History has changed.  There is no disputing the fact; what interested historians a hundred years ago is now out of date and out of style.  What remains important, however, is how historians have arrived at where they are today.  Since the influence of the Annales School, historians are no longer content with looking at the great histories of elites.  Instead, what has become more important is the analysis of less important people and events that have under-girded the great events but, until the Annales School, had not been fully studied.

Perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of this change in thought has been a shift in focus towards the family, particularly the pre-modern family.  The family is now seen by many historians as being the building blocks of society, and essential for getting at the underlying structures of the past.  Often with help from other disciplines, such as anthropology, and sociology, historians are finding new ways of uncovering these blocks and bringing back to life the families of the past. Historians have begun to look at old sources with new eyes, such as legal documents, court records, and correspondence, and have uncovered a family life that is not only dynamic and revealing, but has furthered our understanding of past culture.
From these studies of pre-modern family a new figure has emerged out of the dusty documents of the past, the pre-modern woman.  Although there have been numerous studies which place pre-modern women in the background of their families and their husbands, the research seeking to examine women in their own right is less extensive.   One woman in particular, Margaret Paston, although she is often portrayed alongside her husband and family, deserves a closer look if we are to better understand the pre-modern woman.  What has drawn historians to the Paston family, and recently to Margaret in particular, is the vast amount of correspondence between the family members.  This correspondence is interesting not only because there is so much of it, but because of its detail and scope in covering many different aspects of family life.

By looking at the correspondence between Margaret Paston and her fifteenth-century family, we can begin to see just how integral a part the pre-modern woman played in her family.  Through a study of Margaret Paston, as a wife, mother, and a woman of the pre-modern world we, as historians, can begin to understand the indispensable role that these women played.
 

The History of the History of the Pre-modern Family
Before a study of Margaret Paston can properly be addressed, it is first important to have a grasp of the history of the pre-modern family and the changes in historiography that have guided and shaped historian’s understanding of the family.  In the past years there has been one historian that has stood out among the rest as the cornerstone for pre-modern family research.  With his work, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone has taken an in-depth look at how family life was structured and maintained in pre-modern England.  By looking at the English family over this time period, Stone has concluded that although there were marked changes in the family over these three centuries the basic forms of the family never really changed.
Stone’s work is largely influenced by the methodology of the Annales School and looks closely at the underlying interactions between family members and the larger culture.  However, Stone’s work is still untouched by later feminist strains and remains strongly focused on the role of the male head of household, placing the pre-modern women in a subordinate role.  What Stone argues is important, nonetheless, because it brings to light the preoccupation of pre-modern society with maintaining the honor and prestige of the family, and the protection of primogeniture.  “The prime factor affecting all families which owned property was therefore the principle of primogeniture… No study of the English family makes any sense unless the principle and practice of primogeniture is constantly borne in mind.”   In Stone’s work, women tend to take a sidelined part in maintaining this practice through good marriage arrangements and household management particularly further down the social scale from the elites.
This is a theme that will be seen often in looking at Margaret and the Paston family, as well as, the majority of research on the pre-modern family.  Although he does attribute a place in the family to the wife and mother as a participant in the quest for honor, Stone asserts that the mood of the times insisted upon the subordination of the wife to her husband.   In addition to this, and much to his credit, Stone adds that although documents of the time presented the picture of the subordinate wife, “the distribution of power over decision making will, in the last resort, depend on the personal characters of the husband and the wife.”
Other historians have followed this model set forth by Stone, and have presented similar conclusions.  David Herlihy for example has focused on the structure of medieval families from classic antiquity to the later medieval ages.  Like Stone, Herlihy also gives attention to the importance of primogeniture in marriage and family economics.  Herlihy sees marriage, and the interacting ‘system’ of families as the moving force behind this patriarchal society and states that “the system… helped to ensure that reproduction and production would be carried on somewhere in society, and that this civilization would survive.”
What is interesting about both Herlihy and Stone’s work is their use of quantitative data to portray the pre-modern family.  Unlike Stone, Herlihy also uses documents written about the lives of saints as evidence of the personal lives of his subjects.  However, the use of these sources can be seen as giving a certain religious taint to Herlihy’s work, which may devalue it among some historians.  What also hurts Herlihy’s work, in relation to Stone or other family historians, is the wide time span that Herlihy attempts to synthesize, which does not allow him to focus too long on the family structure of any one period and leaves out important analysis concerning individual roles within the family.

