Chapter II: Preface

[Sidenote: First publication of the Letters.] Public attention was first drawn to the Paston Letters in the year 1787, when there issued from the press two quarto volumes with a very lengthy title, setting forth that the contents were original letters written ‘by various persons of rank and consequence’ during the reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III. The materials were derived from autographs in the possession of the Editor, a Mr. Fenn, of East Dereham, in Norfolk, who was well enough known in society as a gentleman of literary and antiquarian tastes, but who had not at that time attained any great degree of celebrity. Horace Walpole had described him, thirteen years before, as ‘a smatterer in antiquity, but a very good sort of man.’ What the great literary magnate afterwards thought of him we are not informed, but we know that he took a lively interest in the Paston Letters the moment they were published. He appears, indeed, to have given some assistance in the progress of the work through the press. On its appearance he expressed himself with characteristic enthusiasm:--‘The letters of Henry VI.’s reign, etc., are come out, and _to me_ make all other letters not worth reading. I have gone through one volume, and cannot bear to be writing when I am so eager to be reading. . . . There are letters from _all_ my acquaintance, Lord Rivers, Lord Hastings, the Earl of Warwick, whom I remember still better than Mrs. Strawbridge, though she died within these fifty years. What antiquary would be answering a letter from a living countess, when he may read one from Eleanor Mowbray, Duchess of Norfolk?’[1-1]

[Footnote 1-1: _Walpole’s Letters_ (Cunningham’s ed.), ix. 92.]

So wrote the great literary exquisite and virtuoso, the man whose opinion in those days was life or death to a young author or a new publication. And in spite of all that was artificial and affected in his character,--in spite even of the affectation of pretending a snobbish interest in ancient duchesses--Walpole was one of the fittest men of that day to appreciate such a publication. [Sidenote: What was thought of them by some.] Miss Hannah More was less easily pleased, and she no doubt was the type of many other readers. The letters, she declared, were quite barbarous in style, with none of the elegance of their supposed contemporary Rowley. They might perhaps be of some use to correct history, but as letters and fine reading, nothing was to be said for them.[2-1] It was natural enough that an age which took this view of the matter should have preferred the forgeries of Chatterton to the most genuine productions of the fifteenth century. The style of the Paston Letters, even if it had been the most polished imaginable, of course could not have exhibited the polish of the eighteenth century, unless a Chatterton had had some hand in their composition.

[Footnote 2-1: Roberts’s _Memoirs of Hannah More_, ii. 50.]

[Sidenote: General interest in the work.] Yet the interest excited by the work was such that the editor had no reason to complain of its reception. The Paston Letters were soon in everybody’s hands. The work, indeed, appeared under royal patronage, for Fenn had got leave beforehand to dedicate it to the King as ‘the avowed patron’ of antiquarian knowledge. This alone had doubtless some influence upon the sale; but the novel character of the publication itself must have excited curiosity still more. A whole edition was disposed of in a week, and a second edition called for, which, after undergoing some little revision, with the assistance of Mr. George Steevens, the Shakspearian editor, was published the same year. Meanwhile, to gratify the curious, the original MS. letters were deposited for a time in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries; but the King having expressed a wish to see them, Fenn sent them to Buckingham Palace, then called the Queen’s Palace, requesting that, if they were thought worthy of a place in the Royal Collection, His Majesty would be pleased to accept them. They were accordingly, it would seem, added to the Royal Library; and as an acknowledgment of the value of the gift, Fenn was summoned to Court, and received the honour of knighthood.

But the two volumes hitherto published by Fenn contained only a small selection out of a pretty considerable number of original letters of the same period in his possession. The reception these two volumes had met with now encouraged him to make a further selection, and he announced with his second edition that another series of the Letters was in preparation, which was to cover the same period as the first two volumes, and to include also the reign of Henry VII. Accordingly a third and fourth volume of the work were issued together in the year 1789, containing the new letters down to the middle of Edward IV.’s reign. A fifth and concluding volume, bringing the work down to the end of Henry VII.’s reign, was left ready for publication at Sir John Fenn’s death in 1794, and was published by his nephew, Mr. Serjeant Frere, in 1823.

Of the original MSS. of these letters and their descent Fenn gives but a brief account in the preface to his first volume, which we will endeavour to supplement with additional facts to the best of our ability. [Sidenote: The MSS.] The letters, it will be seen, were for the most part written by or to particular members of the family of Paston in Norfolk. Here and there, it is true, are to be found among them State papers and other letters of great interest, which must have come to the hands of the family through some indirect channel; but the great majority are letters distinctly addressed to persons of the name of Paston, and in the possession of the Pastons they remained for several generations. In the days of Charles II. the head of the family, Sir Robert Paston, was created Earl of Yarmouth; but his son William, the second bearer of the title, having got into debt and encumbered his inheritance, finally died without male issue, so that his title became extinct. While living in reduced circumstances, he appears to have parted with a portion of his family papers, which were purchased by the great antiquary and collector, Peter Le Neve, Norroy King of Arms. Le Neve was a Norfolk man, possessed of considerable estates at Witchingham and elsewhere in the county; and he made it a special object to collect MSS. and records relating to Norfolk and Suffolk. Just before his death in 1729 he made a will,[4-1] by which he bequeathed his MSS. to the erudite Dr. Tanner, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph’s, and Thomas Martin of Palgrave; but this bequest was subject to the condition that within a year after his death they should ‘procure a good and safe repository in the Cathedral Church of Norwich, or in some other good and public building in the said city’ for their preservation, the object being to make them at all times accessible to those who wished to consult them. The condition, however, was not fulfilled, and the bequest would naturally have become null; but ‘honest Tom Martin of Palgrave’ (to give him the familiar name by which he himself desired to be known) married the widow of his friend, and thus became possessed of his MSS. by another title.

