Family & Community History, Vol. 15/2, October 2012

© 2013 Family and Community Historical Research Society LtdDOI: 10.1179/1463118013Z.0000000006

SURVIVAL AND BETTERMENT: THE

ASPIRATIONS OF FOUR MEDIEVAL GENTRY

FAMILIES AS REVEALED IN THEIR LETTERS

By Joan W Kirby

Covering the period 1290–1584, the Paston, Plumpton, Cely and Stonor letters, although for the most part ‘business letters’, concerned with the administration of their house-holds and estates, nevertheless throw fascinating light on aspects of contemporary society. They reveal that the lives of those who strove to survive and prosper as landowning gentry were played out against a background of civil war, violent Scottish incursions over the northern borders, and military reversals in France. Closer to home, they struggled with predatory lords, tight-fisted dowagers, disgruntled sons, wretched daughters and bitterly contested wills.

Faced with many imponderables, they marshalled their defences: judicious marriages and kinship networks, compliant children, the patronage of influential magnates – per-haps even of the king himself, such protection as was afforded by the law and unceasing vigilance.

Parental affection and true love and devotion also find welcome expression among what were severely practical concerns.

In common with most letter-writing before the seventeenth century, nearly all the Paston, Cely, Stonor and Plumpton letters, which together cover the period 1290–1586, are what may be called ‘business letters’, concerned with the administration of their households and estates. Many were the work of scribes, usually household clerics attached to the family, although it is probable that all the correspondents, both men and women, wrote tolerably well when they so desired. Certainly long before the mid-fifteenth century not only private individuals, but also politicians and statesmen were habitually corresponding with one another in the vernacular. In spite of their limitations the letters show the family as ‘the circle within which what was most deeply felt in the affective life of the time was played out (James 1974: 19; Fisher 1977: 895).

The Families: Their origins

Like many landed families, the Stonors and Pastons owed the origins of their future prosperity to successful lawyers. Sir John Stonor (d.1354), whose grandfather was already established at the Oxfordshire manor of Stonor early in the reign of Edward I, rose in his profession to be the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and a royal commis-sioner and diplomat. Discreetly avoiding the political upheavals attending the dreadful

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Figure 1 The Pastons

Figure 2 The Plumptons

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Figure 3 The Stonors

Figure 4 The Celys

death of Edward II (1327) and his replacement by his son, Edward III, Sir John contin-ued throughout to earn the prizes of his profession and the great wealth they brought him, notably estates in five south-midland counties. Thereafter his descendants, as reflected in their surviving letters and papers, lived as country gentlemen, busy with the management of their estates and taking their share in local government as sheriffs, justices of the peace and members of parliament.

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By the mid-fifteenth century, the Stonors were well established in county society, whereas the Pastons were arrivistes. Ashamed of their humble lineage from Clement Paston (d. 1419), a ‘good plain husbandman’. who ‘plouhed his land both winter and summer, and rode bareback to the mill with his corn under him (Paston letters -hence-forth – PL- 1872–75: xxxv). He sent his son William to school with money borrowed from his brother-in-law. His successors later created a spurious family history which it eventually suited Edward IV to authenticate, although well aware of the unreliability of the evidence (Richmond 1990: 60). Trained as a lawyer by his uncle, William was even-tually raised to the bench as a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Making the most of his local knowledge, legal expertise and professional concern with land transactions, he gradually built up an estate around the family land-holdings in north-east Norfolk, which he designed should become Paston country.

By contrast, the Celys were city men, representative of a closely-knit class of wool merchants at a time when the English wool trade, although in decline, still held a place of importance in the social and political life of the country. Their significance lay in the fact that they were members of the Company of Wool Staplers, a syndicate that had been granted the monopoly of the sale of wool through the Calais market, in return for which its members were expected to advance loans to the Crown. The Cely Correspon-dence, almost exclusively confined to matters of business, and virtually the sole surviving source of information on the organization of the medieval English firm, is however, of minor interest in the present context. The family consisted of Richard Cely (d. 1483), his wife Agnes, sister of Richard Andrew, the pluralist dean of York, and sons Robert, Richard II and George. As Robert had been virtually disinherited by the time of his father’s death, the letters are almost exclusively concerned thereafter with the affairs of the two younger brothers. But the Celys could have easily blended into county society, for their tastes and standards were virtually indistinguishable from those of a rural gentleman (Hanham 1985: 3; Keen 1900: 123–4).

Thus the Stonors and Pastons had achieved landed status and knighthood through their own determined efforts, whereas the Plumptons were holding a knight’s fee of the Percy barony of Spofforth as early as 1166. Known also through their many charters relating to their lands in Plumpton, a riverside settlement near Knaresborough, and in the West and North Ridings of Yorkshire, the family attracted the notice of the chroni-clers as a consequence of the execution in 1405 of Sir William Plumpton for complicity in the ill-fated rebellion of Richard Scrope, archbishop of York. The clemency of King Henry IV soon brought the family back into favour, however, and Sir William’s son, Sir Robert sailed with Henry V’s expedition to France in 1415. He died there in 1421, leaving an eighteen-year-old son, the future Sir William II (d. 1480), who, with his son, another Sir Robert, were the recipients of most of the letters in the Plumpton letter collection.

The families: the historical background

The commitment of the Plumptons to their patrons, the Percy earls of Northumberland drew them into the Lancastrian orbit and cost them dear.

For example, the civil war, known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) brought a summons, dated 13 March 1461 from King Henry VI to Sir William Plumpton II to join

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the great Lancastrian army mustering near Towton. Routed by the Yorkists under the usurper Edward, earl of March, soon to become Edward IV, the price paid by Sir William included the loss of his elder son in battle and his own confinement in the Tower.

