Paston Letters, a collection of over a thousand letters and papers, mostly written by or to particular members of the Norfolk family of Paston, and covering almost the whole 15th century (1422-1509). They are of especial value as giving a glimpse into the life of England during the Wars of the Roses. The family took its name from the village of Paston, near the sea, about 20 miles N. of Norwich, and gradually grew upwards out of the condition of the smaller gentry of Norfolk. Its most famous members were William Paston, Justice of Common Pleas under Henry VI.; his son John, executor to the famous Sir John Fastolf; Clement Paston, a brave sailor under Henry VIII.; Sir Robert Paston, created under Charles I. first Viscount, then Earl, of Yarmouth. His son William married Lady Charlotte Boyle, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II., but with him the main line and the title became extinct. It was due to the extravagance of the last that the letters were sold to Peter Le Neve, from whom they passed into the hands of 'honest' Tom Martin of Palgrave, and eventually of Sir John Fenn, who edited a selection in two quartos in 1787. The editor presented the originals of these to the king, and was knighted, but these originals have since strangely disappeared. Volumes iii. and iv. followed in 1789; vol. v. posthumously, edited by Mr Serjeant Frere, in 1823. The originals of vol. v. were dis- covered at Mr Serjeant Frere's house at Dunngate, Cambridgeshire, in 1865; those of iii. and iv. were long missing, but the whole 220 were discovered in 1875 at the family mansion of the Freres at Roydon Hall near Diss, together with ninety-five unpublished letters of the same period, described in Mr Gairdner's third appendix. These 311 letters were offered for sale in a London auction-room in 1888, but failed to find a purchaser at 500 guineas.
There is an admirable edition of the Paston Letters by James Gairdner in Arber's 'Annotated Reprints' (3 vols. 1872-4-5). It contains double as many letters as Sir John Fenn's, and, moreover, the letters are here for the first time arranged in chronological order. Mr Gairdner's answer (Fort. Review, No. 11) to Herman Merivale's attack on the authenticity of the Paston Letters (Fort. Review, No. 8) was completely satisfactory.