‘I ask you to get some crossbows and windlasses to fire them with, together with quarrels… two or three short poleaxes… and as many [protective] quilted jackets as you can.’ This letter, written in 1448, might sound like the request of a military commander, but in fact it was composed by Margaret Paston, a young wife and mother based in rural Norfolk. Her husband was away in London, and she was in dire straits. A local lord had besieged the Pastons’ manor house at Gresham, and in her husband’s absence Margaret was marshalling the defence of their property. Even in these trying times, however, she was still juggling domestic responsibilities, closing her letter with a rather more conventional shopping list, asking for a pound each of almonds and sugar, and cloth to make gowns for their children and a hood for herself.
This vivid account is preserved in the Paston Letters, a remarkable collection of correspondence relating to a family of socially ambitious landowners stemming from a village of the same name 20 miles north of Norwich. Around 1,000 personal missives survive, spanning 1422-1509 and containing not only instructions for the management of their estates, but also a wealth of personal details worthy of medieval soap opera. Together with snippets of family news, gossip, and advice, we find records of rivalries and estrangements, illicit love affairs and match-making attempts, and a wealth of other intimate insights into the minutiae of daily life that seldom survive across the centuries.
What makes these letters especially valuable, however, is that the Paston women seem to have been particularly prolific correspondents (over 100 letters survive for Margaret alone), opening a unique window on female experiences, opinions, and aspirations from this period. Medieval histories have traditionally been dominated by kings, male church authorities, and military leaders, whose deeds are more likely to have been set down for posterity. Recent decades of scholarship have done much to rebalance this picture, but stubborn stereotypes persist of medieval women leading marginal (and marginalised) lives, with little power to steer their own destiny or leave any lasting mark on the world around them. As an exhibition currently running at the British Library attests, however, there is a rich repository of women’s stories – side-lined, not silenced – to be found in the archives, and of course archaeological evidence adds to this picture.
