Recently, a leading Norfolk auction house sold a historic archive linked to the famous Paston letters. This important set of documents, which provides a unique window into earlier forms of the English language, was originally gathered together by Sir John Fenn, an antiquarian from the Norfolk town of Dereham who is best remembered – and with enormous gratitude by linguists and philologists – for his collecting, editing, and publishing of these Paston letters.
His own annotated volumes, and the manuscript notes which he used in his landmark 18th-century editions of the Paston letters, had remained with his descendants since the 1780s until this sale, where they were recently bought for £8,400 “by an academic institution”.
Students of Early Modern English are very fortunate to have available to them this famous collection of letters, which consists of correspondence amounting to a thousand or so letters written by and to members of the Paston family in the 15th and 16th centuries. The family were landed gentry who took their name from the village of Paston, which is situated very close to the north-east coast of Norfolk, near Bacton.
The early letters are of such great importance because they provide the best evidence we have from anywhere in Britain for what everyday vernacular Late Middle English and Early Modern English were like. Middle English is the name generally given to our language as it was spoken and written from about 1066 until the late 1400s, and Early Modern English dates from about 1500 to 1800.
The quote below comes from a postscript to a letter which was sent in 1448 by Margaret Paston (née Mautby) to her husband John Paston. Margaret was originally from Mautby on the (former) island of Flegg in eastern Norfolk. The Pastons were generally literate, but this text, like most of the letters, was dictated to a scribe. It is nevertheless unmistakably written in the East Anglian English of the 15th century.
Suggested Reading
The linguistic logic behind dropped syllables
In this postscript, Margaret tells her husband about the aftermath of a dispute which had taken place between the Pastons’ family chaplain, James Gloys, and a member of a rival family, John Wyndam (or Wymondham – the name of the Norfolk town of Wymondham is still pronounced Wind’m.):
“Qwhan Wymdam seyd that Jamys xuld dy I seyd to hym that I soposyd that he xuld repent hym if he schlow hym or dede to hym any bodyly harm; and he seyd nay, he xuld never repent hym ner have a ferdyng wurth of harm thow he kelyd you and hym bothe.”
It was usual in Norfolk at that time to write words with initial qwh- which elsewhere in the country were spelled with wh-. Also, people writing English in Norfolk during this period would use x- at the beginning of words which in modern English are written starting with sh-.
Schlow as found in this postscript is the past-tense form of the verb to slay. The Christmas carol Unto Us Is Born a Son contains the line “and slew the little childer” (and killed the little children), using the similar form slew.
Farthing
Ferdyng was the rendering of the word farthing in Late Middle English. A farthing was a coin which was worth one quarter of a penny in pre-decimal British currency – etymologically it was originally a “fourth-ing” – which meant that there were 960 farthings to the pound. The original Old English form was féorðing, corresponding to Old Norse fiórðungr. The coins ceased to be legal tender in 1961, by which time inflation had meant that they had become something of a worthless nuisance.
