A tale of three marriages

The Paston family, arrivistes among the landed gentry of Norfolk during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, are celebrated for the survival of huge numbers of their letters.

Margaret (died 1484), the wife of John Paston I (1421–66), first speaks of her troublesome daughter Margery (c.1449–79) in a letter of 3 April 1469. Among other business, she urges her eldest son, John II, to help find a place for the girl – a formal fostering, in effect – with either Lady Oxford or Lady Bedford, ‘for we be either of us wary of [an]other’.²² The ‘other’ in question was the Paston family’s steward, one Richard Calle: a man of far too modest standing to be seen to conduct any sort of relationship with a Paston girl. Matters, it seems, had already got out of hand. Although none of Margery’s own letters survives – they may have been deliberately destroyed – one of Richard’s to her does exist, dating from some time that same year. It is obvious that he and Margery had undergone a form of marriage, using words that neither of them would gainsay; evident too that they were in love and that agents of the family were in cahoots to separate them. I have retained Richard’s idiosyncratic spelling to give the full flavour of the Middle English.

…we that ought of very ryght to be moost to gether ar moost asondre; me semyth it is a mll [1000] yere agoo [ago] son [since] that I speke with you… Alas, alas! Goode lady, full litell remembre they what they doo that kepe us thus asunder.²³

In the same letter, Richard reveals that a plot to intercept his letters to Margery, by means of showing his ‘ladde’ as a token a ring supposedly belonging to his lover, had not fooled him – in it he read the designs of his antagonistic mother-in-law and her chaplain, Sir James Gloys.

That May, Margery’s immediately older brother, John III, had written furiously to their elder brother, Sir John, denying any complicity in the liaison:

I conceyve, by your lettyr whyche that ye sent me by Jwde, that ye have herd of R.C. [Richard Calle’s] labor whyche he makyth by our ungracyous sustrs assent; but wher as they wryet [write] that they have my good wyll ther in, savyng your reverence, they falsely lye of it.²⁴

In the same letter, John foretold that his sister would end up selling ‘mustard and candles’ – a pejorative reference to the fact that the Calles were in the grocery trade. His mother took more direct action. She, like the parents of Christina of Markyate, appealed to a bishop, who summoned Margery and warned her of the shame that she would bring upon her family. He carefully questioned her to be sure that she and Richard had exchanged a binding form of words. They had, and she stood by them; and there was little the bishop could do. Frustrated in her plans, Margaret imposed the severest sanctions on her daughter: she was expelled from the household, denied her dowry and disinherited – although Margery’s children were remembered in Margaret’s will. What may strike the modern reader, alongside their feelings of distaste for such social snobbery and a natural empathy for the heartache caused by the rift between mother and daughter, is the fact that Calle continued to be employed by the family. Their daughter may have been the ‘wretch’ described by her mother; but a good steward was hard to replace.

Margaret seems to have been cut from the same cloth as her mother, Agnes Berry, who had married William Paston and borne him at least eight children. Agnes’s own matrimonial crisis concerned another of her daughters, Elizabeth (1429–88), whose independent spirit may in turn have inspired her niece Margery. Elizabeth was said by her mother to have acquiesced reluctantly in a betrothal to a family connection, the elderly and somewhat disfigured Sir Stephen Scrope, so long as he brought sufficient property to the partnership and so long as the marriage settlement was unencumbered by too many other claimants on him.

Negotiations seem to have been conducted during 1449, principally by another Elizabeth, Agnes’s cousin. Reporting to John Paston I on progress, the cousin’s assessment was that if Elizabeth could not find better, then Scrope would do. But the family should act quickly, for Elizabeth was in a state of great unhappiness. Agnes, according to her cousin, had confined her daughter, forbidden her to speak with anyone and beat her once or twice a week: her head was ‘broken in two or three places’.²⁶

Elizabeth Paston did not, in the end, marry Scrope. Mother and daughter continued to seek a suitable match, continued to disagree and sustained a rather formal relationship, judging by later letters. In 1458, at the age of thirty, Elizabeth married Sir Robert Poynings (1419–61), after which she had to pursue her mother for her dowry. Elizabeth and Poynings had a son, Edward. But if Sir Robert was a trial to her, that trial did not last long: he died fighting on the Yorkist side in the second Battle of St Albans three years later. Elizabeth subsequently married a younger man, Sir George Browne, with whom she had two sons and a daughter called Mary. Browne, who joined Henry Stafford’s rebellion, had the misfortune to be executed on the orders of Richard III in 1483 and thus Elizabeth, in her last years, found herself both wealthy and unencumbered. In her will she left nothing to any of her Paston relatives.

