Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Medieval Life During Plague & War

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

When so much of history is written by men, Margaret Paston's letters offer us a rare insight into the life of a woman and the world around her in 15th century England.How did she cope with waves of plague wiping out her town? What did she do when the War of the Roses reached her home? And what family gossip did she write about?Joining Kate today for this insight into every day medieval life is Diane Watt, author of God’s Own Gentlewoman: The Life of Margaret Paston to take us back to this period of tumultuous English history.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.If you enjoy what we're doing, please take one minute to vote for us to win the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards! Voting closes on August 29th and we're in the top 10! Simply click here: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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and you should be an adult too. But to be completely honest, even if you're not an adult, I'm still really pleased that you're here because we are in the top 10 of the listeners choice award at this year's British podcast awards. And that, my lovely betwixters, is all because of you.

Because you actually stepped up and voted. What if we actually get to the top five? Like, oh, if we actually won it? I wouldn't know what to do with myself. But the voting closes on the 29th of August, which is actually today. It's today. So if you've been sitting around thinking,

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It's the mid-15th century and rumblings of war have reached us here in Norfolk in the east of England. A 30-year struggle for the English throne between the houses of York and Lancaster is well underway. As Richard, the Duke of York challenges the rule of the mentally unstable Henry the 6th of House Lancaster. Complicated, isn't it? And here in the kitchen of the medieval matriarch Margaret Paston, she's well aware that things are getting dicey and she's writing a letter to her husband, John, who's based all the way down in London and she's asking for some wartime essentials. Crossbows, check, pole axes, check, armour, check. Own at the end of this list, she asks for some almonds and sugars to be sent, because you still need snacks during warfare.

What incredible insights can we get into everyday life during such a crazy period in this country's history? This remarkable woman's letters offer us a really rare insight into everyday life during such a turbulent period during British history. Let's find out what she's got to say. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Patrix the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Life in Britain can feel pretty tumultuous at the best of times, can't it? But what brings me a sense of calm is to look back through the history books for a healthy dose of perspective. And if you think we've got it bad now,

well, imagine living here in the 15th and 16th centuries. They were bonkers. Even if you had the privilege of Margaret Paston, the woman whose extensive letters from that period form the base of today's episode, you've still got waves of plague to deal with, and of course the small matter of war breaking out. All right, so maybe a pandemic and national division is that much of a reach. Maybe we can relate, but they didn't have Netflix to distract themselves like we do, did they? So just how did Margaret react when war began erupting all around her? Well, today's guest is Diane Watt, Professor of...

of medieval English literature at the University of Surrey, an author of God's Own Gentle Women, The Life of Margaret Paston, who is going to help us find out. And if you fancied hearing more about medieval goings-on, why not listen to our episode The Black Death, The Rise of Women, Witches and the Peasant Revolt with Philippa Gregory. All right, betwixters, I am ready to do this if you are. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's only Diane What? How are you doing? I'm really good, thank you. I'm really excited to be coming on to this podcast. We were looking forward to our conversation. Well, so am I, because, you know, I confess until I knew that you were coming on the podcast and then I looked into your work, I'm going to shock you, but I wasn't familiar with the life and times of Margaret Paston. And you has dedicated your career to this woman. On your Twitter bio, it says Margaret Paston Fangirl. So this is clear. a very important person to use. So as a starter question, can you tell me, when did you first come across

the life and works of Margaret Paston? I came across Margaret Paston's letters. When I was a student, I studied history, archaeology, and English as an undergraduate, and I was always really, always really interested in the Middle Ages. But all of the texts we were reading were all about men, they were by men, there were very few women voices at that. At the point, this was in the early 1980s. So I was really astonished when I came across the letters of Margaret Passon to find that there was just this kind of whole wealth of material about women's experience in the Middle Ages, I just giving a very different perspective to the perspective that I was otherwise encountering, reading history and literature and studying archaeology. So who was Margaret then? Just for other people