Will Coster’s work, similar to Stones work, focuses again on the English family between 1450 and 1800.  Like Stone, Coster’s work is primarily concerned with showing the changes, which took place within the family during this time period.  On the other hand, Coster does not give primogeniture and honor the importance that both Herlihy and Stone used to describe the family.  Instead, Coster tends to look at the growing individuality and a closing off of kinship ties within England.  What sets Coster work apart from Stone and Herlihy, and what gives it value is that it is largely devoted to the historiography of the pre-modern family, and attempts to “impose order on the chaos of historical events and circumstances,”  and to analyze past historians work for conflicts and contradictions within the historiography.  For example Coster looks at the issue of primogeniture versus individualism and the ways it has been addressed in several studies after Stone’s including Alan MacFarland and C. Durston.
Although these studies are useful in setting the background for a discussion of the pre-modern family, they are limited in furthering the study of women in the pre-modern world because they do not give detailed attention to the individuals within the family and only provide models for other historians to follow.  What has grown out of these broader studies of the family has been an interest in looking at particular individuals and instances of the lower and middle classes to demonstrate how women were viewed and how they maneuvered within their male dominated world.  Partly, these works can be seen as changes in historiographic trends as the introduction of feminist theory,  and  Post Modern theory began changing the ways historians looked at history, and moving them away from model based broad histories such as Stone’s and Herlihy’s.

Examples of the new ways in which historians began to use these ideas to reconstruct the lives of individual women and families in the past are the works of Gene Brucker and Steven Ozment.  Following with Stone’s model of primogeniture, and using the influence of feminist theory, Brucker’s work, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence shows us how important marriage was to social class and preservation of honor among the Italian gentry, as well as, “such themes as love, marriage, and the moral conventions governing relations between the sexes.”  Unlike Stone’s model, however, Brucker’s work pays close attention the social boundaries drawn by medieval society and the part they played in structuring marriage and family.
Very similar to Brucker’s study of class and marriage, and the love between individuals which often blurred the lines, Steven Ozment uses the story of Anna Buschler, a Burgermiester’s daughter in Reformation Germany, to show that women were not always submissive wives and mothers.  On the contrary, Ozment’s work, not only mirrors Brucker’s in its focus on love affairs, but also goes more deeply to explain how marriage between social classes was considered taboo, and how marriage within class rank was to be maintained.   This may seem in opposition to the strict code of honor put in place by Stone. However, Stone also spends considerable time discussing the frequent occurrences of extramarital affairs explaining them much like Brucker and Ozment as taboo but not uncommon in pre-modern society.

Other work by Ozment is perhaps more useful when discussing the importance of women’s roles, however.  For instance his study of Magdalena and Balthasar, a married couple in Nuremberg in the sixteenth-century, shows the relationship between husband and wife and the partnership that existed between them.  These letters attest to a strong emotional bond of affection that existed between husband and wife, which is in contrast to Stone and Herlihy’s assumption that love and affection were secondary concerns of the pre-modern world. The letters also provide evidence of the leading role of Magdalena as a household manager and an indispensable part of the household.  “When Balthasar was on the road, Magdalena became his Nuremberg distributor, bookkeeper, and collection agency…over the years such responsibilities grew into a virtual partnership”  between husband and wife.

What is valuable about the research of Ozment and Brucker, and what will provide the stepping-stones for my own exploration of Margaret Paston, is that they rely on letters and documents written by the individuals they represent, which are able to provide more detail than demographic used by Stone. Unlike the broad histories of Stone and Herlihy’s which spans the time period of several centuries, these sources are also useful because of their ability to place their subjects within the context of their environment and providing the framework for an understanding of pre-modern society as championed by the Annales School.  These works are also helpful in moving the focus of historians away from the studies of the family, and on to more in-depth looks at the roles of women to the pre-modern world.