John Paston III (1444–1504), whose sister Margery had been the cause of so much family grief, had his own conjugal travails. In his case, the prospective bride, distant cousin Margery Brews, was approved by all sides. But the Pastons and the Brewses could not agree terms. John wanted a larger dowry; Margery’s father, Sir Thomas Brews, insisted that his wealth must be spread between several daughters; that he could afford no more. His wife, Dame Elizabeth Brews, reinforcing the idea that family matriarchs were prepared to take executive action to achieve the desired result, bargained directly with the prospective groom, mincing no words.

I schall gyffe youwe a grettere tresur, that is, a wytty gentylwoman, and if I sey it, both good and vertuos; for if I schuld take money for hyr, I wold not gyffe hyr for a mli [a thousand pounds].²⁷

It is almost written in jest. Almost. At any rate, John and Margery did marry; and, for her own part, Margery Brews became posthumously famous for having penned^≈≈ the first known Valentine’s note: ‘unto my ryght welebelovyd Voluntyn, John Paston’. And rather touching it is, too: her body and heart will suffer until she hears from him; she will never foresake him…

And yf ye commande me to kepe me true wherever I go,

I wyse I will do all my myght yowe to love and never no mo[re].

And yf my freends say, that I do amys,

Thei schal not let me so for to do,

Myne herte me bydds ever more to love yowe,

Truly over all erthely thing,

And yf thei be never so wroth,

I tryst it schall be better in tyme commyng.²⁸

For all the politics, material greed and social snobbery of the middle-class English medieval family, sometimes love did conquer all.

In the Paston story, women are both oppressors and oppressed. The voices of the victims of parental machinations are not heard directly at all and yet their experiences seem to typify the lives of those restless middle-class women who, in later centuries, would provide the protagonists for hundreds of novels: Jane Eyre and Magdalen Vanstone, Helen Huntingdon – who shocked Victorian England by slamming the door against her husband – Elizabeth Bennet and the Schlegels; or those real-life heroines, like Caroline Norton, who actively fought to improve the lot of married women.^∂∂

^* Montaillou was the subject of a famous, eponymous study by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in the 1970s.

^† From 1334 until his death he was Pope Benedict XII of Avignon.

^‡ As recently as 2008, a Clergue was mayor of the commune of Montaillou.

^§ Which still stands.

^# See page 34.

^∫ The name seems to derive from Middle French bègue, stammerer, apparently referring to the familiar sound of such women muttering psalms in the street.

^Ω Eremitical: isolated, like a hermit.

^≈ See page 130.

^∂ See page 140.

^π Founded in the 1170s in Lombardy, as a loose association of lay men and women devoted to a life of humble Christian piety.

^∆ Founded by Margaret of Constantinople in about 1244.

^** The single surviving manuscript, owned by William Butler-Bowdon, was recognised by the American scholar Hope Emily Allen (1883–1960). She began work on preparing a two-volume edition (the first of which was published in 1940) but the project fell foul of her collaborator’s apparent chauvinism. Her work underpins all modern scholarship on The Book of Margery Kempe.

^†† A reformist Christian movement that prefigures the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was led initially by John Wycliffe, who advocated a vernacular English translation of the Bible.

^‡‡ Her invariable term for herself.

^§§ See page 7.

^## See page 144.

^∫∫ He of the Très Riches Heures (see page 157).

^ΩΩ Christine de Pizan enjoys a place setting at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party table.

^≈≈ At least, she composed a text, copied out fair by a complicit family servant, Thomas Kela.

^∂∂ Magdalen Vanstone is the victim of illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862); Helen Huntingdon is the abused wife who becomes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë 1848); the Schlegels are the eventual occupants of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet need no introduction. Caroline Norton (1808–77) was a writer and political activist who fought against her husband’s abuse and his exclusive custody of her children, and instigated three key laws on women’s rights: over infant custody (1839), divorce (1857), and married women’s property (1870).