that are listening that have never heard of this woman before, who was she and when did she live? Okay, well, first of all, I've got to say that it's not the case that nobody else will have heard of her, because in Norfolk, Margaret Passon is actually quite a big figure. She's got a big following in Norfolk. So virtually anybody you speak to her in Norfolk, I'm sure we'll have heard of her. But yes, she was living in Norfolk in the 15th century. We don't know exactly her birth dates, but sometime between about 1420 into the 1480s when she died. So she was alive during the Wars of the Roses. What's really remarkable about her is that she wrote an awful lot of letters. We've got more than 100 surviving letters from her. And she wrote these letters, even though she seems to have not been able to write, she may have been able to read, but certainly doesn't seem to be able to write herself. So she was using scribes to write these letters. So we've got this kind of real, really rich archive of letters by Margaret.

So who was she writing to? Did she write all through her life? or is it a very specific period? So basically we have letters from her marriage when she was about 20 through to a few years before she died. And she was writing to her husband and her two sons mainly,

not just to them, but mainly to them. She has a very wealthy background. She wasn't also an aristocratic background, but this was a wealthy kind of landed gentry background. And her husband was a lawyer. he had studied in Cambridge, he worked at the ends of court in London. And so she was looking after the estates in Norfolk while he was working in London and elsewhere. And so letters was the main way of communicating in this period of any distance.

You know, we're in this period before we have the telephones or before we have the internet. And so the letter was a really important way of communicating. So that's why she was writing so many letters. She was basically taking responsibility for the estates in Norfolk while he was away, which was most of the time. And then after he died, she was writing mainly to her two sons who took over successfully as the heads of the family. So this isn't a fainting damsel in distress from the medieval period that we often think about. This is quite a balsy woman who's running the estate. This is one of the reasons I think Margaret is such an interesting figure because she really does overturn that kind of stupe.

stereotype of the sort of, as you see, kind of like this figure who is really, the woman who's kept away from working life. Margaret was somebody who, she was not only running the estates, as well as the household and bringing up her children, but she was also at times actually having to physically defend their properties from attack because this was a period of chaos and a lot of unrest in the period. Basically, because this was, in the years leading up to the Wars of the Roses and during the Wars of the Roses, people took advantage of the sort of political chaos of the civil, the civil war that was going on, to seize estates, to besiege one another, to attack one another. There was a lot of sort of outlawry going on at this period. And so

Margaret would find herself in a situation where their ownership of these properties was being challenged. And she was in the position of leading the defence of them while in the absence of her husband and sometimes off her sons. That's fascinating because, I mean, you can look at the history of the war of the roses from a military and royal point of view and it's very complicated of who's fighting who, but to actually get a first-hand account of what it's like, not on the front line, but just how normal people were experiencing it. That must be extraordinarily rare.

Yeah, and it's, I mean, in a sense you said not on the front line, but in many ways she was on the front line because I think your warfare was different in this period. So these sort of local skirmishes were an important aspect of what was going on. You know, obviously there are the big battles that we've heard of in the Walls of the Roses, but these local skirmishes were also really important. And so we have this wonderful letter that was written right at the beginning, you're very early on in Margaret's marriage, where the property that had been basically gifted to Margaret and her husband when they got married by her father-in-law, their ownership was being challenged by some neighbours. And,

And she was left, was defending the property. And she actually writes a letter to her husband where she basically sent him a shopping list where she says, can you send me some crossbowls? Can you send me some windlasses, which is sort of for windy mechanisms for the crossbows, pull axes, can you give me some, send me some armor? And then at the end of the shopping list, and she says, and can I also have some almonds and some sugar as well, please? So it's like this amazing contrast between, you know, I want these weapons.

