John Fastolf - Death and Burial

Death and Burial

He died at Caister in November 1459. He was buried next to his wife Millicent in St Benet's Abbey in a specially built aisle on the South side of the abbey church. During the last decade of his life he was a close political ally and friend to John Paston, a Norfolk landowner, who came to fame through the Paston Letters, a collection of over 1,000 items of correspondence between members of the Paston family. His deathbed testament naming John Paston as his executor and heir led to many years of litigation. The ruins of St Benet's Abbey are hauntingly beautiful, and may still be visited, as may the ruins of Caister Castle. The Castle never became home to a chantry, as Fastolf intended. Instead, it passed to the Paston family. The bulk of Sir John's fortune passed to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he is remembered as a benefactor, and where there is a Fastolf Society.

Read more about this topic:  John Fastolf

Famous quotes containing the words death and, death and/or burial:

    For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
    Ernest Becker (1924–1974)

    The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.
    Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)

    How shall my animal
    Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
    Vessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell,
    Endure burial under the spelling wall....
    Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)