A Lancastrian revolt restored King Henry briefly to the throne from October 1470 to March 1471, and produced short-lived changes favourable to the Pastons with the eclipse of their predatory enemy, the duke of Norfolk, and restoration of their patrons the earls of Warwick and Oxford. The hopes of glittering prizes, however, were dashed by Edward’s decisive victory at Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471 and Norfolk’s return to favour.

Another who threw in his lot with the losing side was Sir William Stonor, who for-feited his estates for his part in the duke of Buckingham’s abortive rebellion against Richard III in October 1483. In exile he joined the supporters of Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, and was rewarded with reinstatement after the latter’s triumph at Bosworth on 22 August 1485 and subsequent usurpation of the crown (Kingsford 1990: 63; Chrimes 1966: 140–1). Henry’s first parliament of 1485 recognised his assumption of the crown as a ‘fait accompli’ ignoring the question of legitimacy (Chrimes 1966: 156–8).

As a result of military reverses in France, Sir William Plumpton’s was the last generation of knights trained in the medieval tradition, to have significant experience of continental warfare. Furthermore, changes in military theory were challenging the function of the heavily armed knight, and producing new, less onerous qualifications for knighthood (Taylor 1975: 72–87; Taylor 1980: 65; Kirby 1995: 88). In England, however, the military nature of northern society persisted, due to the frequency of Scottish inva-sions over the borders. Responsibility for the defence of the region lay with the northern gentry, their households and tenants, led by the earls of Westmoreland and Northum-berland, as wardens of the Marches. As retainers of Northumberland, Sir William II and his son, received personal summonses from the earl urging prompt action to meet these dangerous threats from the north.

How to survive and prosper amidst so many imponderables? The purpose of this article is to show that the overriding characteristic of these medieval landowning families was their determination to advance and preserve the family inheritance, whether through marriage and the joint enterprise of husbands, wives, children, the Law, good lordship or other means, and to ensure the continuance of future generations in undiminished standing. It was a characteristic common to the great majority of their contemporaries.

Survival and betterment; (1) Through marriage

In 1393/4 Sir William Plumpton I, paid 100 marks ( a mark was worth 13s.4d.) for the wardship and marriage of Alice Foljambe, a Midlands’ heiress then aged about one year, as a wife for his son, Robert. The wealth and extensive estates accruing from their marriage raised the horizons of the Plumptons and placed them in the forefront of county society.

Marriage with heiresses was indeed acknowledged to be the quickest way to social and economic betterment. In 1420 Judge Paston married Agnes Berry, the eighteen-year-old daughter and co-heiress of Sir Edmund Berry, who inherited estates in East Anglia

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and Hertfordshire. When his eldest son John I reached marriageable age the Judge could

plan the enrichment of the family through a union that would bring a further accession

of rich manors into the estate. There is a note of urgency in Agnes’s account of their

son’s first meeting with Margaret Mauteby, whose inherited estates were in precisely

those parts of East Anglia in which he was establishing a Paston lordship. She writes:

And as for the first acquaintance between John Paston and the said Gentlewoman,

she made him gentle cheer in gentle wise, and said he was verily your son. And so I hope

there shall need no great treaty between them (PL No. 25).1

It was to be thirty-five years after Margaret and John I’s marriage before the Mauteb y

estates passed into Paston hands. Of immediate advantage to the Pastons, however, was

the trail of Margaret’s relations, who received her husband’s family into their network

of friends, working associates and sustaining kin. Similarly, Sir William Plumpton II,

married at an early age to the daughter of his father’s comrade in arms, Sir Brian

Stapleton, forged an extensive cousinage with a group of neighbourly knightly families

through the marriage of his two sons and seven daughters.

Marriage contracts were blatantly materialistic, hedged as they were with detailed

provisions for every contingency. Nobody would have dreamt of underestimating the

financial arrangements that preceded a wedding (described by Margaret Paston as the

‘condiments of love’). Suitable alliances were usually formed through the willingness and

ability of relations, particularly the head of the lineage, friends and employers, to act as

intermediaries and provide finance and credit. Thus Sir William Plumpton’s views were

sought by his kinsman, Godfrey Green, as to the suitability of a marriage between the

latter’s sister and a young tradesman, to promote which the girl’s employer was willing

to advance money to enable the young man to go into business on his own account.

(PLP 1996: 10). An intermediary negotiating for the hand of Sir William Stoner’s sister

was informed that unless her suitor contracted to settle £20 worth of land on her in joint

ownership, the matter would proceed no further. Richard Cely II, tempted to arrange a

meeting with a young lady on May Day 1482, by the advice that she would inherit a

yearly income of £40 from her father, found her ‘young, well-favoured and witty’, and

the two exchanged gifts, but a mere nine days afterwards, he was paying assiduous court

to the daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire mercer with a dowry of 500 marks, whom he

afterwards married (The Cely Letters-henceforth CL- 1875: 152). Sir William Stoner’s

courtship of Margery Blount, whose husband had been killed at Barnet in April 1471,

ran into difficulties when the lady declared that her friends would despise her foolishness

were she to accept from him a jointure of less than £100. Was she in love with his land

rather than with him, he wondered.

