To the Letter. Simon Garfield
a brilliantly lit sward, with a pre-war searchlight dancing in the sky above us.
George Formby has done a lot of talking since his trip here, but not a word (publicly) about losing ten bottles of beer from the back of his charabanc. Some chaps I was with at the time did the pinching and subsequent drinking, so I know!
Best wishes, Friend (The Lord Forgive Me),
Chris
* He wrote, for example, of how he ruled ‘the field of eloquence with exalted genius and a solemn style’.
* The letters of Aristotle that Demetrius refers to have not survived. The advice that one should ‘write as one speaks’ has become a classic doctrine, and was favoured by Jane Austen amongst innumerable others. We’ll return to it in later chapters.
* As quoted in Alain Boureau, “The Letter-Writing Norm, a Medieval Invention’ in Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century by Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cecile Dauphin, translated by Christopher Woodall, Polity Press, 1997.
* The title may have derived from The Image of Idleness (1555), a fictional account of letters between a bachelor and a married man written by ‘Olyver Oldwanton and dedicated to the Lady Lust’.
** The old English grammar and spelling are retained here for flavour, although the ‘v’ has been replaced with our now-familiar ‘u’, and the letter ‘j’ has been substituted for ‘i’ when the occasion merits it. As quoted in The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Jean Robertson, University Press of Liverpool, 1942.
* A maulkin was a harlot.
* Chris Barker lived in Tottenham; Bessie Moore in Blackheath.
Chapter Six
Neither Snow nor Rain nor the Flatness of Norfolk
In 1633, The Prompters Packet of Letters, yet another popular how-to manual for an increasingly literate Europe, displayed a woodcut on its title page of two galloping horsemen. The first carried the mail in his saddlebag, the second, an aristocratic type with a whip, was probably there to protect the first. The mail carrier sounds a bugle as he rides, and the sound he emits appears in a speech bubble that says simply ‘Post Hast’. The phrase had already been in use for at least 60 years, a regular instruction for speedy delivery written on the outer letter as ‘haste, post, haste’.
But how typical was this galloping sight through the English countryside? How did the post work?
For the beginning of the answer we need to briefly revisit England in the fifteenth century, and a wealthy extended family called Paston, named after the seemingly idyllic coastal Norfolk village where they lived (seemingly idyllic until letters reveal local anarchy, executions, civil wars, domestic shortages and bitter cold). For the Pastons, letters were the glue that held the family together. Their correspondence consisted of frequent (usually weekly, sometimes on consecutive days) communication through several generations and the reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III. The many hundreds of letters that survive make up the most illuminating concentration of letters of fifteenth-century England. After a prolonged period of obscurity (the Paston line ended in 1732), the letters were rediscovered by local historians at the end of the eighteenth century and were acquired by the British Museum in the 1930s.
What can we learn from them now? Most are what we may call personal business letters – matters of property and legal affairs conducted colloquially through family members. A fair number are about love and marriage, several are about family decorum, and many are requests for supplies, not least heavy gowns and worsted cloth to ward off the winters. A modern reader may feel closest to Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston I (and mother to John Paston II and John Paston III), as she writes to her scattered family in London. Over the course of about 70 letters she acts as maternal moral advisor and estate manager, and despite her relatively comfortable domestic situation she must frequently ask for extra supplies of food and clothing. But these things are merely daily blips in the face of the grander issues, such as the threat of being overrun by charging armies. The bloody pageant of the Wars of the Roses unfurls in the background as she writes, and her days appear frantic (the majority of her letters are written ‘in haste’ as she regrets that ‘want of leisure’ prevents her writing more).
Unlike most of the male members of her family, Margaret Paston dictated her letters to a local scribe. On 7 January 1462 she began a letter to her husband in her usual way (‘Right worshipful husband, I recommend me to you’), and continued with news composed straight for the history books:
People of this country beginneth to wax wild, and it said here that my Lord of Clarence and the Duke of Suffolk and certain judges with them should come down and sit on such people as be noised rioutous in this country . . . In good faith men fear sore here of a common rising . . . God for his holy mercy give grace that there may be set a good rule . . . in this country in haste, for I heard never say of so much robbery and manslaught in this country as is now within a little time.*
Taken as a whole, the lexicographer and grammarian may also learn much from the Paston correspondence about the state of fifteenth-century English. The letters are packed with simple but well-formed sentences, and a high level of literacy and learning. We learn, as above, that the polite method of greeting is no longer ‘greetings’; family and friends, male and female almost all open their post to read a derivation of ‘Name of Recipient, I recommend me to you’. There are many early sightings of proverbs and other epithets: ‘I eat like a horse’, one Paston brother writes to another in May 1469, a metaphor not recorded again until the eighteenth century, and in a letter to the youngest Paston brother in 1477, a cousin advises him not to be discouraged by his prolonged pursuit of a wife, ‘for . . . it is but a simple oak that is cut down at the first stroke’.
But we also learn about one other great thing: the workings of the post. By the 1460s, the smooth running of the economy demanded an efficient mail system, but it was not always forthcoming. The Pastons were well connected (with strong links to the legal profession and parliament), but so many of their letters concern the fate of other letters – letters received, letters gone astray – that one can easily imagine the additional stress placed upon their lives by such a significant but unreliable service. They wrote at a time before the establishment of any official postal network, trusting their letters to friends or professional carriers. The system was thus little changed from the service at Vindolanda about 1,350 years before, a process of write, entrust and hope.
‘If you love me . . . you will not leave me’: Margery Brews sends one of the earliest Valentine greetings to her fiance John Paston III in February 1477.
The Pastons occasionally write of finding ‘the first speedy carrier’ to rush information through, and they frequently called on a man called Juddy to journey back and forth on horseback to London (because of their status, the Pastons may have relied on Juddy almost as a private chauffeur). But the letters tell their own story of uncertainty; undelivered letters may mean unreliable carriers, or they may mean worse. At the start of her letter to her husband regarding Norfolk’s lawlessness, Margaret Paston wrote:
Please it you to weet [know] that I sent you a letter by [my cousin] Berney’s man of Witchingham which was written on St Thomas’ Day