God's Own Gentlewoman (eBook)

The Life of Margaret Paston

Diane Watt (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Icon Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-83773-166-4 (ISBN)

Infos

The remarkable story of Margaret Paston, whose letters form the most extensive collection of personal writings by a medieval English woman. Drawing on what is the largest archive of medieval correspondence relating to a single family in the UK, God's Own Gentlewoman explores what everyday life was like during the turbulent decades at the height of the Wars of the Roses. From political conflicts and familial in-fighting; forbidden love affairs and clandestine marriages; bloody battles and sieges; fear of plague and sudden death; friendships and animosity; childbirth and child mortality, Margaret's letters provide us with unparalleled insight into all aspects of life in late medieval England. Diane Watt is a world expert on medieval women's writing, and God's Own Gentlewoman explores how Margaret's personal archive provides an insight into her activities, experiences, emotions and relationships and the life of a medieval woman who was at times absorbed by the mundane and domestic, but who also found herself caught up in the most extraordinary situations and events.

Diane Watt is an award-winning academic and writer. She is the author of Secretaries of God, Medieval Women's Writing, and Women, Writing and Religion. Diane was born and brought up on the west coast of Scotland, and as a child spent her holidays visiting her grandmother in County Durham and aunts and cousins in North Yorkshire. More recently, during the university vacations, she has enjoyed travelling around Norfolk with her wife and their three dogs in search of Margaret Paston.

Textauszug

INTRODUCTION

The idea for this book came to me around the time of the death of my mother. Although she had been housebound for the last few years of her life, my mother’s final decline took only a matter of months. Admitted into hospital with pneumonia in February 2019, she defied the physicians’ initial prognosis that she had only a few days left, and some weeks later moved into the nursing home that would be her last place of residence. After an initial improvement over the spring and summer, which saw her once again enjoying reading detective novels, her daily crossword puzzles and watching Wimbledon, as the nights grew longer and darker her own light began to fade. Unable to fight off yet another chest infection, she passed away with her two daughters and eldest niece by her side, less than a month before her 84th birthday.

During those last few days, sitting holding my mother’s hand and talking to her about her family and our lives together, I was unaware of the Covid-19 pandemic still to come, and of a more personal crisis when I was diagnosed with breast cancer some ten months later. Rather, I thought back to the generations of women before me who must have found themselves in a similar position. Living on the west coast of Scotland, some 180 miles away, my mother was unable to be with my grandmother when she passed away, but I do know that my grandmother nursed her mother, my great-grandmother, in her final days, as was the norm in previous centuries. The ensuing rituals of death and mourning also seemed timeless, from the funeral and wake to the reading of the will, and other, more personal acts of memorialisation.

My mother’s death also gave me a new perspective on her life as a young woman both before and with my father, who had died a couple of decades earlier. Going through their letters, papers, photographs and books, and listening to the memories of other older members of my extended family, I suddenly found myself able to understand better, or at least to imagine, their young adulthoods and the early years of their marriage. Often, we can only conceive of our mothers and fathers as we have known them – as parents to us or grandparents to the next generation – but now I started to see the young woman and man who managed to make a life together over the years.

In my grief, the idea of writing a book retelling the life of Margaret Paston began to take shape. Perhaps, unconsciously at the time, I perceived some similarities between Margaret and my mother, both intelligent, forceful, canny, competitive women, who had strong views about how others should live their lives and who weren’t afraid to fall out with people with whom they disagreed, even members of their own immediate families. Disputes over inheritance and property loomed large in both their lives, if on different scales. Perhaps this book stands in place of my mother’s biography.

Who was Margaret, and why write a book about her? Margaret Mautby was born in the village of Reedham, about twelve miles from Great Yarmouth, in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. She was well-off – her parents, Margery Berney of Reedham and John Mautby of Mautby, were from established and prosperous landowning families – and she married into the upwardly mobile Paston family. She and her husband, John, had seven surviving children: John (II), John (III), Margery, Edmund, Anne, Walter and William. Others may have died at birth or in infancy. What is so remarkable about the Pastons is that, somehow, so many records relating to four generations of the family (from John’s parents down to his grandchildren) have survived. Indeed, the Paston letters and papers make up the largest collection of medieval correspondence relating to a single family in England.1 These documents provide vivid insights into the lives of the gentry classes in late medieval England and include eye-witness accounts of legal disputes, political conflicts and in-fighting in fifteenth-century Norfolk during the turbulent decades of the Wars of the Roses. They describe at first hand forbidden love affairs and clandestine marriages, cruelty and kindness, friendships and animosity, childbirth and child mortality, family arguments and neighbourhood conflicts, battles and violent assaults, sieges and kidnappings, and fear of plague and sudden death. Even more remarkably, given the low levels of literacy of women at this time in history, there are more letters from Margaret than from anyone else in the family.