It must not be thought, however, that mutual attraction played no part in medieval

espousals, especially since the consent of the parties was absolutely necessary to validate

a marriage in the eyes of the Church. The propitious first meeting between John Paston

I and Margaret Mauteby, which was the prelude to one of the more surprising love

matches, had been a great relief to his parents. Margaret’s love for her cold, demanding

and ungracious husband shines through her otherwise severely practical letters, whereas

his only surviving expression of affection for her took the form of the following clumsy

doggerel verse penned a few months before his sudden death:

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My Lord Percy and all this houserecommend them to you, dog, cat, and mouseAnd wish you had been here stillFor they say you are good Jill.No more to you at this time,But god him save that made this rhyme (PL No. 528)

Although he had no ambition to become a knight, John I managed to get his eldest son, John II knighted in 1463, and to find the means to obtain a place for him in the royal household. (Taking a knighthood was obligatory for those with incomes of at least £40 a year. Those wishing to avoid doing so, deterred, perhaps, by the grander and more expensive style of life expected of them, incurred a financial penalty.) He intended the young man to use his connections there to protect the family’s interests. In her last surviving letter to Sir John, referring to a rumour that he was to marry a lady related to the Queen, Margaret advises him by all means to press his suit if the marriage will assist him to retrieve lost lands, but only if he can love her (PL No. 818).

In view of the vital importance of a successful marriage partnership it is surprising there is so little emphasis in these letters on the personal qualities of the parties. Edward Plumpton did indeed recommend his lady, when asking Sir Robert ‘s approval of his courtship, as amiable, good, wise and womanly, but rather as an afterthought amid the more important details regarding the sources of her income (PLP 1996: 121). Sir John Paston, asked by one of his brothers to assess the suitability of a young woman, was required specifically to look at her hands and to note whether she had run to fat (PL vol and date: 827).

The corollary of this pragmatic and unromantic view of marriage was a fairly tolerant attitude towards illegitimacy – an attitude fostered by the Church, whose violent opposition towards abortion and infanticide overcame its view of the heinousness of the sins of the flesh. It is not unlikely that Sir William Plumpton’s two bastard sons (significantly they were given the favoured family names of William and Robert) or (‘Robinet’) were brought up within the family. He provided for them through grants to each of a life interest in land, and his heir continued to support them. Robert, in particular, appears to have remained throughout his life as a competent promoter of the family’s interests (Kirby 1991: 225), as also was William Cely, a family dependant, who eventually took charge of the firm’s affairs in Calais after George’s return to London on the death of his father. Bastardy was more of a problem when the father did not acknowledge paternity. One such poor girl was sent by her master to Sir Robert Plumpton with a letter explaining that one of the Plumpton’s servants had fathered the child. Having maintained the baby at his own expence her employer now appealed to Sir Robert to deal justly with her (The Plumpton letters and papers – henceforth PLP – 1996: 101).

But of all aspects of marriage, disparagement was the most dreaded. ‘Marry your daughters betimes lest they marry themselves’ was a saying in the shire.a. A domestic storm, therefore, broke over the Paston family with news of the betrothal of John I and Margeret’s daughter Margery to their steward Richard Calle in 1469 (PLP 607–9). Facing the outrage of her mother and brothers, Margery was at first too cowed to admit the validity of their betrothal, but Calle’s sympathetic and loving encouragement steeled her, and at last she made her statement to the bishop. The family’s efforts to get the betrothal annulled, however, founded on the Church’s recognition that the two had

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made their pledge in legal form, and as Margery stood firm on this, the bishop was powerless to pronounce a divortium. Margaret then unhesitatingly cast her daughter out of the house, declaring to Sir John that ‘in her we have lost but a wretch’ (PL No. 607, 609, 617).

A few months earlier (April 1469) Margaret had been singing to a different tune. Hearing of Sir John’s betrothal to Anne Haute, a kinswoman of the queen, she had reminded him that the two were now as indissolubly bound by the betrothal as if they were married. The queen’s family, the Woodville’s, had indeed already accepted him into their kinship network headed by the queen’s brother, Lord Scales, but for reasons that are unknown, the couple’s interest in each other soon cooled and both desired to be free of the engagement. Sadly, the ensuing negotiations for an annulment, begun in September 1471, and the protracted and costly processes in the ecclesiastical courts were to occupy Sir John for the rest of his life.

Robert Cely, the spendthrift elder brother of Richard and George, contracted a marriage deplored by his father, who succeeded in persuading the lady to withdraw. In return for her compliance, she was to receive all the gifts the two had exchanged, save for a silver-gilt pendant, a gold ring and a damask tippet. His brother George’s wife, Margery, was a wealthy young widow of nervous disposition, whose loneliness during his no doubt frequent absences moved him to ask a friend to keep an eye on her.

A widow as ‘femme sole’, could find herself in the enviable position of being to some extent in command of her own destiny. Thus the wealthy widow of Sir Thomas Waldegrave spurned the advances of John Paston III, even though he had employed his elder brother, John II (Sir John), an experienced man-of-the-world to plead his cause. Sir John’s advice to his brother when courting was always to be deeply respectful to the girl’s mother (Richmond 1905: 25–36). Indeed during his brother’s ten year search for a wife, Sir John’s offices as intermediary were several times employed, as when he was requested to visit the parents of a certain Mistress Anne to find out what she was worth and who her first husband had been. He was also to obtain similar information about ‘the widow of Blackfriars’ from an apothecary who counted the earl of Warwick among his clients. Finally John III met and fell in love with Margery Brews. Her father was firm in his demands and there would have been the usual haggling, but with the help of the two mothers, the approval of Sir John, his own determination and Margery’s love for him, the marriage was accomplished. Her Valentine letter to him is among the most charming in the collections:

But yf ye loffe me, as I tryste verily that ye do, ye will not lefe me therefor; for if that ye hade not halfe the lyvelode that ye hafe, for to do the grettest labour that any woman in lyve might, I wold not forsake yowe (PL date and vol: 783).

Equally affectionate and playful is Thomas Betson’s true lover’s letter to Sir William Stonor’s young step-daughter Katherine Ryche, his own ‘hartely beloved cossen’ who he later married (The Stonor Letters – henceforth SL – 1919: 166).

