One family’s involvement in wrecks

One of the key landmarks of surviving English medieval letters is exactly that – a remarkable collection of letters sent to, from, and between members of the Paston family between 1422 and 1509. For such a collection of letters to survive from one family is remarkable enough. For that collection to survive from the Middle Ages makes the collection even more significant. Among the jewels of the collection is the first Valentine in English, sent by Margery Brews in 1477 to her betrothed, one of the Paston family. They illustrate Middle English in current use by real people, not literary English as we might think of it from staple texts such as the Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, for example.

Another remarkable aspect of the collection is that it contains the first surviving account of a shipwreck in a letter in English – most of our medieval wrecks are known from official, usually legal or Parliamentary sources, or from material such as chronicles or accounts written by historians, which were often written either retrospectively or at second-hand, or both, sometimes also encompassing hearsay or more than a whiff of legend.

So when we read the words of William Pekoc (Peacock) written ‘in hast’ on 19 November 1477 to his ‘ryth worschepffull master’ [William consistently spells ‘right’, then often riht, ryht as ryth] Sir John Paston (John Paston II, 1442-1479), we see a description in the words of a witness, not couched, as so often, in legalese, by those hearing plaints at one remove. This is a servant speaking to his employer about something he has seen with his own eyes:

Also there is a grete chyppe go to wrekke be for Wynterton, and there came up on your several grownd gret plente of bowe stawys and waynescotte, and clappalde grete plente. [1]

[‘Also a great ship has been wrecked before Winterton, and an abundance of bowstaves and wainscot boards were washed up on your various lands, and also an abundance of cask staves’: translated into modern English by the author]

This brief snippet of information yields a great deal of detail – the cargo of worked timber and tar suggested that the voyage had originated in the Scandinavia/Baltic area. There is a useful parallel in the wreck of Le Cristofre, bound from Gdansk for Bristol with a cargo that included tar, boards, staves, and other goods such as pitch and wax, lost in 1389 near Great Yarmouth, not far from Winterton. What this also tells us is that both the wreck on the Paston lands at Winterton and the earlier wreck of Le Cristofre were also operating within the aegis of the Hanseatic League.

William Peacock hasn’t just seen the wreck for himself, he’s doing something about it, hiring carts to carry away the wreckage into town. He also lets John Paston know that his right to the wreck is being challenged: ‘Mastras [Mistress] Clere hath sent down hyr men’ to carry away the wreckage – as John’s tenant, she is claiming right of wreck, but, as William advises his master, ‘There is no maner in Wynterton but your; lesse your ryth now and lesse it for ever’. The manorial right to wreck was not in question in terms of whether it existed or not, but the question of who benefited was certainly a bone of contention: the tenant or the landlord.

William also urges John to issue a writ of trespass against the men of nearby Scroby who have taken barrels from the wreck, ‘or ellis it wool do yow meche harm here after’. William has also appraised the potential of the timber cargo: ‘The bordes had ben good for wyndowes and dores’.

Two weeks later this faithful servant, writing ‘ryth werey’ [‘right weary’] has sent word again to his master, naming the local men responsible for abstracting wreckage from the ship and exactly how much it was worth. He also appears somewhat – but not unduly – concerned, that there is a potential spanner in the works as there are five survivors from the ship. These survivors made it legally not a wreck, even though physically it was one.

In other words, as there were persons alive who could claim the wreck, or make claim on behalf of others, strictly speaking the wreck and its cargo were neither unclaimed nor unclaimable under medieval wreck law. Therefore, although there were clearly manorial rights to the wreck, neither John Paston nor ‘Mistress Clere’ had any real claim upon the wreckage, or at least not without enquiring further into the matter. It would have been different if there had been no survivors . . . but William Peacock refers to the survivors almost as an afterthought! [2]

Medieval wrecks usually survive in the documentary record because they were contentious in some way, often because of disputes over right to wreck – and this wreck is a case in point, even though it is recorded in private letters and not in official documents. William’s letters have left us a valuable trace in the records and all the more for what is unsaid as well as said – in his time, the vessel would have been easily recognised as a ship from the Hanseatic League, but it takes knowledge of trading patterns to recognise this feature, so typical of historic documentary records, which tell us things that were obvious to the reader at the time and so were not explicitly said. The cargo leads us to the implied voyage and origins of the ship, and the circles in which she was operating, and we recover much more detail.

Though the surviving letters stop in the early 16th century, members of such a literate family jealous of their rights and unafraid to exercise them were also bound to turn up in the official record, and they do. In documents that bring half-remembered history lessons at school to life, we learn that the Pastons and the Cleres resorted to the law over the right to wreck with cases heard in the Court of Star Chamber under Henry VIII. Both documents are undated: just at the point the letters peter out, Henry VIII has come to the throne and the two cases could refer to any time during his reign from April 1509 to January 1547.

The first case is clearer: Sir John Clere (1511-1557) brought a case against Sir William Paston (1479-1554) and others, including Sir William’s son Clement Paston (1508-1597) [4] for ‘forcibly obstructing him from enjoying his rights of wreck in the manor of Winterton’, so it seems that this feud between the two families had spilled over into another generation. [3] Sir John Clere succession to his father’s estates in 1529 seems a reasonable terminus post quem for the date of the incident, thus effectively halving the potential date range of the document: we now know the wreck must have taken place between 1529 and 1547.

