The Paston Letters

The Paston Letters

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The Paston Letters : Landed Gentry and Family Relations in

Fifteenth Century England

By the middle of the fifteenth century , gentry landowners were accustomed to using , indeed were dependent upon , the range of documentary systems that two hundred years earlier had been the province almost exclusively of royal and ecclesiastical government (Richmond First Phase 21-3 ) Fifteenth-century landowners ' use of documents was no less marked by the practical difficulties of farming and revenue collection than its thirteenth-century counterpart . The Pastons familiarity

with documents , and the presence of those documents in their letters , must be understood in relation to the family 's duties as owners of land , for those duties determined the kinds of documents they most regularly used , and the terms in which they understood the relationship to their daily lives of those documents

For the Pastons , as for most land owning families in the fifteenth century , such involvement took the form primarily of setting monitoring , and collecting rents . By the early fifteenth century , most land owners in England had begun commuting customal (villein ) duties on their land to money payments , and had ceased attempting to cultivate demesne land themselves , renting it out instead to free tenants (Moreton 136-9 ) Such a rentier economy was not entirely to landlords liking , having been forced upon them by unfavorable economic conditions Following a depression of population after the plague , labor costs were high enough to discourage landlords from attempting to cultivate their lands themselves , while villeins were emboldened to demand an end to customary services in favor of fixed rents

Fifteenth-century gentry families came together over land management and the language and knowledge they shared were largely composed of the legal and administrative duties that pertained to their property . The family , as an idea , was most likely to have been considered that group of people who could be expected to share responsibility for pieces of land not because they were paid to do so , but because they had an intrinsic interest in doing so . The closeness of family bonds could be measured according to who could most readily be called upon to share land management duties , who had the most intimate knowledge of such duties , and who had the fewest such duties with regard to property in which other family members had no stake (Carpenter 147-55

Actual blood relationships sometimes mattered less than this shared acceptance of responsibilities . William Paston II , John Paston I 's brother , though a close blood relative , is a remote presence in the letters , and becomes a family enemy when he disputes John Paston II 's right to his grandmother 's dower property . Richard Calle , no blood relation to any family member , prosecutes his duties as family bailiff so energetically , and becomes so bound up with the family 's property litigation , that he is suddenly found at the very heart of the family 's social aspirations , shockingly marrying one of its daughters (Richmond FP 188-97

When the role of land management in the life...