[Footnote 4-1: _See_ Appendix after Introduction, No. I.]

The Le Neve collection, however, contained only a portion of the Paston family papers. On the death, in 1732, of the Earl of Yarmouth, who outlived Le Neve by three years, some thirty or forty chests of valuable letters and documents still remained at the family seat at Oxnead. These treasures the Rev. Francis Blomefield was allowed to examine three years later with a view to his county history, for which purpose he boarded at Oxnead for a fortnight.[4-2] Of the results of a general survey of the papers he writes, on the 13th May 1735, to Major Weldon a number of interesting particulars, of which the following may be quoted as bearing upon the subject before us:--‘There is another box full of the pardons, grants, and old deeds, freedoms, etc., belonging to the Paston family only, which I laid by themselves, for fear you should think them proper to be preserved with the family; they don’t relate to any estates. . . . There are innumerable letters of good consequence in history still lying among the loose papers, all which I laid up in a corner of the room on a heap which contains several sacks full.’[5-1] But Blomefield afterwards became the owner of a considerable portion of these papers; for he not only wrote his initials on several of them, and marked a good many others with a mark by which he was in the habit of distinguishing original documents that he had examined and noted, but he also made a present to a friend of one letter which must certainly have once been in the Paston family archives. He himself refers to his ownership of certain collections of documents in the Preface to his _History of Norfolk_, where he informs the reader that he has made distinct reference to the several authors and originals he had made use of in all cases, ‘except’ (these are his words) ‘where the originals are either in Mr. Le Neve’s or my own collections, which at present I design to join to his, so that, being together, they may be consulted at all times.’ Apparently honest Tom Martin was still intending to carry out Le Neve’s design, and Blomefield purposed to aid it further by adding his own collections to the Le Neve MSS. But though Martin lived for nearly forty years after his marriage with Le Neve’s widow, and always kept this design in view, he failed to carry it out. His necessities compelled him to part with some of his treasures, but these apparently were mainly books enriched with MS. notes, not original ancient MSS., and even as he grew old he did not altogether drop the project. He frequently formed resolutions that he would, _next year_, arrange what remained, and make a selection for public use. But at last, at the age of seventy-four, he suddenly died in his chair without having given effect to his purpose.

[Footnote 4-2: _Cursory Notices of the Reverend Francis
Blomefield._ By J. Wilton Rix, Esq.]

[Footnote 5-1: _Norfolk Archæology_, ii. 210, 211.]

Neither did his friend Blomefield, who died nine years before him, in January 1762, succeed in giving effect to _his_ good intention of uniting his collections with the Le Neve MSS. For he died deeply in debt, and by his will, made just before death, he directed all his personal property to be sold in payment of his liabilities. His executors, however, declined to act, and administration was granted to two principal creditors. Of the Paston MSS. which were owned by him, a few are now to be found in one of the volumes of the Douce Collection in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. These, it would seem, were first purchased by the noted antiquary John Ives,[6-1] who acquired a number of Le Neve’s, Martin’s, and Blomefield’s MSS.; and after his library was sold by auction in March 1777, they became part of the collections relating to the counties of Oxford and Cambridge, which Gough, in his _British Topography_ (vol. ii. p. 5), informs us that he purchased at the sale of Mr. Ives’ papers. To this same collection, probably, belonged also a few of the scattered documents relating to the Paston family which have been met with among the miscellaneous stores of the Bodleian Library, for a knowledge of which I was indebted to the late Mr. W. H. Turner of Oxford.

[Footnote 6-1: _See_ Nichols’s _Literary Anecdotes_, iii. 199.]

Martin’s executors seem to have done what they could to preserve the integrity of his collections. A catalogue of his library was printed at Lynn in 1771, in the hope that some purchaser would be found to take the whole. Such a purchaser did present himself, but not in the interest of the public. [Sidenote: By Mr. Worth.] A certain Mr. John Worth, a chemist at Diss, bought both the library and the other collections, as a speculation, for £630. The printed books he immediately sold to a firm at Norwich, who disposed of them by auction; the pictures and smaller curiosities he sold by auction at Diss, and certain portions of the MSS. were sent, at different times, to the London market. But before he had completed the sale of all the collections, Mr. Worth died suddenly in December 1774. That portion of the MSS. which contained the Paston Letters he had up to that time reserved. Mr. Fenn immediately purchased them of his executors, and they had been twelve years in his possession when he published his first two volumes of selections from them.

So much for the early history of the MSS. Their subsequent fate is not a little curious. On the 23rd May 1787, Fenn received his knighthood at St. James’s, having then and there presented to the King three bound volumes of MSS. which were the originals of his first two printed volumes.[6-2] Yet, strange to say, these MSS. were afterwards lost sight of so completely that for a whole century nobody could tell what had become of them. They were not in the Royal Library afterwards given up to the British Museum; they were not to be found in any of the Royal Palaces. The late Prince Consort, just before his death, caused a careful search to be made for them, but it proved quite ineffectual. Their hiding-place remained unknown even when I first republished these Letters in the years 1872-75.

[Footnote 6-2: The following announcement appears in the _Morning
Chronicle_ of the 24th May 1787: ‘Yesterday, John Fenn, Esq.,
attended the levee at St. James’s, and had the honour of
presenting to His Majesty (bound in three volumes) the original
letters of which he had before presented a printed copy; when His
Majesty, as a mark of his gracious acceptance, was pleased to
confer on him the honour of knighthood.’]

