Abstract
A look at the last wills and testaments of the Paston family—with Margaret as our centerpiece—opens the window on many scenarios and agendas touching the world and worldview of the late medieval laity.1 Reading the wills that have come down to us takes us into the center of that circle wherein the individual and the family, the secular community, and those realms defined and governed by the Church and spiritual life, were overlapped so they can be read as being (or as having become) one entity, one sociocultural phenomenon. Thus, it is not only unnecessary but also anachronistic to worry about whether the Paston wills are more “about” family than they are “about” spiritual expression and direction. Rather, we might think of the aggregation of family wills as offering a kinship-linked case study, or a string of connected studies, that illuminate what John Bossy has characterized as a church composed of a “body of believers,” with both “body” and “believers” as operative words.2 And, lest this seem intrusive—an agenda imposed by the historian upon the family—it was Margaret her-self who spoke of the importance of writing a last will before bidding the world farewell: “And for godsake advise hym to doo make hys will, yeue it be not doo … els it were peté” (I, 220). It was a vital component of “the good death.”
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Notes
John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 170–71.
On the funeral procession and burial of Eleanor of Castile, John Carmi Parsons, Eleanorof Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 59–60
Elizabeth Hallum, “Introduction: The Eleanor Crosses and Royal Burial Custom,” in Eleanor of Castile, 1290–1990, ed., David Parsons (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1991), pp. 9–21. York and Suffolk received special treatment because “their weight had to be reduced in order that they might be taken home”:
James H. Wylie, The Reign of Henry the Fifth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), II, pp. 217–18. Wylie refuted suggestions that the bodies had been pickled or embalmed. For a more elaborate ceremony that was virtually contemporary with Margaret’s burial
Christopher Given-Wilson, “The Exequies of Edward IV and the Royal Funeral Ceremony in Late Medieval England,” English Historical Review 124 (2009), pp. 257–82.
Hannes Kleineke, “The Reburial Expenses of Sir Thomas Arundell,” The Ricardian 11 (1998), pp. 288–96, and thanks to Caroline Barron for this reference. Katherine French, The Good Women of the Parish, p. 64, quoting Vanessa Harding: “a funeral was ‘ane vent scripted by its central participant, or by those to whom he or she had delegated that power’.” This is true in bold letters for the burial ofJohn Paston I, as we see below, that being the only Paston burial for which we have the relevant details.
Sidney Painter, William Marshal, Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933; reprinted, Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Medieval Academy, 1982), pp. 275–89. Painter follows the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal on the Marshal’s last days.
Though Henry II was not unattended, no sons were with him. When he learned that John had deserted him, “the will to live departed”: W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1973), p. 626. Warren sets the scene in terms of “an ailing lion savaged by jackals.”
Though for the late medieval aristocracy the Grey Friars house in London was a popular last resting place: Charles L. Kingsford, The Grey Friars of London: Their History (London: British Society for Franciscan Studies 6, 1915), pp. 134–44.
On wills: Eber Carle Perrow, “The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters xvii, part 1, no. 1 (1911), pp. 682–750
Caroline A. J. Skeel, “Medieval Wills,” History 10 (1926), pp. 300–10.
A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to A. D. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). William II left without taking a degree. In his will of 1496 he certainly aimed high, naming the Cardinal, the king’s mother, Lord Daubney, and his own nephew Sir Edward Poynings, as executors. Davis notes that this group declined to act (I, lvii); he does not indicate who eventually undertook the obligation.
Margaret had been seriously ill before her final decline; John Whetley to John II on 20 May 1478: “My meastres your moder hath ben gretly diseased, and so seke that she wened to haue dyed and hath made her wyll” (II, 782). For a widow who sank into depression, Kay Lacey, “Margaret Croke (d. 1490).” In Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 143–64: Margaret had been widowed for eight months when Thomas Betson said of her, “She is a ffyn mery woman, but ye shall kow it not yit ffynd it, nor noe of yours by that I se in her.”
On their dubious origins, Caroline M. Barron, “Who Were the Pastons?” Journal of the Society of Archivists 4 (1972), pp. 530–35. Gairdner, II, pp. 283–5: “ancetors have been bondmen to the ancetors of the said John Pastson sithen the time that no minde is to the contrary ... how their ancetors had licence to have a chaplen.” Having a private or family chapel is offered as a sign of status and perhaps even of gentility.
On the Carmelites, David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England: The End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 144–48, 173. For their Norwich house, VCH Norfolk II, pp. 431–2:
William Worcester, Itinerary, ed. John Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 235–37. Some Calthorpes were buried there, as was an Edmund Berry and his wife in the 1430s.
John Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments (London, 1764) and Blomefield, IV, 414. Tanner says in The Church in Medieval Norwich, pp. 119–25 that the Carmelites held their own for bequests and endowed prayers but did not fare so well in attracting the burials of the wealthy and powerful.
Judith Middleton-Stewart, Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–1540 (Norwich: Boydell, 2001)
Peter Northeast, ed., Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439–1474: I. Wills from the Register “Balldwyne,” part 1, 1439–1461, Suffolk Records Society 44 (2001).