Survival and Betterment: (2) The Joint Enterprise of Husband and Wife

The surviving correspondence between husbands and wives in these collections arose from the fact that in most upper class families they frequently lived apart. The man’s

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obligations might include the completion of his education (John Paston II was still a student at Cambridge at the time of his marriage), military service, attendance on his lord, service in local government or as a knight of the shire in Parliament.

On his frequent visits to London on legal business, John Paston lodged in the Middle Temple, whilst Margaret wrote to him from Paston, Mauteby or Norwich. A period in prison was not unusual, perhaps for debt or because pressure of personal matters had interfered with his duty of attendance on the king’s business. John Paston was impris-oned several times, as, for different reasons, were Sir William and Sir Robert Plumpton. (PLP 1996: 8; PL No. 482, 585).

During a man’s absence his affairs at home were managed by his most trusted stew-ard, ideally his wife whose ability to preside over a large household and estate was an advantage, if not a necessity. The Paston, Plumpton and Stonor wives identified them-selves closely with their husband’s families and interests: John Paston I, for example, was fortunate in having a wife whose desire to do him service was only equalled by her ability to do so. Throughout her husband’s life and for eighteen years thereafter, Margaret Paston guarded the Paston interests with the greatest tenacity and resource. Not all women were of equal courage, of course, but who were more trustworthy to defend the homestead than the lady of the house? Thus Margaret protected by only about a dozen defenders, held out at the Paston manor of Gresham against a large attacking force sent by a rival claimant, Lord Moleyns on 28 January 1450.

In a famous letter to her husband in London she asked for crossbows and pole-axes (as well as almonds and sugar) to be delivered to her at Gresham, and described the military preparedness of the Moleyns faction:

They have made bars to the doors cross-wise, and they have made wickets on every quarter of the house to shoot out at with bows and hand guns (PLvol and date?: 66, 77)

She continued to resist until, having mined the wall of the room in which she was hold-ing out, the attackers were able to carry her away and set her down outside the gates.

William and Elizabeth Stonor’s ménage differed from the other three, however, in that it was she who spent much time in London, busying herself with the affairs of her late husband and relishing her enhanced social status from city wool merchant’s wife to great lady. In attendance on Elizabeth, duchess of Suffolk at the court of Edward IV, she was able to regale her husband with a rare description of the ceremonial meeting at Greenwich between the king and queen and Edward’s venerable mother, Cecily, duchess of York. Meanwhile William, at Stonor, was supplying the London house with venison, fish and rabbits. A masterful woman who usually got her own way, Elizabeth was nevertheless an astute and effective helpmate, whose inherited interests in the wool trade greatly enriched her new family; but social ambition led her to extravagance and it is clear that her household, whether in London or at Stonor, lacked the ‘sad, wise rule’ imposed by Agnes and Margaret Paston. After her death Sir William was advised to re-order his affairs with greater prudence. He appears to have been an indulgent husband and an affectionate step-father to Elizabeth’s three children.

These gentlewomen, who had no formal training for the heavy responsibilities of medieval marriage, were taught the accomplishments necessary to their estate and the skills they required as wives by the examples of their mothers and mothers-in-law; but more effectively, perhaps, by the chatelaines of the great houses to which they were sent

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for education, training and service, some of whom, like lady Ingoldesthorpe, acquired a reputation as good trainers of girls (PLP 1996: 12).

Christine de Pisan’s vignette of the lady in charge of a country estate and its almost exclusively male staff of servants was probably true to the experience of most gentry women, and the letters tell us a good deal about the management of servants(Pisan 1986: 130–33). For example we hear Jane Stonor complaining that servants were not as dili-gent as they used to be, Margaret Paston ordering the instant dismissal of a recalcitrant servant, questioning a man’s reliability and reporting the success or otherwise of agents engaged in rent collecting. Edward Plumpton recommended a servant, as ‘a true man but overweight’ who, if Sir Robert will employ him, will bring the horse he had ridden in 1487 at the battle of Stoke (PLP 1996: 82). Agnes Plumpton, in anger and shame over the arrest and imprisonment of one of their servants, exerted herself to obtain his release. Many of the letters were entrusted for delivery to servants, to whose more informative verbal passages the addressees were often advised to give credence.

Where there was discord in marriage, the legal disabilities of the wife could make her life a ‘little hell’,exacerbated by the kind of loneliness that must have been the fate of women in largely male households. Thus in a letter to her brother, Sir William Plumpton’s aunt, Dame Katherine Chadderton, described the wretchedness of her sister, Dame Isabel Thorpe, whose husband was always in trouble. She also writes of her own need of a waiting woman to keep her company (PLP 1996: 2). By concealing his second (clandestine) marriage, Sir William Plumpton condemned his wife to at least fifteen years of humiliation, although knowing that secrecy was essential to a complex plan of her husband’s, she may have been a willing accomplice. Simultaneously the devious knight was trifling with the affections of a certain Mistress F.S., to the extent of raising her hopes of marriage. An intermediary hints that Sir William was not unused to extricating himself from similar entanglements (PLP 1996: 12).

Survival and betterment: (3) The Law

In a world in which ownership of land could be challenged on slender grounds, Justice Paston advised his sons that their best defence lay in a knowledge of the law. To this he might have added that tireless lobbying, influential patrons and favourable political conditions were equally essential. Moreover as the Plumptons had discovered, the law can be a two-edged weapon.