If we accept the 1508 date for Clement’s (later Sir Clement’s) birth then he would have been 21 in 1529, so it is feasible for him to have been involved from that date onwards. Some of the later dates discussed elsewhere for his birth may make the 1529 date tricky – it is difficult to see him involved in his early teens but his later teens, perhaps. 1529 onwards seems secure, however, and perhaps a little later, as Sir John would not have mounted a challenge without legal title to his father’s estate.

A second case, this time brought by Sir William Paston against Sir John Clere, does not specify the location of loss, but as the two families had butted heads previously over wreck at Winterton in 1477 and in the other Star Chamber Case, it is reasonable to suppose it concerns right to wreck at the same manor, which is also a well-known location of loss with many wrecks historically documented there. [5] It is clearly a different wreck, as different persons are named outside the two principals (a counter-claim would have involved the same ‘supporting cast’, albeit in reversed roles) and must date to the same period – perhaps, if the numbering for the Star Chamber records is anything to go by, slightly later. This time there was an ‘assault on the plaintiff’s servants, arising out of dispute as to wreck.’ A possible terminus ante quem might be provided by Clement Paston’s biography in that he was at sea in the navy by 1544 and was therefore, no longer in Norfolk. [6]

Framing the chronology for the two wrecks in this way clarifies that Clement’s involvement in the first case has the hallmarks of youth and a young man still knocking around at home, so to speak and that 1529-ish is reasonably secure in the first case, and somewhat later in the second.

We therefore have three securely recorded wrecks involving Paston lands, but there may be more wrecks with a Paston connection – not involving their lands, but possible active involvement in what we would today class as piracy. These wrecks are securely recorded – it is simply that we can’t directly pin them on one of the Paston ancestors.

The Paston ancestry is shrouded in some obscurity, as the family was of peasant stock and worked its way up into the ranks of the gentry through education and marriage alliances. The first securely recorded Paston is William Paston (1378-1444) but the 1904 edition of the Paston Letters references a Constantine de Paston, who, in 1330, was part of a group of people engaged in inter-communal rivalry and piracy between Southwold and Dunwich. In two distinct events, at least, this group attacked at least five ships of John de Claveryng [7] and another ship belonging to a widow, Anastasia But [8], and some of these ships were wrecked or sunk. Anastasia’s was certainly sunk, and a detail in the Anglo-Norman texts of John de Claveryng’s complaint also indicates that his ships were wrecked: the word naufrerent is used – ‘they wrecked’ (cf. naufrage, ‘shipwreck’ in modern French), a detail lost in summarising the records.

It’s impossible to say whether Constantine de Paston was in truth one of the Paston ancestors (if so, he illustrates the Paston talent for controversy!) but these stories illustrate that local rivalry, whether of competing ports or adjoining landowners, enables preservation in the documentary record (and possibly also, in the Claveryng and But cases, causes them!) Of ordinary fishing vessels, ships without lucrative cargoes, or of other significance, or those that simply did not give rise to disputes, during the Middle Ages, we tend to learn very little.

This makes the preservation of a wreck record of 1477 in letters in ordinary everyday English that was neither literary nor legalese all the more precious. Without William Peacock we would know nothing about this particular wreck at all, and in all the cases we discover more when we read between the lines, or go back to the original language to see something ‘lost in translation’.

Footnotes

[1] Letter 807, repr. in Gairdner, J [ed] 1896 The Paston Letters, Vol. III, 1471-1509 [Westminster: A Constable and Co.]

[2] Letter 808, repr. in Gairdner, J [ed] 1896 The Paston Letters, Vol. III, 1471-1509 [Westminster: A Constable and Co.]

[3] Catalogue entry for STAC 2/10/25, Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings of Henry VIII, Folio 50, held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7122306

[4] Clement Paston’s life is dated 1508-1597 in the family tree published on the Paston Footprints website, a collaborative endeavour between the University of East Anglia, the Paston Heritage Society, and Collisions Theatre, and represents the most recent available information; his biography in the History of Parliament Online states that he was born by 1523, which must be the earliest secure reference to his life; his tomb monument states that he lived ‘Twice fortie yeares & somewhat more’, which, if true, places his birth as 1516 at the latest. All this has ramifications for the date of the wreck involved in the subsequent discussion.

[5] Catalogue entry for STAC 2/29/121, Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings of Henry VIII, held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3978192

[6] Sir Clement Paston, MP for Norfolk, 1563, in History of Parliament Online

[7] Catalogue entries for SC 8/39/1929, in Petitions to the King etc., held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9062132 ; SC 8/178/8857, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9294725 ; SC 8/256/12800 Petitioners: John de Claveringg (Clavering). Name(s): de Claveringg (Clavering),… | The National Archives; Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, Vol. 2, 1330-34, p199; p235=6; Gairdner, J, (ed.) 1904 The Paston Letters 1422-1509, Vol. II, accessed online via Project Gutenberg

[8] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, Vol, 2, 1330-34, p62, pp134-5; catalogue entry for SC 8/39/1929 in Petitions to the King etc., held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9062132