Oh, and I'll also get me some groceries, please. That's incredible. Had Margaret been trained in military tacticians, or was she just hoping for that, just send me crossbows and I'll see what happens? Like, what was her plan? Well, I'm not sure that we really know what her plan was, but I suspect that, you know,

she was obviously leading sort of small kind of local militia in a sense made up of servants, members of the family. Sometimes they actually hired in some professional soldiers on occasion. So much later, she actually was involved in these sorts of skirmishes in a sense for quite a lot of her life. So later on, there's a point when three different present properties are being kind of simultaneously attacked. And she sends one of her sons to defend one of the properties.

And she writes in the letter, she says, I would rather be the captainess here than there. So she sees herself. She actually describes herself. This is the first time, according to the Oxford English dictionary, of the word captainess being used to describe a female captain. Wow. So she thinks of herself as a captain.

And again, this is perhaps there's something about kind of warfare in a sense in the waters and the horses where not everybody is a trained militia, but many people have to learn to defend themselves. I mean, one might make it to draw parallel with contemporary America, you know, the USA and think about how many people have their own guns.

They might be trained to fire them in gun clubs and so forth. In a sense, this was the equivalent of the American gun culture in 15th century England. It's one way to think about it. And not saying that she actually fired a crossbow? I don't know if she did or not. We don't know that. We know that. She asked for them to be bought. She does talk about some of the sort of practicalities of the weapons at the time. Basically, in this period, we have the invention of the handgun. And I'm no weapons expert here,

but the handgun was, it was kind of the predecessor of the rifle in some ways, but it was more like a portable cannon where you actually had to light a sort of touch paper to trigger it. it didn't have the mechanisms that the modern gun would have, but usually shot a handgun from standing up position. It was a heavy piece of machinery, but she's describing how basically the windows are so low that the handguns are going to have to be shot out from kneeling position out of the windows.

So she does talk a bit about the practical answer to this. So she's not just requesting these weapons. She also understands how these weapons work. Whether she ever fired, of course, born or I don't know, but certainly she's got the know-how to lead this sort of kind of rag-tag militia in a sense that she has around her. Because you wouldn't want to mess with Margaret, would you? I mean, if someone was attacking my flat, I don't know if I would try and lead a militia to defend it. I might just say, nah, you're all right, lads.

Was that common to have a captainess? Well, yes, I'm nois in a sense. Because thinking about the sort of the period that we're talking about, Margaret's life kind of overlaps with Joan of Arc. So think about Joan of Arc in France leading an army. Yes, she's an exception. Yes. But actually, John of Hart had a very bad reputation in English at this time.

You know, she was thought of as being the English had been responsible for her execution. She was seen as being a witch. She was seen in very sort of negative terms. But nevertheless, we have in the sort of, in the public imagination, there's very much the idea of a woman leading an army. It's going to be well known within, you know, in this period. And then closer to home in the. We, Walter Thorses, we have Margaret von der Leyengeur, at least sort of notionally leading armies because her husband, Henry VI, he was ill and then he was imprisoned.

And so she was taking a sort of leading role as well. So there is a kind of wider context of women in England, in France, and Europe, taking on this sort of role. But to see it more, this kind of local level is quite unique to have these insights of how this, you know, that this was happening also at a local level. it wasn't just something that exceptional women were doing in a sense because I think that's one of the things that's so interesting about Margaret is that she's not an exceptional woman in many ways

I mean, yes she is, but we read her letters we think she's exceptional. If those letters hadn't survived, we would probably know nothing about her. She wouldn't be a name in history. There isn't other evidence about her. So she's not exceptional in that sense. We rely very heavily on the family's letters for any information about her. So people are attacking the house and she's come from money. Were the Paston's a popular family?

Did they get on well with the local community? Was she popular at the time? The simple answer to that is probably no. Not so much about Margaret, but because what happened with the Pastons was two generations earlier, Margaret's grandfather-in-law, as it were, he was a local farmer, he didn't have extensive estate, he was married to a bondswoman, which is really somebody at the very bottom of society.

