you laugh.’
Letters often begin with ‘I greet you well’. They generally end with a religious salutation, ‘the Blessed Trinity have you in his holy governance’ or ‘may God keep you and deliver you’.
One of the pleasures of the Paston correspondence, however, lies in the extent to which the life of the day is revealed. The actions of recorded history may be stirring or dispiriting, according to taste, but the busy concourse of human existence can be heard beneath the events recorded by the annalists and the chroniclers. The real life and spirit of the time are held in the innumerable remarks and encounters among the people going about their business in market and in town, in hamlet and in field. Those who pursue the process of living are those who create the history and traditions of the country in a million unacknowledged ways; they form the language of expression, and they preserve the stability of the land.
So in a period of war and domestic turmoil the general economy of the country was growing at a rapid pace. The diminution of population at the time of the Black Death in 1348 meant that there was more land, and more work, for fewer people; this in itself was the context for the relatively new experience of prosperity. It was a commonplace of observation that the English agricultural worker was better fed and housed than the French peasant. A Venetian diplomat remarked in 1497 that England was an underpopulated country but that ‘the riches of England are greater than those of any other country in Europe, as I have been told by the oldest and most experienced merchants, and also as I myself can vouch from what I have seen. This is owing in the first place to the great fertility of the soil which is such that, with the exception of wine, they import nothing from abroad for their subsistence … everyone who makes a tour in this island will soon become aware of this great wealth.’
