shall hear after this. I sent your younger son to the Lady Stapleton,' and she said according to my Lady Morley's saying in that; and as she had seen used in places of worship thereas (where) she hath been. I pray you that ye will assure to you some man at Caister to keep your buttery, for the man that ye left with me will not take upon him to breve daily as ye commanded; he saith he hath not used to give a reckoning neither of bread nor ale till at the week's end, and he saith he wot (knows) well that he should not condeneth (give content), and there Friday, 24th of December, 1484. 2 R. III. even. By your servant and beadwoman, Be your fund cledewon LETTER CCCCXLII.-(I. vol. v. p. 305.) [THIS letter is from Dame Elizabeth Browne (formerly Poynings), the daughter of Sir William Paston the judge, to her nephew John Paston. Fenn supposes it to have been written "to disprove some assertion of William Pas How 1 Sir Miles Stapleton died in 1466. 2 To breve is to make up an account. strictly this custom of breving was formerly observed in great houses may be known from one of the daily rules enforced in the family of the fifth Earl of Northumberland. "Furst, that the said clerk is be dayly at the brevynge every day by vii of the cloke in the mornynge. And theire to breve every officer accordynge as the custome is unto half howre after viii of the cloke. And that theire be no brackfasts delyveret unto the tyme that all the officers have breved." -See Household Book, p. 59. As this letter has no date of the year, I have some doubts where to place it, unless we may suppose that the same respect would be paid to the memory of Margaret, mother of J. Paston, who was an heiress, and died in 1484, and whose will was proved on the 18th of December in that year. If I could have placed it earlier, I should have fixed upon the death of Sir John Paston, in November 1479, as the time of its being written; but the present J. Paston was not married till 1477, and his eldest son being born in 1478, was now only in his seventh year, which might be the case, as the expression that he "dede hese heyrne ryght wele" implies his being very young. ton concerning the matters in dispute between him and his nephew." As W. Paston is in no way alluded to throughout the letter, we do not see the value of this guess, but Fenn admires so indiscriminatingly the chief contributors to his Collection, that he enters, on too many occasions, into the petty feelings of dislike which they appear to have entertained for William Paston. Except compliments, the following is the letter:-" Whereas ye desire me to send you word whether my brother John Paston, your father, was with my father and his, whom God assoil, during his last sickness and at the time of his decease at St. Bride's or not. Nephew, I ascertain you upon my faith and poor honour, that I was fourteen, fifteen year, or sixteen year old, and at St. Bride's with my father and my mother, when my father's last sickness took him, and till he was deceased; and I dare depose before any person honourable that, when my father's last sickness took him, my brother your father was in Norfolk, and he came not to London till after that my father was deceased; and that can Sir William Cooting and James Gresham record, for they both were my fa ther's clerks at that time." There are two dates to the letter, "the Thursday next before Whitsunday, the second year of King Richard the Third" (May 19, 1485), which is scratched through with a pen; and then "the 23rd of September, the first year of the reign of King Henry the Seventh." It was probably written on the first date, but not transmitted till the second, a proof that its contents were not considered very urgent.] LETTER CCCCXLIII.-(VI. vol. ii. p. 335.) Henry, Earl of Richmond, landed upon Saturday the 6th of August, 1485, at Milford Haven in South Wales; this letter therefore could not be written before the Friday or Saturday following (12th or 13th of August). Richard appears not to have regarded the landing of the Earl as a matter of that great importance which it soon became; for, as a valiant prince, he certainly would have set forwards to meet his competitor as soon as possible; and however great his veneration might have been for the day of "the Assumption of our Lady," yet his fears of losing a crown, for the possession of which he had ventured everything, would have been still greater, and would have prompted him to break in upon the services due to our Lady. The Duke of Norfolk survived the writing of this letter only a few days, for he joined his royal master, and commanded the vanguard of his army in the field of Bosworth, where he fell on Monday the 22nd of August, valiantly fighting for his sovereign lord and benefactor. To my well-beloved friend John Paston, be this bill delivered in haste. WELL-BELOVED friend, I commend me to you; letting you to understand that the king's enemies be a-land, and that the king would have set forth as upon Monday, but only for our Lady-day; but for certain he goeth forward as upon Tuesday, for a servant of mine brought to me the certainty. Wherefore I pray you that ye meet with me at Bury,2 for, by the grace of God, I purpose to lie at Bury as upon Tuesday night; 1 The Assumption of our Lady, 15th of August. 2 Bury St. Edmund's, in Suffolk. and that ye bring with you such company of J. NORFOLK. 3 From this it appears that the royal army, when embodied, was clothed in jackets of the livery of the respective great lords and commanders. [We have now brought down our correspondence to the close of the reign of Richard III. To effect this in an unbroken chronological series, we have introduced abstracts of several letters from the fifth quarto volume, of which the copyright is yet unexpired, and upon the rights of which we should be sorry to trespass. There are only two letters in the fourth quarto volume belonging to the reign of Henry VII.; but the fifth quarto contains many of that reign of a most interesting character. To all to whom expense is not an object, we can recommend the volume as a desirable one to possess. Taking it for granted that the reader, who has been admitted so freely into the family affairs and secrets of the Pastons, will feel some interest in their further fortunes, we have added the pedigree of the family to its final extinction.] |