Let me introduce you to Margaret Paston, a medieval woman who basically lived through a non-stop

Tudor-era soap opera, wrote it all down, and somehow still found the time to nag her husband

about lace samples. She wasn't royalty. She didn't die on a scaffold. She didn't even technically

lived during the Tudor period. She died in 1484 a year before

Henry the 7th took the crown. But if we're talking about the real lives of late medieval

women, the kind of lives that didn't involve crowns or coronations, Margaret's is one of the

best documented ones that we've got. And that is because of the

Paston Letters, a massive collection of over a thousand letters written by and about her family

between 1422 and 1509. The Pastons were social climbers from Norfolk who never missed a chance to sue their neighbors,

grab land, or feud with literally anybody and everybody.

If you've ever wished you could read a bunch of medieval texts that amount to my in-laws are awful,

and please buy the right kind of wool this time, this is your moment. So let's talk about

Margaret, wife, mother, letter dictator, siege survivor, and reluctant matriarch of one of the

most dysfunctional families in English history. Hello, friend, and welcome back to the YouTube channel for the Renaissance English History

podcast. I am your host, Heather, and I have been podcasting about Tudor England since 2009

with my show, which makes it the original Tudor History podcast. This channel, of course, is where I put all of my

content from all of my shows as well as lots of extra videos like this one right here. Today,

you're talking about Margaret Paston and the Paston Letters. If you've been around Tudor History

for a little bit, you have likely heard about the Paston Let letters. I did an episode on them for Valentine's

Day a few years ago because one of them is considered to be like the earliest Valentine's card or

one of the earliest Valentine's cards. But today we're going to talk about the life of Margaret,

the matriarch and why her writing and dictating these letters is just so extraordinary.

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