But his son, William Paston, was able to make money through the law, through studying law, became a judge and became quite powerful figure. And he made a lot of money two ways, really, one by buying up a lot of property, by buying up a lot of land. And secondly, by marrying an heiress who was much younger than him. She was probably about 15 when he married her. There was quite an age gap there. So Margaret married into a family that was Nouveau-Wish, if you like. This is a family who had recently started to make money,

and that led to quite a lot of resentment. And also, some of their dealings were a bit shady, really. There were different reasons why there were these conflicts over properties. But sometimes it was just that the legal ownership of these properties wasn't quite clear. People were sort of contesting whether or not. the Passons actually purchased this property, or whether the purchase was valid. But also their popularity was particularly challenged in a sense when Margaret's husband claimed to inherit a castle called Case the Castle, which belonged to Sir John Fastol, who's a sort of distant relative

of Margaret's, and John had been working as his lawyer and supporting John Fassel in his later years. and he was a soldier, he was very wealthy. He's actually the figure on which Shakespeare's false staff is loosely based. Wow. Okay. But very different, really, in terms of his position in society, much more kind of respectable figure in society. But when he died, John Paston claimed that John Paston was at Falstaff's deathbed.

And he claimed that he'd said that the Pastons were to inherit all the property. So this wasn't in the written will. that he'd made this sort of all amendment. And because he's one of the executors of the will, he then laid claim to the properties, including Case de Castle. And this led to, you know, a lot of unhappiness, legal battles, actual battles.

So Case of Castle was at Bonap actually besieged. And, you know, when Margaret's sons were inside it, or one of her sons was inside it. And so the long answer to the question is, no, the family were not popular. they had a lot of enemies. So what is Margaret writing about all throughout her life to her son and to her husband? I mean, the letter saying we could use some crossbows here, we seem to be under attack.

They're fascinating. But mixed in with that must be much more mundane stuff of just day-to-day life. Or what kind of stuff was Margaret writing about? So she did spend a lot of time actually talking about the property disputes because they occupied a lot of the family's time. There was so much going on. There were legal disputes. There were physical disputes.

But she was also talking about sort of everyday matters. Like she would often, in her letters, she would ask for things to be purchased for her in London that you couldn't get locally. So there would be more sort of mundane shopping lists, you know, clothing for the children, for example. On one occasion, she requests some fabric for caps for her young children. And there's a sort of implicit approval in the letter

where she sort of says that the previous caps were too small and not very good quality. So she wants some fabrics, so let's some proper caps that the right size can be made. So she's kind of sending instructions, requesting provisions. She's reporting on news. She sometimes reports on some gossip,

talks about disputes that are going on within the family, as well as disputes that are going on outside. So when, as relationships break down or become fractures within the family, she's reporting what's going on there. So it's a kind of combination, really, of news, of business matters. in relating to the running of the estates

and requests for provisions. That's kind of broad sense. They're not deeply personal letters. What is interesting about the letters is that they are sometimes quite intimate. So what gets a very strong sense throughout the letters that her marriage, although it was an arranged marriage,

as was typical in her social class in this period, this marriage was a hugely successful marriage. Margaret and her husband John were really, very, very fond of one another. They had really, sort of, you know, close relationship. And that comes across on the letters. So they have love letters as such, but there were certainly some elements in them that there were elements of the love letter within these letters.

And that closeness continued throughout the marriage. As I say, it's an arranged marriage, but it's a very successful one. So although she doesn't talk a lot about her feelings, we nevertheless do get a sense of how that relationship was actually working. I'll be back with Diana after the short break. What is there in the letters, that makes you think, oh, she does actually quite love him. She does quite love her husband.

When you say that there are intimate moments, what is that? Does she have, like, pet names for him? Or like, what is there in that that makes you think, oh, they actually really like each other? So in one early letter, for example, she writes her husband and she says that she's, she basically, she writes her husband to tell him about her pregnancy. And she does this in sort of quite veiled terms. So she refers to the pregnancy as a gift. Her husband has given her a gift, which is her pregnancy.

