A training in letter writing was one of the foundations of rhetoric in the middle ages. Writers learnt their craft by copying older letters. In the later Middle Ages, letters were also part of the world of pragmatic literacy, simple forms of business and legal letters accessible by those with limited literacy. Almost all letters depended on a sophisticated system of scribes and messengers, the latter often interpreting and glossing letters on delivery, the former writing almost all letters in women’s names. So, if we are to immerse ourselves in what Joan Kirby has characterised as a world of ‘predatory lords, tight-fisted dowagers, disgruntled sons, wretched daughters and bitterly contested wills,’ we must learn how to read the letters in their original form, as well as trying to read between the lines of their contents.
In 15th-century England, letters begin to survive from a much wider range of social ranks to include secular families of gentry status as well as merchants. The famous collections from five families, the Pastons in Norfolk, the Celys, a family of London wool merchants, the Oxfordshire Stonors, the Armburgh estates in Warwickshire and the Plumptons in Yorkshire, are well known. Most of their letters are what we might now term ‘business letters’, but they are revealingly personal too. The Pastons, a family with its origins amongst the peasantry, looked back to a founder, Clement Paston, who ‘plouhed his land both winter and summer, and rode bareback to the mill with his corn under him.’ One of the Armburgh correspondents, Margaret Walkern worried about receiving guests when she was about to give birth, her rooms being without what she termed ‘honest bedding’: ‘for as moche as ladyes and gentilwemen and other fendys of my modres and myn ar lyk to vysite me while I ly ynne childe bende [sic] and I am not purveyed of onest bedding with oute the whiche myn hosbondys oneste and myn may not he savid.’
In each of the sessions we will also try to read parts of the letters in their original handwriting, a skill which is not difficult to master with some introductory training. This aspect of the seminar follows on from several taster sessions at the 2015 Medieval Summer Programme.