Edgar C. Robbins, William Paston, Justice: Founder of the Paston Family, 1378–1444 (Norwich: Jarrod & Sons, 1932).
Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Remembrance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 74.
For the London Carmelites, C. M. Barron and Matthew Davies, ed., The Religious Houses of London and Middlesex (London: VCH and the Centre for Metropolitan History, 2007), pp. 128–32 in this newly edited ver-sion of the old VCH, London. The house was founded in the 1240s and in 1334 it peaked at 80 friars, making it the largest Carmelite house in Britain. At the end it had a prior and 12 friars.
For the reburial of the patriarch of the House of York, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs with Peter Hammond, The Reburial of Richard Duke of York (London: Richard III Society, 1996), p. 6 for a diagram of the positioning of groups of mourners, p. 8 for the route followed by the cortège, and Plate I for a Flemish painting of the 1460s depicting a royal funeral procession.
For maps that show the villages at which a royal cortege came to rest, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, with R. A. Griffiths, ed., The Royal Funerals of the House of York at Windsor (London: Richard III Society, 2005), p. 23 for the route of Edward IV’s cortege, p. 59 for that of Princess Mary and Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Kleineke, “Reburial Expenses” also has a route map for the long procession.
On the link between the de la Poles of East Anglia and duchess Alice at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, John A. Goodall, “The Architecture of Ancestry at the Collegiate Church of St. Andrews, Wingfield, Suffolk,” in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Conference, Harlaxton Medieval Studies ix, ed. Richard Eales and Shaun Tyas (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), pp. 157–71. On the idea of the monuments at Wingfield as models for de la Pole projects at Ewelme, King, “‘My Image to be Made All Naked’.”
On the escutcheons chosen by Alice Chaucer for her tomb, G. Lamburn, “The Arms in the Chaucer Tomb at Ewelme,” Oxoniensia 5 (1940), pp. 78–93. For the Countess of Warwick’s escutcheons, Fifty Earliest English Wills, pp. 116–17
the Black Prince left comparable instructions: Teresa G. Frisch, Gothic Art, 1140–c. 1450: Sources and Documents (New York: Prentice Hall, 1971; reprinted, Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Medieval Academy, 1987), pp. 114–15.
For an elaborate gloss of virtually every provision in Margaret’s will: Dawson Turner, “The Will of Margaret Paston,” NA 3 (1852), pp. 157–72. Her genealogy, based on Harleian mss 1552, f. 173 (p. 159), explains her choice of the escutch-eons; her paternal grandmother was a daughter of Richard Beauchamp of Bletsoe-and thus a legitimate if thin claim to aristocratic ancestry.
I read this bequest to mean the transmission of books already in Margaret’s ownership. Caroline Barron reads it to mean that she left money for their purchase, so they could be given to the church. Prof. Barron is probably correct. On such bequests, Fiona Kisby, “Books in London Parish Churches before 1670: Some Preliminary Observations,” in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Jenny Stratford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XI (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002), pp. 305–26
Stacey Gee, “Parochial Libraries in Pre-Reformation England,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees-Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 199–222.
Chaucer-Paston business at Gresham is mentioned in Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds., Chaucer Life-Records (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 543.
On Norwich’s rich ration of anchorites, presumably of both sexes, Anne Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985) and Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, pp. 198–204: 18 percent of the lay wills from Norwich named at least one anchorite or hermit.
Rotha M. Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London: Methuen, 1914): the hermit at the Magdelan gate presided over the lepers who also assembled there. Turner, “The Will of Margaret Paston,” p. 168: one of the anchoresses whom Margaret remembered was Catherine Mann, the recipient of 20s per annum for life from the city.
Carol Hill, “Julian and Her Sisters: Female Piety in Late Medieval Norwich,” in The Fifteenth Century VI, ed., Linda Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 165–87.
VCH Norfolk II, pp. 442–50 for the hospitals of Norwich; Carole Rawcliffe, The Hospitals of Medieval Norwich (Norwich: University of East Anglia, 1995)
and Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). For Margaret’s quarrel with Selot, master of the hospital, Rawcliffe, The Hospitals, p. 104; in a letter of September 1465 (I, 192): “the demenyng and parcialté of Master John Salatt,” as Margaret reports to John I in September 1465.
On bequests for church bells: Judith Middleton-Steward, “Time and the Testator, 1370–1540,” in The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History, ed. Robert N. Swanton, Studies in Church History 37 (2002), pp. 133–44
R. Hindry Mason, The History of Norfolk (London: Wertheimer, Lea, & Co., 1894), pp. 589–602 on the bells of Norfolk churches
A. G. G. Thurlow, “Church Bells of Norwich,” NA 28 (1945), pp. 241–84.
Caroline M. Barron, “Johanna Hill (d. 1441) and Johanna Sturdy (d. c. 1460), Bell-Founders,” in Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 99–112: the quote is on p. 108.
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© 2010 Joel T. Rosenthal
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Rosenthal, J.T. (2010). Family Wills: Margaret Paston and the Rest. In: Margaret Paston’s Piety. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111462_4
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