To this mystery succeeded another of the same kind. The originals of the other three volumes were not presented to the king; but they, too, disappeared, and remained for a long time equally undiscoverable. Even Mr. Serjeant Frere, who edited the fifth volume from transcripts left by Sir John Fenn after his death, declared that he had not been able to find the originals of that volume any more than those of the others. Strange to say, however, the originals of that volume were in his house all the time, and were discovered by his son, Mr. Philip Frere, in the year 1865, just after an ingenious _littérateur_ had made the complete disappearance of _all_ the MSS. a ground for casting doubt on the authenticity of the published letters. It is certainly a misfortune for historical literature, or at all events was in those days, that the owners of ancient MSS. commonly took so little pains to ascertain what it was that they had got. Since then the proceedings of the Historical MSS. Commission, which have brought to light vast stores of unsuspected materials for history, have awakened much more interest in such matters.

Thus three distinct portions of MSS. that had been carefully edited had all been lost sight of and remained undiscoverable for a long series of years. The originals of the first two volumes presented to the King could not be found. The originals of volumes iii. and iv. could not be found. The originals of volume v. could not be found. These last, however, after a time, came to light, as we have seen, in 1865, having been discovered in the house of the late Mr. Philip Frere at Dungate, in Cambridgeshire; and with them were found a large number of additional MSS., also belonging to the Paston Collection, among which was the original of one of the letters of volume iii. separated from all its fellows, whose place of concealment remained still unknown.

This discovery, however, was important, and at once suggested to me the possibility of producing a new edition of the Letters arranged in true chronological order, and augmented by those hitherto unedited. It suggested, moreover, that more of the originals might even yet be discovered with a little further search, perhaps even in the same house. But a further search at Dungate, though it brought to light a vast quantity of papers of different ages, many of them very curious, did not lead to the discovery of any other than the single document above referred to belonging to any of the first four volumes. All that Mr. Philip Frere could find belonging to the Paston Collection he sold to the British Museum, and the rest he disposed of by auction.

The question then occurred: Since the originals of volumes iii. and iv. had not been found at Dungate, might they be in the possession of the head of the Frere family, the late Mr. George Frere of Roydon Hall, near Diss, in Norfolk? This was suggested to me as probable by Mr. Philip Frere, his cousin, and I wrote to him accordingly on the 3rd December 1867. I received an answer from him dated on the 6th, that he did not see how such MSS. should have found their way to Roydon, but if they turned up at any time he would let me know. Unluckily he seems to have dismissed the subject from his mind, and I received no answer to further inquiries repeated at various intervals. At last it appeared hopeless to wait longer and defer my edition of the Letters indefinitely on the chance of finding more originals anywhere. So the first volume of my edition went to press, and the second, and the third. But just after I had printed off two Appendices to vol. iii., a friend of Mr. George Frere’s called upon me at the Record Office, and informed me that a number of original Paston letters had been discovered at Roydon, which he had conveyed up to London. After some further communication with Mr. Frere himself I was allowed to inspect them at his son’s chambers in the Temple, when I found among them those very originals of Fenn’s third and fourth volumes which eight years before he could not believe were in his possession! Every one of them, I think, was there with just two exceptions--the first a document which, as already mentioned, was found at Dungate; the second a letter (No. 52 in this edition) now preserved at Holland House, the existence of which was made known to me before my second volume was issued by a recent book of the Princess Marie Liechtenstein.[9-1]

[Footnote 9-1: _Holland House._ By Princess Marie Liechtenstein,
vol. ii. p. 198.]

It was mortifying, I confess, not to have received earlier intelligence of a fact that I had suspected all along. But it was better to have learned it at the last moment than not till after my last volume was published. So, having made two Appendices already to that volume, the only thing to do was to add a third, in which the reader would find a brief note of the discovery, with copies of some of the unpublished letters, and as full an account of the others belonging to the same period as circumstances would permit. Altogether there were no less than ninety-five new original letters belonging to the period found at Roydon Hall, along with the originals of Fenn’s third and fourth volumes.

In July 1888 these Roydon Hall MSS. were offered for sale at Christie’s. They consisted then of 311 letters, mainly the originals of Fenn’s third and fourth volumes, and of those described in my third Appendix. Of the former set there were only four letters wanting, viz. the two in volume iii. whose existence is accounted for elsewhere, and two in volume iv. ‘which,’ the sale catalogue observes, ‘are noted by Fenn himself as being no longer in his possession.’ As to the letters in my Appendix the catalogue goes on to say:--

‘Of the ninety-five additional letters above mentioned (Gairdner,
992-1086) _four_ are missing (Nos. 1016, 1029, 1077, 1085). On the
other hand, on collating the present collection with the printed
volumes, it was found to contain _four others_ of which no record
exists either in Fenn’s or Mr. Gairdner’s edition, and which
consequently appear to have escaped the notice of the latter
gentleman while examining the treasures at Roydon Hall.’

‘The latter gentleman’ begs leave to say here that he never was at Roydon Hall in his life, and was only allowed to examine such of the ‘treasures’ found there as were placed before him in the year 1875 in a certain chamber in the Temple. A well-known bookseller purchased the MSS. offered at Christie’s for 500 guineas, and some years later (in 1896), sold them to the British Museum. They are thus, at length, available for general consultation. The number of missing originals, however, is not quite as given in Christie’s sale catalogue. There are four, not two, lacking of volume iv. On the other hand, only two letters of the Appendix are wanting.[10-1]

[Footnote 10-1: The missing letters of volume iv. are Nos. 24, 97,
99, and 105 (Nos. 551, 726, 735, and 758 of this edition). The
last never formed part of Fenn’s collection. I do not know of any
other noted by him as ‘no longer in his possession.’ The letters
missing of the Appendix are only Nos. 997 and 1019. Of the four
said to be missing in Christie’s catalogue, 1016 is not a document
at all, the number having been accidentally skipped in the
Inventory, and the other three are in the British Museum. No.
1077, however, is inaccurately described in the Appendix.]