Helen Jewell has also looked extensively at the ways in which medieval women operated within their patriarchal framework in the context of both cities and countryside, separating her study further to make the distinction between royalty, nobility, and land gentry.  This is a divergence from Stone who tends to ignore the dynamics of women’s roles, and chooses to focus male centered activities.  Like Stone, and the other historians of the family, however, Jewell puts strong emphasis on the importance and value of marrying well, particularly among the landed gentry and the noble class.

 By breaking her argument down into social standings of women, Jewell is able to provide interesting analysis into the lives of the gentlewoman, of which Margaret Paston is a part.  Jewell is persistent, however, in keeping with the traditional view of the subordinate wife,  “During her marriage, the noblewoman generally subordinated herself to her husband’s interests…most married households were male dominated,”  although she does allow for some variability in this standard. Although, Jewell’s work is not lacking in source material (she makes excellent use of the Paston letters as well as other families correspondence) it cannot provide the reader with the personal flavor of more individual based works like Ozment and Brucker’s.  What it can do, however, is to isolate women from their background roles within the family, and make their personal contributions to the family unit and to society more clearly seen and understood.

This scholarship leads us finally into a discussion of the Paston family, and Margaret Paston’s role as an indispensable figure within the household.  As will be shown through the examples of historiography on the Paston family, the role of women, particularly the role of Margaret, has been downplayed even in more recent feminism and women’s studies that have tried to give them voice.

The Paston family is nonetheless interesting, however, despite its focus on the male characters of the family, which are seen as the true protectors of the family’s interests.  Because they were a family which came from modest beginnings and were able to work their way up through the social ranks by good marriage and strategic social ties.  The Pastons are in a sense the perfect embodiment of Stone’s model family, in which family members work as a unit to preserve and enhance the primogeniture of the family, and much of the research has upheld the position of a subordinate wife (Margaret) put forth by Stone.
When studying the historiography of the Paston family, it is best to start at the beginning when the letters first became important to historians.  In this case, it was the historian, John Fenn who first began work on the Paston letters in 1787.  Like many of the earlier works, Fenn’s edition is mainly a translation of the letters into more modern (by eighteenth-century standards) spelling.  Fenn also attempts a brief summary of each of the letters, which is helpful to the reader in discerning the letters.
Fenn’s work is flawed, however, partly because it is a product of a time when historians were concerned mainly with the collecting and reading of primary documents not with analyzing them closely for content.  It is also flawed in its representation of the letters themselves because it does not present the letters in a chronological order, making the letters hard to connect and use as a complete source.  Fenn’s work is invaluable, however, in its ability to provide future historians with a translated primary source, which can be used to further research.

As we have seen with the history of the family, the effects of changing thoughts and theories within the discipline have also altered the history of the Paston family. for example, the Annales Schools emphasis on studying history from the ground up, influenced several historians of the fifties and sixties to use the Paston’s as an example of culture in fifteenth century England.  These studies used the Paston family as an example of the underlying structure of society that the Annales saw as so important in looking at the past.

One such study was Percival Hunt’s Fifteenth Century England, in 1962, which begins with an in-depth discussion of England’s towns, social classes, and music.  The second half of Hunt’s book then provides examples of these institutions through case studies of well-known families including the Pastons, who as mentioned before are often seen as a model gentry family.  Similar to Fenn, Hunt does not attempt an analysis of the letters or their content.  More significant to this study, however, is Hunt’s dismissal of Margaret Paston by simply describing her as “busy, how honorably busy, she was.”

