Yours Ever Read Free Page B

away those that they could find, and put the parson out of the church till they had done, and ransacked every man’s house in the town five or six times.”
    At less turbulent moments, Margaret uses her letters to remind John that their sons need hats, or that she had no decent necklace to wear when the queen visited Norwich. She has, to say the least, a strong practical streak. Shortly after John is released from a brief stay in Fleet Prison, she reminds him to bring some “pewter vessels, 2 basins, 2 ewers and 12 candlesticks” home for Christmas. John Paston sometimes complains about how things are being managed in his absence (“I pray you put all your wits together and see to the reform of it”), but more often he has reason to compliment his wife’s fearlessness: “I recommend me to you and thank you for your labour and diligence against the unruly fellowship that came before you on Monday last, of which I have heard report by John Hobbs. In good faith you acquit yourself right well and discreetly, and much to your worship and mine, and to the shame of your adversaries.”
    The Pastons’ wealth was vastly increased by an inheritance from Sir John Fastolf, a rich Knight of the Garter to whom John Paston rendered long friendship and legal counsel. Fastolf’s last will and testament—itself a sort of letter, through which the author speaks of many matters from beyond the grave—assured a constant volley of arrows and writs between the Pastons and those who sought to overturn their benefactor’s wishes.
    These struggles lasted many years beyond John Paston’s death in 1466, after which two of Margaret’s sons, both named John, continued to receive her strong-willed, advice-filled letters. The eldest, Sir John (or John II), was a courtier of King Edward
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, better at holding on to a jouster’s lance than money. Having irritated his father (“I see in him,” John Sr. wrote Margaret, “no disposition towards discretion nor self-control”), John II is now the constant object of his mother’s scoldings. Usually in London instead of at the contested Paston properties, he exasperates her with his absenceand pleas of poverty. She can’t believe how infrequently he writes or, after five years, that he has still not had his father’s gravestone made. She tells him that one lord “reports better of you than I think you deserve,” and that she will not be responsible for his debts, not when her own encircled estates are bringing in so little: “We beat the bushes and have the loss and disworship, and other men have the birds.”
    Sir John will protest that his presence at court is important to the family’s interests, but his younger brother (John III) is the one literally left holding the fort. John III warns him that “your folk think that you have forgotten them,” and suggests he spend more time with his tenants and less on his tournaments. John II does send some men to help defend the estate at Caister against the duke of Norfolk, but he doesn’t show up himself to help, a dereliction that prompts his mother’s most bitter letter of all:
    I greet you well, letting you know that your brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister, and are lacking in victuals. Daubeney and Berney are dead and others badly hurt, and gunpowder and arrows are lacking. The place is badly broken down by the guns of the other party, so that, unless they have hasty help, they are likely to lose both their lives and the place, which will be the greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman …
    Before one begins thinking of Johns II and III as those latter-day scions of Brideshead—the wastrel Sebastian and the rule-bound Bridey, with Margaret, in between, as Lady Marchmain—one should turn to the non-emergency letters that passed between the brothers, often on the subject of John III’s search for a wife. The elder John does his best to help with a number of candidates, including one properous,