Following the death c. 1461 of his only surviving son William, leaving two daughters by his marriage to Elizabeth Clifford, Sir William Plumpton II faced the calamity most dreaded by the heads of landowning families: division of the inheritance between heiresses and consequent descent of the lineage into ‘the bottomless pit of oblivion’. Sir William rose to the challenge. Taking advantage of the opportunity to acquire the substantial premiums they commanded as heirs at law of the Plumpton estate, he sold the marriages of his granddaughters, the four-year-old Margaret to Brian Rocliffe, a puisne baron of the exchequer, and her younger sister Elizabeth to the lawyer, Henry Sotehill, the marriage contracts providing for the upbringing of the girls in the households of their respective fathers-in-law.

Significantly. The Sotehill contract of 1464 included a clause forbidding the alienation by enfeoffment of any part of the Plumpton estate; hence not only was Sir William

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precluded from providing other than a life annuity for a future son of his own in the event of his remarriage, but the child’s wardship and marriage were guaranteed to Sotehill. Yet, if his later testimony is to be believed Sir William had been by this time, clandestinely married for some eleven years to Joan Wintringham, with whom he was then living, and had a son (later Sir Robert) aged two. Not until 1468, when summoned to appear before the official of the civil court in York to account for the irregularity of his private life, did he disclose that he and Joan had long been lawfully married and that their only son had been born in wedlock. Legal proceedings were interrupted by the brief return to the throne of Henry VI, and it was not until July 1472 that the case resumed. After hearing the crucial evidence of the parish priest, the validity of the marriage was certified and the young Robert acknowledged as his father’s heir apparent. Several years before his death in 1480 Sir William made an absolute disposition of his entire estate, real and personal, to his son, thus precluding the necessity for a will. For this he chose as his principal feoffee none other than Richard Andrew, dean of York and uncle of Richard and George Cely. Sir William also defaulted on his contract with Henry Sotehill by signing indentures for Robert’s marriage with Agnes, siater of Sir William Gascoigne. Thus did Sir William attempt to use the law to accomplish his purpose (On a father’s loss of freedom when he married his eldest son, see McFarlane 1973: 81).

But after his death his son was ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming the legal chal-lenge of his step-sisters. In 1501–02, the verdicts of two courts went against him, no doubt due in part to his own invidious position (there was a suspicion that he was indeed illegitimate) in part to the intervention of Henry VII’s all-powerful minister, Sir Richard Empson. Both Agnes and Isabel Plumpton, successively married to Sir Robert Plumpton, were exasperated with what they saw as his exclusive, self-indulgent immersion in a morass of legal and political intrigue (PLP 1996: 188, 199; Kirby 1989: 13–19). Beset by troubles at home, intimidation and destraint of tenants by both sides, cattle impounded, no money coming in and credit running out, Dame Agnes Plumpton, charged with the duty of defending the manor place, besought her husband to bestir himself, bring matters to a conclusion and so put an end to the ruinous expense he was incurring as he strove to get the verdicts of 1501–2 reversed. On 19 March 1503–4 she wrote:

Sir, I marvell greatly that ye let the matter rest so long, and labors no better for your selfe, and ye wold labor it diligently. . . . . Sir, I beseech you to remember your great cost and charges, and myne, and labor the matter that it myght have and end. . .(PLP 1996: 188).

They both exerted themselves heroically to keep him afloat in London while he reduced the family almost to beggary in pursuit of a lost cause. Surprisingly, perhaps, Plumpton appears to have learnt little from the experience, for he pursued a spurious claim of his own to a part of his daughter-in-law Isabel Babthorpe’s inheritance, and thus in his turn bequeathed a troubled legacy to his son.

The twenty years of bitter legal wrangling in which the Pastons engaged, and which left them immeasurably richer, began with the death of Sir John Fastolf, reputedly the wealthiest commoner in England, on 5 November 1459. John Paston I, for some years Fastolf’s truest friend and legal adviser, was present at his bedside as the old man lay dying in Caister castle Although scarcely able to speak, Paston afterwards claimed that Sir John had confirmed what for long had been his intention, namely to leave his East Anglian estates to Paston, on condition that he founded the college at Caister on which

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the old knight had set his heart (PL No. 332–7). It was the determined opposition of Fastolf’s remaining trustees, who denounced the will as a fabrication and fought the issue tirelessly through the courts, that embroiled John and Margaret in the troubles that may have led to the former’s sudden death in 1466 at the age of forty-five. Margaret’s first thought was that Fastolf’s death, so near to Christmas should be marked in an appropriate manner by her household. Accordingly she sent her son, Sir John, to Lady Morley, doyenne of Norfolk ladies, for advice on the appropriate etiquette. From her she learnt that the quieter pursuits –backgammon, chess and cards – were considered seemly, others more frivolous – acting, luting, harping and singing – should be strictly forbidden (PL No. 881). But by July 1465 she and her son found themselves facing an onslaught by 300 of the duke of Suffolk’s men on the manor at Hellesdon, to which, spurred on by the Fastolf trustees and one of the Paston’s bitterest enemies, John Heydon, he had reasserted a claim. Margaret’s desperate appeals to her husband to conclude the affair one way or another were met by his stern charge to do her utmost to maintain his authority. The garrison though small, was well armed and provisioned, and the attack was not pressed, but the following October during Margaret and John’s absence, the duke, with his household and a retinue of knights and squires, occupied Hellesdon without opposition and ransacked the manor house, church and village houses. Margaret, surveying the wreckage a few days later, was overcome with pity and shame. Although the Pastons were to seek redress for the loss of Hellesdon over many years, the manor was, in fact, to be lost to them for ever.