About fifteen years after the discovery at Roydon there came another discovery elsewhere. On the 29th March 1890 it was announced in the _Athenæum_ that the missing originals of Fenn’s first and second volumes--that is to say, the MSS. presented to King George III.--had likewise come to light again. They were found at Orwell Park, in Suffolk, in 1889, after the death of the late Colonel Tomline, and they remain there in the possession of his cousin, Mr. E. G. Pretyman, M.P., now Secretary to the Admiralty, who kindly showed them to me at his house soon after their discovery. They have come to him among family papers and heirlooms of which, being only tenant for life, he is not free to dispose until some doubts can be removed as to their past history; and I accordingly forbear from saying more on this point except that their place of deposit indicates that they may either have got mixed with the private papers and books of Pitt, of which a large number are in the Orwell library, or with those of his old tutor and secretary, Dr. George Pretyman, better known as Bishop Tomline. Dr. Pretyman had just been appointed Bishop of Lincoln when Fenn published his first two volumes, and it was many years afterwards that he assumed the name of Tomline. But whether these MSS. came to his hands or to Pitt’s, or under what circumstances they were delivered to either, there is no evidence to show. Possibly the King’s illness in 1788 prevented their being placed, or, it may be, replaced, in the Royal Library, where they were intended to remain.

The edition of these Letters published by Mr. Arber in 1872-75 was in three volumes. It was printed from stereotype plates, and has been reissued more than once by the Messrs. Constable with corrections, and latterly with an additional volume containing the Preface and Introduction by themselves, and a Supplement giving the full text of those newly-found letters of which the reader had to be content with a bare catalogue in 1875. My original aim to have a complete collection of all extant Paston Letters had been defeated; and there seemed nothing for it but to let them remain even at the last in a general series, an Appendix and a Supplement. The present publishers, however, by arrangement with Messrs. Constable, were anxious to meet the wants of scholars who desired to possess the letters, now that the collection seems to be as complete as it is ever likely to be, in a single series, and in a more luxurious form than that in which they have hitherto appeared. I have accordingly rearranged the letters as desired--a task not altogether without its difficulties when nice chronological questions had to be weighed and the story of the Pastons in all its details had for so many years ceased to occupy a foremost place in my thoughts; and I trust that the unity of the series will now give satisfaction. At the same time, the opportunity has not been lost of rectifying such errors as have been brought to my notice, which could not have been conveniently corrected in the stereotype editions.

Notwithstanding the recovery of the originals of the letters printed by Fenn, it has not been thought necessary to edit these anew from the MSS. Whether such a thing would be altogether practicable even now may perhaps be a question; at all events it would have delayed the work unduly. Fenn’s editing is, as I have shown in previous editions, fairly satisfactory on the whole, and it is not to be supposed that a comparison of all the printed letters with the original MSS. would lead to results of very material consequence. A large number have been compared already, and the comparison inspires the greatest confidence in his care and accuracy. His misreadings are really very few, his method of procedure having been such as to prevent their being either many or serious; while as to his suppressions I have found no reason to believe, from what examination I have been able to make, that any of them were of very material importance.

It was not editorial carelessness on Fenn’s part which made a new edition desirable in 1872. It was, first of all, the advance of historical criticism since his day--or rather, perhaps, I should say, of the means of verifying many things by the publication of historical sources and the greater accessibility of historical records. And secondly, the discovery of such a large number of unprinted documents belonging to the Paston Collection made it possible to study that collection as a whole, and fill up the outlines of information which they contained on matters both public and private. On this subject I may be allowed simply to quote what I said in 1872 in the preface to the first volume:--

‘The errors in Fenn’s chronology are numerous, and so exceedingly
misleading that, indispensable as these Letters now are to the
historian, there is not a single historian who has made use of them
but has misdated some event or other, owing to their inaccurate
arrangement. Even writers who have been most on their guard in some
places have suffered themselves to be misled in others. This is no
reproach to the former Editor, whose work is indeed a perfect model
of care and accuracy for the days in which he lived; but historical
criticism has advanced since that time, and facilities abound which
did not then exist for comparing one set of documents with another,
and testing the accuracy of dates by public records. The completion
of Blomefield’s _History of Norfolk_, and the admirable index added
to that work of late years by Mr. Chadwick, have also been of
eminent service in verifying minute facts. Moreover, the
comprehensive study of the whole correspondence, with the advantage
of having a part already published to refer to, has enabled me in
many cases to see the exact bearing of particular letters, which
before seemed to have no certain place in the chronology, not only
upon public events, but upon the Private affairs of the Paston
family. . . .

[Sidenote: Accuracy of Fenn’s text.] ‘The care taken by Sir John
Fenn to secure the accuracy of his text can be proved by many tests.
It might, indeed, be inferred from the elaborate plan of editing
that he adopted, exhibiting in every case two transcripts of the
same letter, the one to show the precise spelling and punctuation of
the original, the other to facilitate the perusal by modern
orthography. A work on which so much pains were bestowed, and which
was illustrated besides by numerous facsimiles of the original
handwritings, signatures, paper-marks, and seals of the letters, was
not likely to have been executed in a slovenly manner, in so far as
the text is concerned. But we are not left in this case to mere
presumptive evidence. The originals of the fifth volume have been
minutely examined by a committee of the Society of Antiquaries, and
compared all through with the printed text, and the general result
of this examination was that the errors are very few, and for the
most part trivial. Now, if this was the case with regard to that
volume, which it must be remembered was published after Fenn’s death
from transcripts prepared for the press, and had not the benefit of
a final revision of the proof-sheets by the editor, we have surely
every reason to suppose that the preceding volumes were at least not
less accurate.

