The Knight in History (31 page)

Fastolf’s wife, Millicent, died in 1446 without giving him children
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(an illegitimate son who became a monk predeceased him),
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and he never remarried. As a result, the English properties bought with his war profits enriched another family, whose members became knights and finally joined the upper nobility. These were the Pastons, whose vast correspondence forms one of the most useful archives of late medieval social history. Their connection with Fastolf grew out of his legal and financial problems and personal vexations.

He was not popular in England. The unfair rumor of his behavior at Patay lingered, along with the general onus of being a king’s councillor in a losing war. In 1450, during Jack Cade’s rebellion, one of Fastolf’s men was captured by Cade, who taxed him with his master’s part in the war in France, where he had “diminished all the garrisons of Normandy and Le Mans and Maine, which was the cause of the losing of all the king’s title and right of an inheritance that he had beyond the sea.”
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In addition, the old soldier had gained a reputation for rapacity, the reverse of the knightly model of largesse. He heard of “scornful language of me” voiced at a dinner at Norwich, and begged one of his agents “that you give me knowledge by writing what gentlemen they be…. I shall keep your information secret, and with God’s grace so purvey for them as they shall not [at] all be pleased. At such a time a man may know his friends and foes asunder.”
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His estates caused him more substantive concerns. There were legal wrangles over the establishment of title, rents were difficult to collect, stewards were incompetent or dishonest. He wrote from London to Thomas Howes, his agent in Norfolk, demanding to be informed about those who infringed his rights. “If they will not dread nor obey [the law], then they shall be quit by Blackbeard or Whitebeard, that is to say, by God or the Devil. And therefore I charge you, send me word whether such as have been my adversaries before this time continue still in their wilfulness.” He had heard “many strange reports of the governance of my place at Caister and other places,” the sale of his wines on the sly, neglect of his possessions, trapping of his rabbits, and other misuse of his lands.
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“Sir John Buck, parson of Stratford, fished my ponds at Dedham, broke my dam, destroyed my new mill,” and “he and John Cole had by force this year and other years taken out of my waters at Dedham 24 swans and cygnets.”
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His sleepless suspicion did not endear him to his servitors. One of his agents wrote another that he had always been “cruel and vengeful…and for the most part without pity and mercy.”
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Another of his agents, however, brought him comfort and reassurance. This was young John Paston, ambitious grandson of a “good plain husbandman”
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who had managed to send his son to school to learn the law. The son rose to become a judge and to marry the daughter of a wealthy knight. Grandson John Paston, also educated in the law, likewise married an heiress, Margaret Mauteby, who was a distant relation of Fastolf’s. In the early 1450s John became Fastolf’s legal and financial counselor, just as the political disorders of the 1440s and 1450s were growing into the Wars of the Roses. A legacy of the military defeats in France, aggravated by Jack Cade’s rebellion and abetted by the incompetence and later imbecility of Henry VI, the breakdown of authority opened a field to the private armies of the new “bastard feudalism” fostered by the military indenture system. Whereas military indentures between the king and his captains were for a year or less, the subcontracts of the captains with their men were usually for life. Joined to a lord’s other attendants, indentured or merely hired, they formed bands of armed retainers capable of intimidating the king’s justices and imposing their own local law.
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Both Fastolf and the Pastons suffered depredations from such bands belonging to rapacious Norfolk neighbors. In 1451 a royal judicial commission was sent to Norwich to investigate the complaints of Fastolf and others, but the defendants corrupted one justice, who muzzled the plaintiffs’ complaints (he “took them by the nose at every third word”) and got the charges dropped.
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When Fastolf began his connection with John Paston, he was already in his seventies, in failing physical health and mental power, marshaling against the crown his still-outstanding claims amounting to about £11,000, stewing over the management of his affairs and the disposition of his inheritance. Stephen Scrope, Millicent Fastolf’s son by her first marriage, had come to live with him at Caister, but Fastolf had no intention of making his stepson his heir. In fact, Scrope even accused his stepfather of improperly reducing Scrope’s own estate. Fastolf had sold the wardship of his stepson for 500 marks, but when the new guardian proposed to marry the young man to his own daughter, had bought back the wardship. “He bought and sold me as a beast,” Scrope wrote later, “against all right and law, to mine hurt more than 1,000 marks.”
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As Fastolf’s health deteriorated, John Paston assumed increasing control of his affairs. In a characteristic medieval effort to ensure his soul’s salvation, the old knight had made up his mind to found a college at Caister where “seven priests and seven poor folk” would be maintained. Arrangements were still not complete in the spring of 1459 when he fell ill of asthma and a “hectic fever.” In June he made a will providing for the college to be established, maintained by income from his estates. A lengthy document, the will also granted funds for prayers to be said for his soul and the souls of his father, mother, wife, and other relations and friends and for six months’ wages of his servants. The vestments and ornaments of his chapel were to be given to “the monastery church of Saint Benet, where I shall be buried.” Marble effigies were to be erected over the tomb of his father in the parish church of St. Nicholas at Yarmouth and over that of his mother in the parish church of Attilburgh, his father’s effigy “with escutcheons of arms of him and his ancestors,” his mother’s with those of her three husbands.
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HERE AND ON FACING PAGE: SPANDREL OF THE MAIN GATEWAY OF ST. BENET’S ABBEY, WHERE SIR JOHN FASTOLF WAS BURIED.
(HALLAM ASHLEY)