Survival and betterment: (4) Children and Dowagers

In The Tree of Commonwealth, Edmund Dudley reviled ‘the noblemen and gentlemen of England’ for being ‘the worst brought-up, for the most part, of any realm in Chris-tendom’ (Dudley 1948: 45). English upper-class parents saw education as primarily the learning of ‘good rule’, which, to Agnes Paston, for example, meant that her youngest son’s tutor at Cambridge was exhorted to beat him if he were lazy, for ‘I had rather he were buried than lost for lack of chastisement’. The social structure of the medieval nobility – frequent separation of husband and wife, and the heavy duties imposed upon the latter – often precluded the creation of close ties between mothers and children. Furthermore, in the belief that it was the surest route to social advancement as well as the more effective teaching of discipline, many gentry families sent their young boys and girls into service in great households of high repute – a practice that struck a contem-porary Italian observer as unnatural (A relation or rather a true account of the island of England….1847). Betterment, however, does not appear to have been the motive that impelled Agnes Paston to seek such a place for her daughter Elizabeth, whose life at home was made wretched by her mother’s dislike and rough treatment, as also by the callous indifference of her brother, Sir John. To her, service in the household of Lady Pole must have come as something of a relief, although she remained almost as unhappy there as at home. From the tone of delicate irony in what may have been her first letter to her mother after her marriage to the forty-year-old Robert Poynings, we are left to question whether it was a marriage contracted for the sake of the family or as an escape from the family (PL No. 322).

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Unhappy in the post obtained for her by Edward IV’s queen (Elizabeth Woodville), Jane Stonor’s daughter was nevertheless told that she must subordinate her wishes to those of the family who dared not risk removing her without the queen’s express approval. Whereas Mistress Stonor was not indifferent to her daughter’s plight, Sir Robert Plumpton appears to have been deaf to his daughter Dorothy’s frequent attempts to enlist his help to improve her situation at Templehurst, where she was in service with her step-grandmother Lady Darcy. His failure to acknowledge her many letters and messages had given the impression that he had neither affection for her nor interest in her welfare (PLP 1996: 201). By contrast, Isabel Marley, a kinswoman of Sir William Plumpton II, through whom she had obtained a place in the household of Joan, Lady Ingoldesthorpe, was reported to be happy there and ‘much beholden’ to her mistress (PLP 1996: 12).

Agnes Paston recalled a day in August 1444 when she and her eldest son, John I, were summoned to the bedside of the dying judge William Paston, who proceeded to read his will. As Agnes knelt, John paced the room, his face showing increasing displeasure as the reading continued. The Judge’s extraordinary generosity towards his wife (she was left property worth £100 a year, including certain prime manors), and to his younger sons, entailed parsimony towards his heir, on whom lay the responsibility for the con-tinuance and financial stability of the family. A deep rift opened up between father and son. John did not receive his father’s blessing, he was not present when William died in London, and afterwards, as Agnes wrote some years later, ‘my son John Paston had never right kind words to me.’ After his father’s death, John ignored his wishes: he claimed the disputed manors; quickly laid hands on his father’s cash, in spite of the protestation of its custodians, and refused to endow his father’s charity.

In turn his relations with his own son and heir deteriorated. Hearing that Sir John had failed to make his mark at the court of Edward IV, where he had been expected to exert himself in the interests of the family, his angry father condemned him as ‘a drone among bees’ and ordered his return home. Thereafter the two were at loggerheads, and although on Margaret’s advice Sir John humbly sought his father’s forgiveness, his attempts and her pleas on his behalf were alike met with stony resistance.

Temperamentally, father and son could not have been more different: the former, frosty, ungenerous, parsimonious and authoritarian, yet with a vein of heroism underly-ing his single-minded dedication to family interests, the latter a ladies’ man, a man of culture and a bibliophile, owner of one of the first books to come from William Caxton’s printing press. An inventory of his library taken in 1482 included books on law, knighthood, romance (for example the story of the death of King Arthur), the rules of chess, and a number of devotional works (Keen 1900: 9). After succeeding his father as head of the family, his cultural horizons were no doubt widened by exposure to the glories of the Burgundian court while attending one of the great ceremonial occasions of the century: the marriage in June 1468 of the king’s sister Margaret to Charles, Duke of Burgundy, for he afterwards commissioned the writing of his ‘Great Book’, a com-pendium of chivalry, which survives in the British Library. He also had himself measured for an entire suit of armour. His prowess in the tourneys eventually brought him to the notice of King Edward, a fellow enthusiast, and he at last became an active and familiar figure at court. The surrender of Caister to the duke of Norfolk, who claimed to have purchased it from the Fastolf trustees, earned him a furious rebuke from his mother, but

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patience and the impact of royal favour enabled him at length to succeed where his father had failed (PL No. 620–21; 629; 808).

It was to his mother that Sir Robert Plumpton’s grandson and namesake wrote from the Inner Temple appealing for funds to keep him solvent until Easter. Mother and son appear to have been close, for it was as a loving son that Robert introduced her to the ‘marvelous things’ contained in William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament and the Prologue attached to it. Regarding his forthcoming entry into Lord Latimer’s service, he asks that she use her influence to obtain for him a position within the household itself, where he will become personally known to his lord (PLP 1996: 230).

Charming hints of parental affection appear here and there in the letters of Richard Cely I. Though worrying perpetually about the prospects of war, the difficulties of making a profit from wool and about his sons’ remissness in writing, he and his wife were not lacking in solicitude. Hearing of George’s illness in Bruges, his father warns him not to economise on food and drink, and reassures him with the news that his mother and father had been on pilgrimage to intercede for his recovery. To a neighbour it seemed that the light had gone out of their lives and would not be rekindled until they heard of their son’s recovery. Richard II, about to embark at Calais in November 1479, was told that although his mother looked daily for his return to London, he was to wait for fine weather (CL 1975: 73, 74).