Although Margaret doesn’t seem to have been able to write (she dictated her letters to scribes), she was a prolific correspondent. In total 106 items, including her draft will, are attributed to her in the collection, spanning a period of four decades in the mid- to later-fifteenth century. Until the death of her husband, he is the main recipient. Thereafter, she principally writes to her two eldest sons. The letters are not evenly distributed across time. There are far more from the last two decades of her life, with a marked concentration in the 1460s, a particularly tumultuous time, both nationally and closer to home, with John Paston’s disputed claim on the will of the wealthy Sir John Fastolf, the outbreak of civil war, John’s death, and, at the end of the decade, the decision of Margaret and John’s daughter Margery to marry the family bailiff, John Calle, against Margaret’s will.

It is then no surprise that, like my parents, in my mind, Margaret Paston is fixed in middle age. I think of Margaret as a truculent newly widowed woman in her forties or fifties, who apparently has little time for pleasure, and less still for displays of affection, but who is always focused on the business at hand and the next job that needs to be done. Yet, rereading her letters, I am reminded that there is much more to Margaret than this. The early letters reveal a young woman who loved and worried about her husband, who enjoyed the support of female family members and friends, including her mother-in-law and close companion Agnes, and who was excited by her pregnancies. The later letters tell a different story, as we encounter an ageing widow who increasingly turns for comfort to her chaplain and to her religious devotions, one who fears the spread of plague and struggles with her own ill health, and one who is frustrated by or anxious about her sons and daughters, their behaviour, and their futures. What Margaret’s letters offer us is the opportunity to experience something of the course of her adult life from her own perspective; to follow her from marriage and young motherhood through to her widowhood and old age.

I am not the first author to have been inspired by Margaret Paston’s letters. In 1929, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote movingly about the absences in history and fiction of what she called the ‘infinitely obscure lives’ of women in the past:

For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.2

But even as she wrote these words, Woolf already knew of Margaret Paston’s correspondence and the rare insights it offers into the everyday life of a medieval gentlewoman. Woolf’s copies of James Gairdner’s four-volume edition of the Paston letters3 were sold by Sotheby’s in 2011: they are signed ‘Virginia Stephen’ and dated to 1905.4 In fact, as early as 1904, she informed a friend about her plans to write a ‘large’ work on the Paston collection.5 The following year, she urged her cousin Emma Vaughan ‘to visit Paston on the Norfolk coast’6 and in the summer of 1906, Woolf took Margaret Paston as her inspiration when she composed the short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’7 while staying in Blo’ Norton Hall, a sixteenth-century manor house in Norfolk. Woolf discussed Margaret’s letters directly two decades later in her essay ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, published in The Common Reader in 1925.8

Woolf’s short story is narrated in part by an unmarried and bookish young woman living in Norfolk in the time of the Pastons, but there is a clear focus on the Martyn matriarch, modelled on Margaret Paston herself. Joan’s mother is a woman of considerable authority in the household, who can write but not read, and whose closest confidant is the family priest. In the words of Joan Martyn, ‘It is a great thing to be the daughter of such a mother, & to hope that one day such power will be mine. She rules us all.’9 In Woolf’s essay, ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, Margaret (Woolf’s ‘Mrs Paston’) also controls the household. She is a brave woman, but she does ‘not talk about herself’, and she feels angry and frustrated at her eldest son, who rather than attend to his business ‘would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming …’. Woolf, it seems, was fascinated by Margaret, even if she didn’t entirely sympathise with her.10 Woolf was of course drawn to strong women, but perhaps she also found in Margaret her opposite, a woman who didn’t seem to have time for literature or the world of the imagination.

Throughout much of my life, I have shared Woolf’s fascination. I first encountered the Paston letters when I was a postgraduate reading Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. As an undergraduate I had developed an interest in medieval...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.8.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Schlagworte: Everyday Life in Medieval London • Femina • Heroines of the Medieval Women • janina ramirez • Normal Women • Paston letters • Philippa Gregory • The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women • Tudor women
• ISBN-10: 1-83773-166-7 / 1837731667
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83773-166-4 / 9781837731664