‘At all events, any inaccuracies that may exist in them were
certainly not the result of negligence. I have been favoured by Mr.
Almack, of Melford, near Sudbury, in Suffolk, with the loan of
several sheets of MS. notes bequeathed to him by the late Mr.
Dalton, of Bury St. Edmunds, who transcribed a number of the
original MSS. for Sir John Fenn. These papers contain a host of
minute queries and criticisms, which were the result of a close
examination of the first four volumes, undertaken at Fenn’s request.
Those on the first two volumes are dated on the 3rd and 7th of May
1788, more than a year after the book was published. But on vols.
iii. and iv. there are two separate sets of observations, the first
of which were made on the transcripts before they were sent to
press, the other, like those on the two first volumes, on the
published letters. From an examination of these criticisms, and also
from the results of the examination of the fifth volume by the
committee of the Society of Antiquaries,[13-1] I have been led to
the opinion that the manner in which Sir John Fenn prepared his
materials for the press was as follows:-- [Sidenote: Mode in which
Fenn prepared the letters for publication.] Two copies were first
made of every letter, the one in the exact spelling and punctuation
of the original, the other in modern orthography. Both these copies
were taken direct from the original, and possibly in the case of the
first two volumes they were both made by Fenn himself. In vols. iii.
and iv., however, it is stated that many of the transcripts were
made by Mr. Dalton, while those of vol. v. were found to be almost
all in his handwriting when that volume was sent to press in
1823.[13-2] But this statement probably refers only to the copies in
the antique spelling. Those in modern spelling I believe to have
been made for the most part, if not altogether, by Fenn himself.
When completed, the two copies were placed side by side, and given
to Mr. Dalton to take home with him. Mr. Dalton then made a close
comparison of the two versions, and pointed out every instance in
which he found the slightest disagreement between them, or where he
thought an explanation might be usefully bracketed into the modern
version. These comments in the case of vol. iii. are upwards of 400
in number, and extend over eighteen closely written pages quarto. It
is clear that they one and all received the fullest consideration
from Sir John Fenn before the work was published. Every one of the
discrepancies pointed out between the two versions is rectified in
the printed volume, and there cannot be a doubt that in every such
case the original MS. was again referred to, to settle the disputed
reading.

‘One or two illustrations of this may not be unacceptable to the
reader. The following are among the observations made by Mr. Dalton
on the transcripts of vol. iii. as prepared for press. [Sidenote:
Examples.] In Letter viii. was a passage in which occurred the
words, “that had of your father certain lands _one_ seven years or
eight years agone.” Mr. Dalton’s experience as a transcriber appears
to have suggested to him that “one” was a very common misreading of
the word “over” in ancient MSS., and he accordingly suggested that
word as making better sense. His surmise turned out to be the true
reading, and the passage stands corrected accordingly in the printed
volume. In Letter xxiv. there was a discrepancy in the date between
the transcript in ancient spelling and the modern version. In the
latter it was “the 4th day of December,” whereas the former gave it
as the 3rd. On examination it appears that the _modern_ version was
found to be correct, a Roman “iiij.” having been misread in the
other as “iij.” Thus we have very sufficient evidence that the
modern copy could not have been taken from the ancient, but was made
independently from the original MS. Another instance of the same
thing occurs in the beginning of Letter xli., where the words “to my
power” had been omitted in the literal transcript, but were found in
the modern copy.

‘Mr. Dalton’s part in the work of transcription appears clearly in
several of his observations. One of the transcripts is frequently
referred to as “my copy”; and an observation made on Letter lxxxvi.
shows pretty clearly that the copy so referred to was the literal
one. At the bottom of that letter is the following brief
postscript:--“Utinam iste mundus malignus transiret et
concupiscentia ejus”; on which Mr. Dalton remarks as follows:--“I
have added this on _your_ copy as supposing it an oversight, and
hope it is properly inserted.” Thus it appears that Mr. Dalton’s own
transcript had the words which were deficient in the other, and
that, being tolerably certain they existed in the original, he
transferred them to the copy made by Fenn. Now when it is considered
that these words are written in the original MS. with peculiarly
crabbed contractions, which had to be preserved in the literal
version as exactly as they could be represented in type,[15-1] it
will, I think, appear evident that Mr. Dalton could never have
ventured to supply them in such a form without the original before
him. It is clear, therefore, that his copy was the literal
transcript, and that of Fenn the modern version.

‘Again, in Letter xxxi. of the same volume, on the second last line
of page 137, occur the words, “that he obey not the certiorari.” On
this passage occurs the following query--“The word for ‘obey’ seems
unintelligible. Have I not erred from the original in my copy?”
Another case will show how by this examination the errors of the
original transcripts were eliminated. In Letter xxxiv., at the
bottom of pp. 144-5, occurs the name of Will or William Staunton. It
appears this name was first transcribed as “Robert Fraunton” in the
right or modern version; on which Mr. Dalton remarks, “It is William
in orig.” (Mr. Dalton constantly speaks of the transcript in ancient
spelling as the “original” in these notes, though it is clear he had
not the real original before him at the time he made them).
Strangely enough, Mr. Dalton does not suspect the surname as well as
the Christian name, but it is clear that both were wrong, and that
they were set right in consequence of this query directing the
editor’s attention once more to the original MS.’

[Footnote 13-1: _Archæol._ vol. xli. p. 39.]

[Footnote 13-2: _See_ Advertisement in the beginning of the
volume, p. vii.]