Other historians of this time followed closely in Hunt’s footsteps, and placed the Pastons within the context of English culture of the time.  H.S. Bennett, who has published two works dealing with the Paston family, is able to isolate Margaret more easily and gives her role in the family some consideration.    However, Bennett still places Margaret in a background role, as a wife who is commanded solely by her husband; “She received her husband’s instructions, carried them out, reported action…with great efficiency.”   What is significant about Bennett’s work is that he is among the first to look at all of the members of the Paston family and to begin to draw some connections about what pre-modern family life might have been like.

Building on the work completed by Bennett, Richard Barber has taken the interactions between family members a step farther.  Barber’s work, The Pastons: A Family in the Wars of the Roses published in 1986, has taken the methods used by Ozment and Brucker and has used the actually letters of the Pastons to show how the family interacted and survived their changing society against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses.  Through Barber’s full translation of the letters, the reader is able to see the interdependence between Margaret Paston, her sons, and her husband as they fight to keep their lands and social position intact.  Barber’s work puts Stones statements about the preservation of honor at all cost  in a real life perspective through the presentation and analysis of the Paston letters.

Other historians have chosen not to focus on the letters as exclusively as Barber, however, but have chosen to study the Pastons as a model family of the pre-modern world.  Frances and Joseph Gies, who have studied and written on the Pastons for nearly thirty years, have provided us with a closer understanding of how the Pastons measured up with other families in the pre-modern world. The Gieses’ work also begins to reflect the growing influence of feminism and has begun to recognize the influence of Margaret Paston as an equal in the family.

What is interesting about the work of Gieses is the progression of their research since 1978.  Beginning with a study of medieval women, the Gieses use Margaret Paston as an example of a model wife in the Middle Ages, and use a powerful statement: “woman was the partner of man, often his equal, sometimes more than his equal,”  to describe Margaret, and women in the family. Unfortunately, this is a theme that is quickly lost as their research continues through a study of marriage and family where the power of women is downplayed to the point where “the egalitarian family in which husband and wife share authority… is a modern invention.”   Finally, their last work, which focuses exclusively on the Paston and their conflicts over property and status, goes even further to call John Paston “a more absolute monarch over his wife, his children, and his estate than Henry VI ever was over his kingdom.”

Other works have used changes in methodology to look more exclusively at the Pastons as an individual family, and have tried to draw some conclusions about the individual characters of the family and how they affected the fortunes and misfortunes of the Pastons.  Colin Richmond has published three volumes on the Paston family, beginning with an overview of the family, continuing with a work exclusively on the struggle over Fastolf’s will, and finally, a work that looks closely at the characters of the family including an extensive discussion on Margaret.

Building on Stone, Richmond’s work personifies the importance the Pastons placed on maintaining and furthering their social status, which included time spent arranging profitable marriages for their children.  What is unique about Richmond’s work is the characterization that he places on Margaret.  Unlike historians before him, Richmond places Margaret in a condescending attitude, claiming that Margaret never identified herself as a true Paston, thinking that she had married beneath her rank,  and like Stone continues to place women in a marginal role. What is also unique about Richmond’s work is the hint of post-modernism that pops up in his belief that the Paston letters and his work are unable to present a real picture of the Pastons and can only provide an understanding that historians can build upon.

Despite these views, Richmond’s work has helped to provide the basis for the most recent trend in Paston historiography, women’s studies and feminism, which has begun focusing more closely on Margaret Paston, who because of her extensive correspondence to her husband and her sons, makes her a compelling case study for feminist historians trying to understand the pre-modern woman.  Unlike Richmond, some feminist historians have placed Margaret in the glorifying role of medieval hotel manager.  These historians have also expanded upon the Gieses’ previous statement about the position of women within the family by stating, “Margaret and John seem to have had a good marriage, a true partnership in which each was able to trust and rely upon the other.”

Unfortunately, these histories usually place Margaret along with other notable women of the pre-modern period and therefore are unable to give her the time and attention that would allow the reader to understand her fully.  My own research will focus more exclusively on Margaret and her role within her family.  By removing Margaret from her position in the background behind her husband and sons, this study will bring to light the indispensable role that Margaret played in keeping her family together.