Of significance to the economy of a landed family like the Pastons was the long-lived, tight-fisted dowager. With absolute rights in her own property, including a share in her husband’s goods and at least a third of the estate, she could retain much of the family’s land in her hands. Neither Agnes nor Margaret Paston remarried; the former, who outlived her husband by thirty -five years, lived for the most part in Norwich, but in old age took up residence in London with her younger son William until her death during the plague epidemic of 1476, that also claimed her grandson Sir John, and Margaret’s best-loved son Walter (Notestein 1986: 76; Virgoe 1989: 267).

Meanwhile part of the Mauteby estate remained for thirty-five years after the marriage of John I and Margaret in the hands of Margaret’s mother and grandmother, both of whom remarried. In her turn, Margaret kept a firm hand on her property during the eighteen years of her widowhood, but her plans for its disposal alarmed John III, who foresaw that he might find himself in shamefully reduced circumstances. Neverthe-less, having succeeded Sir John as head of the family and inherited his grandmother’s lands, he was at pains to reassure his mother that no-one, neither wife nor friend should persuade him to do other than carry out her wishes as expressed in her will (PL No. 697, 861–2).

Not so well provided for, Sir William Plumpton’s widow, Joan Wintringham, pub-lished her intention never to remarry by receiving the veil as a symbol of her vow of celibacy, but her son showed his affection for her by increasing her life estate and she continued to live at Plumpton. Dame Elizabeth de la Pole, widow of a former justice of the King’s Bench, confided to Sir Robert that, having administered her grandson’s estate during his minority, it was her intention to live out her days in a modest house within the precincts of the friary at Derby with but a few servants to attend her (PLP 1996: 193). Sir Robert’s own arrangement for his retirement provided for the transfer of the issues of the Plumpton estate to his son and his continued occupation there with Dame Isabel, his second wife, under certain specified conditions (PLP 1996: 291–2).

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Sir William Stonor was at variance with his mother over the performance of his father’s will. So intractable was their quarrel that matters in dispute were submitted to arbitration. A sharp-tongued woman, Jane Stonor so berated her son’s emissary that the unfortunate man hoped he would never have to confront her again (SL 1919: I, 162–4). A scandalized Richard Cely II was convinced that an enemy must have started the rumour that his mother had remarried or was about to do so, and that she had walked in procession on Corpus Christi day arrayed in a crimson robe.

Survival and Betterment (5) Good Lordship

If kinship was one pillar of medieval society, another was good lordship, by which is meant the favour that individuals in a position to do so bestowed upon those within their sphere of influence. The royal court being the nerve centre of national politics, it was important to be aware of who was in favour and who was not. ‘The indignation of the prince is death’, was a truth learned by many to their cost (SL 1919: PL No. 156–87), for the impact of good lordship extended through almost all classes of society. For example, John Paston III, placed by his father in the young fourth duke of Norfolk’s household at Framlingham in 1461, continued in service with the duke until his employer withheld his livery eight years later. However, Paston was able to maintain his former contacts for some years afterward, but then fell out of favour with the duke, who humiliated him in the presence of others, so that thereafter they ceased to treat him as a man of consequence (PL No. 531, 714, 763). The earl of Shrewsbury’s intervention on behalf of his wife’s lady-in-waiting, Dame Joyce Percy, put an end to Sir Robert Plumpton’s misuse of his stewardship to deprive her of her right to certain lands under his authority (PLP 1996: 23).

The Lancastrian earl of Northumberland, dispossessed after the Yorkist victory at Towton in 1461, was reinstated ten years later and reappointed steward of Knaresbor-ough, a constituent of the Duchy of Lancaster. He appears to have reappointed Sir William Plumpton as his deputy, but perhaps as a result of some misdemeanour Plumpton was dismissed and replaced by the earl’s brother-in-law, Sir William Gascoigne. His bitter disappointment found expression in a deluge of instructions from Sir William to his attorney to urge his cause in influential quarters. The lawyer’s advice is instructive: the earl would bestow the office on whom he pleased, furthermore, one who was beholden to him alone for the favour.

The great fouth earl died in 1489, leaving a successor, young and distrusted, who was no match for Henry VII’s powerful minister, Sir Richard Empson, whose influence ensured that the verdicts of 1502–3 went against Sir Robert Plumpton. Indeed, regarding a commission of enquiry the king proposed to appoint at Plumpton’s request, Sir Robert was advised that it would be dangerous to identify his friends by naming them as commissioners (PLP 1996: 177).

By contrast, Sir Richard Paston had the immense good fortune to acquire the patron-age of Lord Hastings, a man greatly favoured by King Edward and completely loyal to him. Whilst serving under Hastings in the garrison at Calais, Paston with his small retinue, joined his patron’s contingent in the army, commanded by the king himself that crossed the channel in 1375, ostensibly to recapture some of the glory of Henry V’s campaigns. Lord Hasting’s patronage brought Sir John fully back into favour at court

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and secured the king’s intervention on behalf of the family’s claim to Caister. Thus did the Pastons finally attain the coveted prize. The college of priests so much desired by Fastolf was at last established, not at Caister but at Magdalen college Oxford (Bennett 1970: 19).

The friendship between the Stonors and the de la Pole dukes of Suffolk was already of long standing when Thomas Stonor married the first duke’ natural daughter Jane. The Paston correspondence includes William Lomner’s cool description of the duke’s violent death at sea, beheaded with a rusty sword as he was making his way across the Channel into exile (PL date and vol?: 93). Among the Plumpton letters, John Pullein’s description of the barbarous execution of Perkin Warbeck and his supporters, though it spares no detail, expresses neither horror, sympathy nor satisfaction, suggesting that the frequent usurpations of the fifteenth century had produced a cynical disbelief in causes that earlier generations might have thought worth dying for (PLP 1996: 142).

