The Lords of the Manor

Abstract

John Paston, a country gentleman from Norfolk, died in 1466 while staying at an inn in London. This was not an event of great importance in a city where many people died every day, but in his home village of Paston on the windswept Norfolk coast, and among the prosperous manor houses of that fertile county, it was an event of great significance. The Pastons were wealthy (later it became a commonplace that you never saw a poor Paston), and, while normally tightfisted, on this occasion they saw fit to display their wealth. The corpse was carried home from London escorted by twelve poor men bearing torches. It rested at Norwich, and then moved on to the priory of Bromholm where John was buried in the place of honour next to Sir William Glanville who had founded the priory in 1113.¹ Now, three hundred years later, the Pastons were taking over Bromholm as its second founders. The Paston servants and the household of the prior of Bromholm had been working for days killing beasts, brewing beer and cooking geese and chickens in preparation for the funeral feast. The guests also consumed a thousand eggs, twenty gallons of milk, forty-one pigs and forty-nine calves. The smoke from the hundreds of candles, tapers and torches burning at the funeral dirge was so dense that a glazier had to be summoned to take out two of the windows of the priory church.² The coffin was covered with a rich cloth of gold although a stone tombchest was not erected over the grave for some years.³ After Bromholm priory was dissolved in 1536, John Paston’s tomb was transferred to the parish church, where it is now placed at the east end and serves as the altar.