John Paston was in London when Friar Brackley, a Franciscan monk and friend of the Pastons who was in attendance on the sick man, wrote urging him to return to Caister. “It is high time; he draweth fast homeward, and is right low brought, and sore weakened and enfeebled…. Every day this five days he saith, ‘God send me soon my good cousin Paston, for I hold him a faithful man, and ever one man.’
Cui ego
[to which I]: ‘That is sooth.’
Et ille
[and he]: ‘Show me not the meat, show me the man.’”
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John Paston arrived in time for the deathbed watch. Testimony at a hearing seven years later paints a picture reminiscent of a Molière play—the coming and going to the sickroom where the master lay dying, while the household routine proceeded—horses shod in the stable, the servants chattering at breakfast, the laundress delivering clean linens, farmers arriving to collect money due for grain or capons or wagon hire to carry malt to Yarmouth. Every day a servant visited the sickroom to shave the old man. A distant relative, Richard Fastolf, came down from London to beg “help…so that he might marry,” and found the dying man tottering about his chamber on the arms of two servants. To Richard’s petition he replied that he had already made his will and that it provided for him (the will made in June, however, contained no such provision). John Monk, a smith of Norwich, said that he had been “frequently in Sir John’s chamber” on the Friday and Saturday before his death and that “he was so weak for want of breath that he could not speak distinctly” his attendants had to put their ears to his mouth, and “when people spoke to him to comfort him in his illness, he only answered by sighs.” The chaplain came to say prayers with him, as was his daily wont, but said the service alone, “while Fastolf lay on his bed and said nothing.”
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Despite what he had told Richard Fastolf, on November 3 a new, much shorter will was drawn up, making John Paston the chief heir, his inheritance limited only by provision for the college at Caister and a nominal payment to the other executors.
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Two days later the old knight died. He was buried in the chapel of Saint Benet’s (Benedict’s) Holm, a monastery a few miles west of Caister.

Overnight, John Paston found himself a very rich man, possessor not only of Caister Castle but of three other houses, at Yarmouth, Norwich, and Southwark, ninety-four manors, a large sum in cash, and a fortune in jewels, plate, furnishings, and clothing. He also inherited all Fastolf’s troubles, and more. Rumors circulated at once that he had unduly influenced his old master or even forged the new will. Outraged would-be beneficiaries raised their voices, among them William Worcester. The duke of Exeter laid claim to Fastolf’s house in Southwark and presently seized it. The Pastons successfully took possession of most of Fastolf’s manors in Norfolk and Suffolk, but in 1461 when the civil war broke out again the duke of Norfolk laid hands on Caister Castle. John Paston appealed to the new king, Edward IV, and eventually got the castle back, but lawsuits pursued him, and before his death in 1464 he served three brief terms in Fleet prison. In the fierce struggle for influence with those in authority, however, John Paston evidently held his own, bequeathing his family a position of wealth and power. He refused the honor of knighthood that was pressed upon him,
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preferring to join the large number of landed gentry who paid cash to avoid military and other knightly service and were content to write “Esquire” after their names instead of “Sir” in front of them.
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He did serve two terms as knight of the shire, or member of Parliament, an honor and duty that no longer required actual knighthood—in the words of a modern scholar, the knights of the shire had achieved a position in which the term “shire” had outrun in significance the term “knight,” and although most of the men returned as shire-knights had sufficient property to be subject to distraint of knighthood, sometimes as few as half of them were actually knights.
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