Conclusion

The world in which these families strove to survive and prosper was a world of ruthless, predatory lords, long-lived, tight-fisted dowagers, disgruntled sons, wretched daughters, devious legal proceedings and bitterly contested wills. Given the political instability and lawlessness of the times, however, they would probably have achieved nothing without a rich vein of opportunism. Land, being almost uniquely the basis of wealth and power, the three gentry families, having increased their landed wealth through high office in the legal profession, judicious marriage, or (in the case of the Pastons) service to a wealthy patron, applied themselves to its defence by every available means. These included prolonged and exhausting legal arguments and spirited armed resistance to attack by powerful magnates and their private armies. The final success of the Pastons was due to the fact that three able men succeeded one another as head of the family, John I, with his doughty wife, Margaret, Sir John, whose friendship with Lord Hastings and success at the court of Edward IV resulted in the establishment of his title to Caistor, and John III, under whom the family’s quarrel with the earl of Suffolk was finally settled; with his appointment as sheriff of Norfolk, the family may be said to have ‘arrived.’

The fate of the Plumptons, however, was unhappy. Faced with the premature death of his two sons by his first marriage to Agnes Stapleton and the break-up of his inheri-tance between two granddaughters as heirs-general,, Sir William II’s gamble might indeed have achieved the survival of the family in undiminished wealth and standing. But the appeal of the heirs-general was upheld by a legal system, which in its local functioning could often be what one writer has called ‘a riot of mutual backslapping’ (Carpenter 1997: 49). Sir Robert Plumpton’s unsuccessful fight against the loss of his Midlands and Yorkshire estates was in part due to the maintenance of Henry VII’s most powerful minister, Sir Richard Empson on behalf of the heirs-general. Hence his fruitless and ruinously expensive attempts to have the adverse verdicts reversed. Empson’s execu-tion in August 1510 brought a more equitable settlement five years later, but the family, although reinstated in their ancestral lands within the parish of Spofforth, remained shorn of the greater part of their inheritance. Whether this verdict represented justice tempered by mercy, or injustice, it is impossible to say, because of the irregularity

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surrounding Sir William’s second marriage to Joan Wintrinham and the possible illegitimacy of their son, later Sir Robert.

Finally, as we have seen, the advancement of the family often depended upon the joint undertaking of husband and wife. A capable spouse, such as Margaret Paston shared in her husband’s success, or, like Agnes and Isabel Plumpton, patiently bore the brunt of failure.

Note

1 (The references marked ‘PL’ throughout are to The Paston Letters 1422–1509. ed. Janes Gardner, 4 vols, London, 1901, followed by the number of the item, e.g. No. 25).

References

PRIMARY SOURCESThe Stonor letters 1290–1483 (1919), ed. C.LKingsford, 2 vols, Camden Society, 3rd series, 29 and 30.The Paston letters 1422–1509, (1872–75) ed, James Gardner, 3 vols, London.The Cely Letters 1472–1488, ed. Alison Hanham, Early English Text Society, 273, Oxford.The Plumpton Letters and Papers 1346–1584, (1996) ed. Joan Kirby, Camden Society, 5th series, 8.Calendar of Patent Rolls 1467–1477, (1900) Her Majesty’s Stationar y Office.A relation or rather a true account of the island of England; with sundry particulars of the customs of

the people, and of the royal revenues under King Henry the Seventh, about the year 1500 (1847), translated from the Italien by Charlotte Augusta Sneyd, Camden Society, Old Series, 37.

SECONDARY SOURCESBennett, H.S. (1870) The Pastons and their England. Studies in an Age of Transition, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Carpenter, Christine (1997) The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437–

1509, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Chrimes, S.B. (1966) Lancastrians, Yorkists and Hemry VII, London: Macmillan.Dudley, Edmund (1948), Brodie, D.M. (ed) The Tree of Commonwealth, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Fisher, John H. (1977) ‘Chancery and the emergence of standard written English in the fifteenth

century’ Speculum 52.Hanham, Alison (1985) The Celys and their world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.James, M.E. (1974) Family and Lineage in Civil Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Keen, Maurice (1900) English Social History in the Later Middle Ages, London: Allen Lane.Kingsford, C.L. (1962) Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth – Century England, Liverpool and London:

Frank Cass.Kirby, Joan (1989)’A fifteenth-century family: the Plumptons of Plumpton and their lawyers’ Northern

History, 25.Kirby, Joan (1991) ‘Women in the Plumpton correspondence: fiction and reality’ in Wood, Ian and

Loud, G.S. (eds) Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: essays presented to John Taylor, London: Hambledon.

Kirly, Joan (1995) ‘A medieval knightly family: the Plumptons of Plumpton in the waning middle ages’ Northern History, 31.

McFarlane, K.B. (1973) The Nobility of Medieval England, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Notestein, Wallace (1986) ‘The English woman 1580–1650’ in Plumb, J.H. (ed) Studies in Social

History, London.Pisan, Christine de (1986) The Treasure if the City of Ladies, trans, Lawson, S. harmondsworth:

Penguin.

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Richmond, Colin (1985) ‘The Pastons revisited: marriage and the family in fifteenth-century England’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 56: 25–36.

Richmond, Colin (1990) The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Taylor, John (1975) ‘The Plumpton Letters 1416–1552’, Northern History, 10.Taylor John (1980) ‘Letters and letter collections in England’ Nottingham Medieval Studies, 24.Virgoe, Roger (1989) The Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family, London: Macmillan.

Biographical Note

Joan Kirby has published work on Medieval and Early Modern Leeds, the Plumpton family in the Later Middle Ages, and the Registers Sede Vacante of the Archbishopric of York, 1405–1408 and 1423–1426. She received her degrees of BA and M.Phil in the School of History at the University of Leeds.

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