[Footnote 15-1: The following is the exact form in which they
stand in the literal or left-hand version:--‘Utia’z iste mu’d
maligu{s} t’nsir{t} & c’up’ia e{s}.’]

[[‘The care taken by Sir John
_opening quotation mark missing_]]

To this I may add some further evidences of Fenn’s editorial care and accuracy. When the second volume of my first edition was published in 1874, my attention was called, as already mentioned, to the existence at Holland House of the original of one of those letters[15-2] which I had reprinted from Fenn. It was one of the letters in Fenn’s third volume, and only one[15-3] other letter in that volume had then turned up. I carefully compared both these papers with the documents as printed, and in both, as I remarked in the Preface to vol. ii., the exact spelling was given with the most scrupulous accuracy, so that there was scarcely the most trivial variation between the originals and the printed text. But a more careful estimate, alike of Fenn’s merits and of his defects as an editor, became possible when, on the publication of the third volume of the same edition, I was able, as I have already shown, to announce at the last moment the result of a cursory inspection of the originals of his third and fourth volumes. And what I said at that time may be here transcribed:--

‘The recovery of these long-lost originals, although, unfortunately,
too late to be of the use it might have been in this edition, is
important in two ways: first, as affording an additional means of
testing Fenn’s accuracy as an editor; and secondly, as a means of
testing the soundness of some occasional inferences which the
present Editor was obliged to draw for himself in the absence of the
originals. More than one instance occurs in this work in which it
will be seen that I have ventured to eliminate from the text as
spurious a heading printed by Fenn as if it were a part of the
document which it precedes. Thus, in No. 19,[16-1] I pointed out
that the title, in which Judge Paston is called “Sir William Paston,
knight,” could not possibly be contemporaneous; and the document
itself shows that this opinion was well founded. It bears, indeed,
a modern endorsement in a handwriting of the last century much to the
same effect as Sir John Fenn’s heading; but this, of course, is no
authority at all. In the same way I showed that the title printed by
Fenn, as a heading to No. 191,[16-2] was utterly erroneous, and
could not possibly have existed in the original MS. This conclusion
is also substantiated by the document, which, I may add, bears in
the margin the heading “Copia,” showing that it was a transcript.
The document itself being an important State Paper, there were
probably a number of copies made at the time; but as no others have
been preserved, it is only known to us as one of the Paston Letters.

‘Another State Paper (No. 238),[16-3] of which a copy was likewise
sent to John Paston, has a heading which Sir John Fenn very
curiously misread. It is printed in this edition[16-4] as it stands
in the first, _Vadatur J. P._, meaning apparently “John Paston gives
security, or stands pledged.” But it turns out on examination that
the reading of the original is _Tradatur J. P._ (Let this be
delivered to John Paston).

‘To return to No. 19, it will be seen that I was obliged to reprint
from Fenn in the preliminary note a few words which he had found
written on the back of the letter, of which it was difficult to make
any perfect sense, but which seemed to imply that the bill was
delivered to Parliament in the 13th year of Henry VI. I pointed out
that there seemed to be some error in this, as no Parliament
actually met in the 13th year of Henry VI. The original endorsement,
however, is perfectly intelligible and consistent with facts, when
once it has been accurately deciphered. The handwriting, indeed, is
very crabbed, and for a considerable time I was puzzled; but the
words are as follows:--“Falsa billa Will’i Dallyng ad parliamentum
tempore quo Henricus Grey fuit vicecomes, ante annum terciodecimum
Regis Henrici vj{ti}.” I find as a matter of fact that Henry Grey
was sheriff (_vicecomes_) of Norfolk, first in the 8th and 9th, and
again in the 12th and 13th year of Henry VI., and that Parliament
sat in November and December of the 12th year (1433); so that the
date of the document is one year earlier than that assigned to it.

‘Again, I ventured to question on internal evidence the authorship
of a letter (No. 910)[17-1] which Fenn had assigned to William
Paston, the uncle of Sir John Paston. At the end is the signature
“Wyll’m Paston,” with a reference in Fenn to a facsimile engraved in
a previous volume. But the evidence seemed to me very strong that
the William Paston who wrote this letter was not Sir John’s uncle,
but his brother. The inspection of the original letter itself has
proved to me that I was right. The signatures of the two Williams
were not altogether unlike each other; but the signature appended to
this letter is unquestionably that of the younger man, not of his
uncle; while the facsimile, to which Fenn erroneously refers the
reader, is that of the uncle’s signature taken from a different
letter.

‘It may perhaps be conceived that if even these few errors could be
detected in Fenn’s work by one who had not yet an opportunity of
consulting the original MSS., a large number of others would be
discovered by a minute comparison of the printed volumes with the
letters themselves. This suspicion, however, is scarcely borne out
by the facts. I cannot profess to have made anything like an
exhaustive examination, but so far as I have compared these MSS.
with the printed text, I find no evidence of more than very
occasional inaccuracy, and, generally speaking, in matters very
immaterial. On the contrary, an inspection of these last recovered
originals has greatly confirmed the opinion, which the originals
previously discovered enabled me to form, of the scrupulous fidelity
and care with which the letters were first edited. For the most
part, not only the words, but the exact spelling of the MSS. is
preserved, with merely the most trifling variations. Sir John,
indeed, was not a trained archivist, and there are what may be
called errors of system in his mode of reading, such as, for
instance, the omission of contractions that may be held to represent
a final _e_, or the rendering a final dash by _s_ instead of _es_.
In such things the plan that he pursued was obvious. But it is
manifest that in other respects he is very accurate indeed; for he
had made so careful a study of these MSS. that he was quite familiar
with most of the ancient modes of handwriting, and, on the whole,
very seldom mistook a reading.