And she's actually, she's replacing a new girdle because she says she's grown too big to fit within her the girdles that she's already got because of the pregnancy. But she also, she says in exchange to the gift of the pregnancy that her husband has given her, she is sending him a ring of St. Margaret. And that's quite significant that ring because St. Margaret was a patient saint of pregnant women who have been giving birth. So it's significant for that point. If you're also, St. Margaret's obviously her namesake. the gift is the sort of thank you in a sense for the pregnancy. And then in other letters, John suffered quite a lot of ill health. And she talks about wanting him to come back from London so that she can look after him.

She thinks that she might be able to look after him better than he's being looked after in London. So she's sort of hoping him to come back. And in the meantime, she's going to go on pilgrimage to pray to God and offer to God so he recovers quickly. And then towards the end of his life, so this is 20 years old end to the marriage. she actually offers to go and visit him because one of the things that happens to Purgeon is that with all the property disputes and that are going on,

he ends up on a number of occasions being imprisoned in the fleet of prison. And on one occasion, Margaret says, I'll come and visit you. I'm going to come to London and visit you. And as far as I noticed, the only time she really sets foot outside of Norfolk, but she does go and visit her husband in prison.

And then he writes to her and he sends her, it's almost like dog roll, but some poetry. So the intimacy is the kind of exchange is expressed with all sorts of exchanges, whether it's the sort of writing of poetry, just the offer of love and support, or whether it's through the offering gifts. And then she does, like so she sometimes signs off her letters in very affectionate terms,

like in a later pregnancy, she signs herself offers by your groaning wife. So, you know, she's groaning of the sort of, the pregnancy. You know, it's just really, you know, normally these letters are very formal. So there's the moment when they sort of strain to informal, is particularly interesting.

And he died, didn't he? Didn't he die in a jail when Margaret was about 40? So she was a widow for a long time. Yeah, so he had been in prison and his health had been bad, as I say, for on and off really from quite early in their marriage, but his health had been declining. And then just after he was released from prison,

he didn't die in prison and in the fleet prison, but he died in the ends of court where he was lodging at the time, and none of his family were around him. So it seems to have been really unarmed. unexpected. It's interesting because at this point in Margaret's letter collection, there's a gap of several months. We don't have any letters from Margaret in the month after her husband's death. So that means that we don't have any direct insights into how she reacted to it. But I think

indirectly, perhaps we could read into that silence that she was probably, you know, there was a lot of suffering going on and she wasn't functioning. She wasn't. It took a while to get back into, to function again and to start letter writing again. So I think maybe we could read something into the silence after his death. Yeah, that sounds very much like she was a very, very distraught lady. But after that, then she's the matriarch of the estates. And no other suitors come a knock in, do they? Or do a son try and take over?

No, so, yeah, she is pretty much the matriac, but only actually because her eldest son hasn't married. So what would happen is that you would expect a daughter-in-law, if the eldest son would inherit the passing estates and his wife would normally take over the matriarchal role that Margaret had. So in a sense Margaret had taken that role over from her mother-in-law Agnes, but her eldest son didn't marry. So that meant that in some way she continued in that role.

She continued doing the sorts of things that she'd been doing in terms of looking after the estates for her husband. She continued to do some of these things for her son because her son also trained his lawyer, also spent a lot of time in London. in a way. And so in some ways, the situation continued. At the point where Margaret might have expected to retire, she didn't because her son didn't marry. So really her retirement only came. Her eldest son then, he also died prematurely. He died before her. And her second son took over.

