Paston Letters - History of The Collection

History of The Collection

The huge collection of letters and papers was acquired from the executors of William Paston, 2nd Earl of Yarmouth, the last representative of the family, by the antiquary Francis Blomefield in 1735. On Blomefield's death in 1752 they came into the possession of Thomas Martin of Palgrave, and upon Martin's death in 1771 many were purchased by John Worth, a chemist at Diss, whose executors sold them three years later to Sir John Fenn of East Dereham. Some others passed into the hands of John Ives after Martin's death. In 1787 Fenn published a selection of the letters in two volumes, and general interest was aroused by this publication. In 1789 Fenn published two other volumes of letters, and when he died in 1794 he had prepared for the press a fifth volume, which was published in 1823 by his nephew, William Frere. In 1787 Fenn presented the originals of his first two volumes to King George III, and shortly afterwards received a knighthood, on 23 May.

These manuscripts soon disappeared, and the same fate attended the originals of the three other volumes. In these circumstances it is not surprising that some doubt should have been cast upon the authenticity of the letters. In 1865 their genuineness was impugned by Herman Merivale in the Fortnightly Review; but it was vindicated on grounds of internal evidence by James Gairdner in the same periodical; and within a year Gairdner's contention was established by the discovery of the originals of Fenn's fifth volume, together with other letters and papers, by William Frere's son, Philip Frere, in his house at Dungate, near Balsham, Cambridgeshire. Ten years later the originals of Fenn's third and fourth volumes, with ninety-five unpublished letters, were found at Roydon Hall, Norfolk, the seat of George Frere, the head of the Frere family; and finally in 1889 the originals of the two remaining volumes were discovered at Orwell Park, Ipswich, the residence of Captain EG Pretyman. This latter batch of papers are the letters which were presented to George III, and which possibly reached Orwell through Sir George Pretyman Tomline (1750–1827), the tutor and friend of William Pitt.

The bulk of the Paston letters and associated documents are now in the British Library; but a few others are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; at Magdalen College, Oxford; and a few at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Fenn's edition of the Paston Letters held the field until 1872, when James Gairdner published the first volume of a new edition. Taking Fenn's work as a basis, the aim of the new editor was to include all the letters which had come to light since this publication, and in his careful and accurate work in three volumes (London, 1872–1875) he printed over four hundred letters for the first time. Gairdner's edition, with notes and index, also contained a valuable introduction to each volume, including a survey of the reign of Henry VI; and he was just completing his task when the discovery of 1875 was made at Roydon. An appendix gave particulars of this discovery, and the unpublished letters were printed as a supplement to subsequent editions. In 1904 a new and complete edition of the Paston Letters was edited by Gairdner, and these six volumes, containing 1,088 letters and papers, possess a very valuable introduction.

In 1971, Norman Davis published a new edition, which was further revised and expanded by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond in 2004.

Two recent books have presented the story of the fifteenth-century Pastons for a wide audience, Blood and Roses by Helen Castor (2004) and A Medieval Family by Frances and Joseph Gies (1998).