‘I may add, that this recent discovery enables me to vindicate his
accuracy in one place, even where it seemed before to be very
strangely at fault. At the end of Letter iii. of the fifth
volume,[18-1] occurs in the original edition the following
postscript:--“I warn you keep this letter close, and lose it not;
rather burn it.” On comparing this letter with the original, the
Committee of the Society of Antiquaries, some years ago, were amazed
to find that there was no such postscript in the MS., and they were
a good deal at a loss to account for its insertion. It now appears,
however, that this letter was preserved in duplicate, for among the
newly-recovered MSS. I discovered a second copy, being a corrected
draft, in Margaret Paston’s own hand, at the end of which occurs the
P.S. in question.

‘It must be acknowledged, however, that Fenn’s mode of editing was
not in all respects quite so satisfactory. Defects, of which no one
could reasonably have complained in his own day, are now a serious
drawback, especially where the original MSS. are no longer
accessible. Occasionally, as we have seen, he inserts a heading of
his own in the text of a document without any intimation that it is
not in the original; but this is so rare a matter that little need
be said about it. A more serious fault is, that in vols. iii. and
iv. he has published occasionally mere extracts from a letter as if
it were the whole letter. In vols. i. and ii. he avowedly left out
passages of little interest, and marked the places where they
occurred with asterisks; but in the two succeeding volumes he has
not thought it necessary to be so particular, and he has made the
omissions _sub silentio_. For this indeed no one can seriously blame
him. The work itself, as he had planned it, was only a selection of
letters from a correspondence, and a liberal use of asterisks would
not have helped to make it more interesting to the public.
Occasionally he even inverts the order of his extracts, printing a
postscript, or part of a postscript, in the body of a letter, and
placing at the end some passage that occurs in the letter itself,
for no other reason apparently than that it might read better as a
whole.

‘Thus Letter 37 of this edition[18-2] (vol. iii., Letter vi., in
Fenn) is only a brief extract, the original being a very long
letter, though the subjects touched upon are not of very great
interest. So also Letter 171 (Letter xxx. in Fenn’s third
volume)[18-3] is a set of extracts. Letter 182 (vol. iii., Letter
xxxix., in Fenn)[18-4] is the same; and the first part of what is
given as a postscript is not a postscript in the original, but
actually comes before the first printed paragraph.

‘In short, it was the aim of Sir John Fenn to reproduce with
accuracy the spelling and the style of the MSS. he had before him;
but as for the substance, to give only so much as he thought would
be really interesting. The letters themselves he regarded rather as
specimens of epistolary art in the fifteenth century than as a
substantial contribution to our knowledge of the times. To have
given a complete transcript of every letter, or even a _résumé_ in
his own words of all that concerned lawsuits, leases, bailiffs’
accounts, and a number of other matters of equally little interest,
formed no part of his design; but the task that he had really set
himself he executed with admirable fidelity. He grudged no labour or
expense in tracing facsimiles of the signatures, the seals, and the
watermarks on the paper. All that could serve to illustrate the
manners of the period, either in the contents of the letters, or in
the handwritings, or the mode in which they were folded, he esteemed
most valuable; and for these things his edition will continue still
to be much prized. But as it was clearly impossible in that day to
think of printing the whole correspondence, and determining
precisely the chronology by an exhaustive study of minutiæ, there
seemed no good reason why he should not give two or three paragraphs
from a letter without feeling bound to specify that they were merely
extracts. Yet even these defects are not of frequent occurrence. The
omissions are by no means numerous, and the matter they contain is
generally unimportant in itself.’

[Footnote 15-2: No. 38 in that edition, No. 52 in this.]

[Footnote 15-3: It was Letter 1 in Fenn’s third volume, No. 18 in
my first edition, No. 24 in this.]

[Footnote 16-1: No. 25 in present edition.]

[Footnote 16-2: No. 230 in present edition.]

[Footnote 16-3: No. 282 in present edition.]

[Footnote 16-4: That is to say, in the edition published by Mr.
Arber in 1875, when it was impossible to correct the text.]

[Footnote 17-1: No. 1033 in present edition.]

[Footnote 18-1: No. 787 of this edition.]

[Footnote 18-2: No. 51 of present edition.]

[Footnote 18-3: No. 205.]

[Footnote 18-4: No. 221.]

I took advantage, however, at that time, of the recovery of so many of the missing originals to make a cursory examination for the further testing of Fenn’s editorial accuracy. Two or three letters I compared carefully with the originals throughout, and in others I made special reference to passages where doubts were naturally suggested, either from the obscurity of the words or from any other cause as to the correctness of the reading. The results of this examination I gave in an Appendix at the end of the Introduction to the third volume in 1875, and such errors as I was then able to detect are corrected in the present edition.

Apart from such corrections, the letters are here reproduced as they are printed in previous editions, only in a better order. Fenn’s text has been followed, where no corrections have been found, in all the letters printed by him except those of his fifth volume. The exact transcript given on the left-hand pages of Fenn’s edition has been strictly adhered to, except that contractions have been extended; and even in this process we have always been guided by the interpretation given by Fenn himself in his modern version on the right-hand pages. All the other letters in this publication are edited from the original MSS., with a very few exceptions in which these cannot be found. In some places, indeed, where the contents of a letter are of very little interest, it has been thought sufficient merely to give an abstract instead of a transcript, placing the abstract in what is believed to be its true place in the series chronologically. Abstracts are also given of documents that are too lengthy and formal to be printed, and, in one case, of a letter sold at a public sale, of which a transcript is not now procurable. In the same manner, wherever I have found the slightest note or reference, whether in Fenn’s footnotes or in Blomefield’s _Norfolk_--where a few such references may be met with--to any letter that appears originally to have belonged to the Paston correspondence, even though the original be now inaccessible, and our information about the contents the most scanty, the reader will find a notice of all that is known about the missing document in the present publication.