And then her second son was married. And at that point in the sense, that's the point where Margaret really begins to step back. And she lived to plague outbreaks as well, didn't she? In the middle of being widowed and being attacked and the War of the Roses and and and and there was plague. And there was plague. So they referred it as pestilence at the time. And that was because there were actually sort of multiple different epidemics and pandemics going on. So we all have heard of the Black Death, which kind of comes to, it starts off in Asia, moves across through Europe, through Africa, possibly in sub-Saharan Africa, gets to Britain in the mid-14th century, and it has a devastating effect on the society.

And in some ways, the Passons may have themselves benefited from that, because it may have, the shortage of workers, the disruptions of society, may have given the first generation of the Passan family the opportunity to sort of start accumulating wealth. If you survive the Black Death, there could be. real opportunities there. In the decades and centuries of old, what we had was a kind of whole wave of different, as I say, academics and pandemics. You had bubonic plague, but you also had pneumonic plague. There's also a disease called English sweating sickness, which was believed

to start in England and spread out to Europe. So what the Margaret and her family and the people's time just tend to refer to all of this kind of collectively is the pestilence, these different diseases. There's so many diseases, just pestilence. Yes. And there was just way, of them. There would be waves, so there would be particular kind of what we would now call plague years in a sense, which would have a real impact on the family. So one of those years was 1479, so when Margaret's quite elderly, where she loses two of her sons and her mother-in-law, and we don't know if it's certainly died of plague. So it's possible that we died of plague. We don't know what the cause of death were, but this was a play, what we would call a plague year.

and she loses three members of her family in close succession, including the son to whom she's closest, which is actually one of her middle sons, her second youngest son, Walter, who was a student in Oxford at the time, and he only just graduated from university and had decided to stay in Oxford rather than to return home because there was going to be like the first ever honorary degree was being awarded, there's going to be a big ceremony,

he wanted to attend that, and he got ill. And he was then, after he got ill, he's brought back to Norfolk, but unfortunately he died. So she lost her two of her sons, one of whom was the one that she was closest to. I mean, she said about Walter. She said that he meant more to her than her other sons, who are elder sons. Margaret, you're not supposed to say that out loud, let alone put it in a letter. And in the middle of all this, didn't her daughter run off with a bailiff? Yes.

So her daughter, Marjorie, who's probably named after her, Marjorie's a little version of the name Margaret, Marjorie married the family bailiff secretly. So it's effectively kind of eloped. And what happened was that Margaret seems to have got wind that something's going on. And she tried to have Marjorie sent away. So what would typically happen for the education of young girls at this time is they didn't receive a formal education in the way that their brothers would. But they would often be sent to serve in the households of the sort of aristocracy as a sort of form of informal education. in the sense. And so

Margaret wanted to have Marjorie sent away, as I'd get to a place in the household and move her away from the home. And this seems to have been because she seems to have cottoned on that there was something going on. She's read the signs. But unfortunately, she wasn't able to stop the marriage from happening.

So Marjorie and Richard just conducted a private wedding ceremony, just the two of them, in that summer, and then said, right, now we're married. And you could do that in the middle age So all you had to do in the Middle Ages to be married was to basically say that you had married one another. Once you'd made that promise to marry one another,

you didn't have to have any witnesses. You didn't have to have any paperwork. You didn't even need to consummate the marriage technically. You just had to say, we've got married, and that would be sufficient. So Margaret was absolutely furious. She was popping mad. She was very unhappy because this was, you know,

she saw her daughter's marrying beneath her. Richard Cal, who she married, he was a very trusted servant within the family, so I guess it also sent a betrayal there, but she certainly felt that he wasn't a fitting husband. So Margaret stormed off to see the Bishop of Norwich with her mother-law and tour and tried to convince the Bishop of Norwich that this wasn't a proper marriage, that it should be an old, that it was invalid. And the bishop was kind of sympathetic because, you know,

this is not something that Church wanted. They don't want people, they don't really want men and women randomly going off and getting married without some sort of oversight from the church. But Bishop sort of says, but I could have to speak to both of them and interview them separately. So he interviewed them. And then they came back and said,

