The Paston Letters 1422-1509, A.D. (1875)

This is a three-volume set which seems to have culminated a lot of work in the late nineteenth century to discover and print the complete Paston correspondence. My guess is that James Gairdner, of the Public Record Office, who edited, and Edward Arber, who published, are leading lights of the scholarly history of these records of the fifteenth century, even though I feel sure that some of their conclusions about who did what and when have long since been overturned. Which itself gives evidence of the moveable feast-like quality here; does a particular reference apply to John the elder, Sir John, his first son, or the later Sir John, his second? Often other evidence can provide an answer: such-and-such, who is referred to in such a position, was so only in the lifetime of one or other of them, or died before some other person achieved their title, and so on. What that gives me is an insight into the process, and it's one I'm fascinated by, would love to do similar things myself, for a living preferably. Two other interests are catered to here. One is what people wrote about in those days - these are not on the whole personal revelations of wondering souls, rather they are updates about politics and money and all sorts of cases people had in play, in terms of inheritance. Every now and then a parent will warn a child to apply themselves more, or perhaps a mother will adjure a child to recognize that they need to reply, and not leave all sorts of threads hanging. Of course we are pre-postal, so letters always have bearers, who are often mentioned as being able to provide more information if required on some key matter. The other interest which is slaked in reading these is language. These are in the original spelling and syntax, which becomes very familiar over such a long journey. Variation in spelling, given that there were so many fewer rules; ways of greeting; the invocation to the Lord having you in his keeping at the end (or variations thereof); the language world before easy possessives - "the Earl of Warwick his wife" and so on; how close English was to what we would now think of as something like pan-Europeany Spanish, with 'what' spelled qwat, and 'you' as zow. A brimming compendium for a language nerd and history nerd like me.