I wish it were in my power to make the present edition better still. But there have been always formidable obstacles to completeness during the thirty years and more since I first took up the business of editing the letters; and though many of these obstacles have been removed, my energies are naturally not quite what they once were. The publishers, however, have thought it time for a more satisfactory edition, and I hope I have done my best. It remains to say a few words about the original MSS. and the places in which they now exist.

Of those at Orwell Park I have already spoken. They are contained in three half-bound volumes, and are the originals of the letters printed by Fenn in his first and second volumes.

In the British Museum are contained, first of all, four volumes of the ‘Additional MSS.’ numbered 27,443 to 27,446, consisting of the originals of volume v. of Fenn’s edition which was published after his death, and a number of other letters first printed by me in the edition of 1872-75. The nine volumes which follow these, viz. ‘Additional MSS.,’ 27,447-27,455, contain also Paston letters but of a later date, and papers relating to Sir John Fenn’s publication. There is also a separate volume of ‘Paston letters’ in ‘Additional MS.’ 33,597; but these, too, are mostly of later date, only eight being of the fifteenth century. Further, there are the Roydon Hall MSS. (including with, I believe, only two exceptions the originals of Fenn’s third and fourth volumes), which are contained in the volumes ‘Additional,’ 34,888-9. And finally there are two Paston letters (included in this edition) in ‘Additional MS.’ 35,251. These are all that are in the British Museum. Besides these there are, as above noticed, a few MSS. in a volume of the Douce Collection and the other stray MSS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford above referred to. At Oxford, also, though not strictly belonging to the Paston family correspondence, are a number of valuable papers, some of which are included in this edition, having an important bearing on the fortunes of the family. These are among the muniments contained in the tower of Magdalene College. As the execution of Sir John Fastolf’s will ultimately devolved upon Bishop Waynflete, who, instead of a college at Caister, made provision for a foundation of seven priests and seven poor scholars in Magdalene College, a number of papers relative to the disputes between the executors and the arrangement between the Bishop and John Paston’s sons have been preserved among the documents of that college. My attention was first called to these many years ago by Mr. Macray, through whom I obtained copies, in the first place, of some entries from an old index of the deeds relating to Norfolk and Suffolk, which had already been referred to by Chandler in his Life of Bishop Waynflete. Afterwards Mr. Macray, who had for some time been engaged in a catalogue of the whole collection, was obliging enough to send me one or two abstracts of his own made from the original documents even before he was able to refer me to his report on the muniments of Magdalene College, printed in the Fourth Report of the Historical MSS. Commission. It will be seen that I have transcribed several interesting entries from this source.

Further, there are just a few Paston letters preserved in Pembroke College, Cambridge.

What remains to be said is only the confession of personal obligations, incurred mainly long ago in connection with this work. The lapse of years since my first edition of these letters was issued, in 1872, naturally reminds me of the loss of various friends who favoured and assisted it in various ways. Among these were the late Colonel Chester, Mr. H. C. Coote, Mr. Richard Almack of Melford, Mr. W. H. Turner of Oxford, Mr. J. H. Gurney, Mr. Fitch, and Mr. L’Estrange of Norwich. On the other hand, I am happy to reckon still among the living Dr. Jessopp, Mr. Aldis Wright, Miss Toulmin Smith, and Mr. J. C. C. Smith, now a retired official of the Probate Office at Somerset House, who all gave me kindly help so long ago. And I have further to declare my obligations to Mr. Walter Rye, a gentleman well known as the best living authority on Norfolk topography and families, for most friendly and useful assistance in the way of notes and suggestions towards later editions. I have also quite recently received help (confessed elsewhere) from the Rev. William Hudson of Eastbourne, and have further had my attention called to significant documents in the Public Record Office by some of my old friends and colleagues there.

But among the departed, there is one whom I have reserved for mention by himself, not so much for any particular assistance given me long ago in the preparation of this work as for the previous education in historical study which I feel that I received from intercourse with him. I had been years engaged in the public service, and always thought that the records of the realm ought to be better utilised than they were in those days for the purpose of historical research; but how even Record clerks were to become well acquainted with them under the conditions then existing it was difficult to see. For each of us had his own little task assigned to him, and had really very little opportunity, if ever so willing, to go beyond it. Nor was there too much encouragement given under official regulations to anything like historical training; for the Record Office, when first constituted, was supposed to exist for the sake of litigants who wanted copies of documents, rather than for that of historical students who wanted to read them with other objects. Besides, people did not generally imagine then that past history could be rewritten, except by able and graphic pens which, perhaps, could put new life into old facts without a very large amount of additional research. The idea that the country contained vast stores of long-neglected letters capable of yielding up copious new information to supplement and to correct the old story of our national annals had hardly dawned upon anybody--least of all, perhaps, on humble officials bound to furnish office copies of ‘fines’ and ‘recoveries’ and antiquated legal processes. Even the State Papers, at that time, were kept apart from the Public Records, and could only be consulted by special permission from a Secretary of State. No clerk, either of the Record or State Paper Department, knew more than was contained within his own particular province. But by the wise policy of the late Lord Romilly these red-tape bands were ultimately broken; and just at that time I had the rare privilege of being appointed to assist the late Reverend John S. Brewer in one of the great works which his Lordship set on foot to enable the British public to understand the value of its own MSS. It was to this association with Mr. Brewer that I feel I owe all my historical training, and I made some acknowledgment of that debt in 1872 when I dedicated to him my first edition of this work.