well, I'm really sorry, but actually it all seems to be valid. What they've done, their marriage is valid. There's nothing I can do about it. And Margaret was appalled that Marjor had done this, and she was appalled that the bishop

had decided that this marriage was valid. And so she effectively seems to have disowned Marjorie. And there's some kind of dispute about whether she really did this old Marjorie, but I think she sort of effectively did. I don't think the relationship ever fully recovered. She does mention one of Marjorie's children in her will, but she doesn't leave them the same sort of bequest

that she's leaving her other grandchildren. So I think that she doesn't, I don't think the relationships ever fully comes back to what it was. What does Margaret sound like when she's angry in the letters? Oh, she says terrifying. She sounds really terrified. You would not want to be. to get on the wrong side of her. And this is also true about her mother-in-law, Agnes, as well.

I think she learned from the best. There's a wonderful episode earlier than the Paston where they describe an argument for the villages in the village of Paston, this sort of exchange of abuse, and someone calls up strong halls, which is a really interesting phrase to this use to describe them. So, Margaret and her mother-in-law were both very formidable women, the women you didn't want to get on the wrong side of. And, you know, women who would, you know, like Margaret did, go to someone of tremendous authority like a bishop and really set down the law for what she thinks should be the case.

And in fact, later on, before her son, Walter died, she was actually trying to have Walter made the priest of the village in which she was living. And the classic authorities were just absolutely horrified and they were sort of trying to see it out. But no, this is actually, he's not qualified. He hasn't got the qualifications to become a priest yet. you cannot do this, this would be a completely inappropriate thing to do.

But, you know, she just kind of, in some levels, and she did back down on that occasion, but in some levels I think she thought that the law should fit what she thought should happen. Sounds like it, doesn't it? Do we have any surviving letters that were written back to her to know how her letters were being received? Yeah, so we do. We've got a lot of letters that were written to her. We've got letters to my husband. As I say, you know, we also have sort of terms of deument in her husband.

letters to her. So we know that that was a relationship on both sides as a close relationship. But we also have letters that her son's right to her. And interestingly, in a sense, the letters that the sons exchanged between what another tells a lot? Because after her widowhood, what is the sort of controversial things that happened within her family? Well, she became very close to the family chaplain. So you asked earlier she remarried and she didn't remarry, but she did have a very close, and I'm sure entirely spiritual relationship with the family chaplain. a man called Sir James Gloy's. But he was felt by her sons

to have too much influence over her. The family chaplain was always picking arguments with them and making them look bad in front of the mother. And when the family chaplain died, they were quite insistent that they should not let anyone else gain that sort of influence over their mother again because they had felt that he was a really pernicious influence that he was too close to her

and it had influenced her too much. Why have these letters survive? because presumably other families must have been writing letters. Why have the past and letters survived in such a complete form and nobody else's have? So I think there are a couple of reasons for that. I mean, first of all, it's not the case that there were no other letter collections from gentry families from this period

because there are a couple of other, there are some other collections as the stoner letters, Plumpton letters, silly letters. So there are some other letters and letter collections. They're just not extensive in the same way and they don't have such a wealth of letters by women within them. So they're not entirely unique, but there is the biggest collection of correspondence for this period, of private correspondence.

And the reason it's survived, partly it's chance, and I'm going to come back to that in a minute, but it's partly because of the circumstances of the family found themselves in, because they found themselves in this situation where their ownership of property was constantly being challenged, their daughter, and both daughters, were having relationships that they disapproved of. So the younger daughter,

they feared a similar thing was going to happen as the younger daughter has happened with Marjorie and had to really push up to it. Because there was also a lot going on within the family and also externally, they kept the letters as sort of legal evidence.

So some of the letters come with the instructions, you know, when you receive this and have read it, burn it. And they obviously didn't. They obviously thought, no, actually, this is an important letter. I need to hang on to this. And Margaret actually tells one of his sons that he should, you know, he needs to look at after his documents and papers

because he basically never knows when he's going to need them again. In the sense, she actively encouraged the creation of this archive because she said, hang on to your correspondence. So the correspondence was kind of collected by the family, I think largely, as I say, for sort of as legal evidence. But then, in the subsequent generations of the family, they sort of rose up the hierarchy,

the gates of the aristocratic status in the ensuring centuries before they're ending up in poverty, as kind of quite often happens with aristocrats. So kind of families of the 18th century. They've lost all the money. They're beautiful properties and I'm sort of crumbling around them. The last of the Pastons, as it were,

when he died, a local historian, a rector, a local historian called Francis Blomfield, went to have a look at Elkneed Hall, which had become the sort of Paston family home in a sense. And he went into the records room and he found all these letters scattered all over this records room

in quite a sort of vulnerable state. And so he purchased these. letters because he was interested he was an antiquarian he was interested in these sorts of old things and eventually the letters ended up in the British Library it could easily have happened that those letters would just have been thrown away was really quite chance so I think that what tells us is that there used to be a lot more correspondence like this around and it just hasn't survived and she lived to quite a reasonable old age did mara didn't she yeah so she lived into the 60s, it was a good age for the time. As I say, we don't have any letters from the very end

of her life, but her last years were spent in retirement in a village called Maltby, which is a small village in Norfolk where her new great Yarmouth, where her father's family were from. And when she'd been younger, she seemed to have planned for her retirement there, because when she was younger, she'd actually had the manorial hall restored and she'd put some, really so cutting-edge renovations at the time, she had a chimney built. Chimneys are not common in until, you know, the following century. So she had the chimney installed. She had window panes installed. She had the roof re-thatched. And crucially, she had a medorial chapel either built or restored, but as a place where she could kind of perform her sort of private devotions because she became increasingly

religious as she got older. And so she seems to have really planned for her retirement. So what happened was when she was younger, she'd been living, you know, Lain Gresham, Gresham had been attacked. She had been forcibly removed from Gresham. She hadn't succeeded in her defence of Gresham. Gresham had been destroyed, never rebuilt. She'd escaped. She moved to Norfolk, lived in Norwich for many years. And then in her retirement, she retired to Maltby, which is this quiet village and really lived a quiet life there and a much more sort of religious, spiritual life there. Way for her children, really. She was quite sort of, sort of, sort of, I suppose. I suppose in Mawkes. But I think in a positive way, she said that she felt very welcomed there, very happy there.

So final question then, from somebody that studied this woman for a huge chunk of your career, do you like Margaret? Do you think that Margaret is a person you would want to go out to dinner with or have a pint with? You know, I'm not sure that I'd go out for dinner or have a pint with Margaret because I think Margaret is more a sort of afternoon tea sort of woman. So I would certainly have afternoon tea with Margaret. One of the things in my book, one of the things I talk about is how Margaret reminds me of my late mother. And I think that's a way to think about Margaret. I think of Margaret is having, she has certain personality traits that are similar to my mother. So one of the reasons why I've really enjoyed latterly working on Margaret's letters is because it's in a sense been a useful way for me to reconnect her for my mother after her death.

So yes, I like Margaret. But I like Margaret in the way the one likes on's mother, which can often be troubling. Oh, Diane, you've been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I'm an academic at the University, Surrey, but my book on Margaret Patton's Life is being published next month. August the 15th is the release date. It's called God's own gentlewoman, the life of Margaret Panston. It's not an academic book. It's intended for a general readership. I'm trying to make Margaret's life and letters accessible to a wider audience beyond the borders of Norfolk. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me today. You've been fascinating.

Thank you. I would thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Diana for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from ancient Greek bodies to Victorian surgery all coming your way. And if you're hankering for even more medieval histories, then why not check out our sister podcast Gone Medieval? This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.

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