Part 2

[Footnote 10-1: The missing letters of volume iv. are Nos. 24, 97, 99, and 105 (Nos. 551, 726, 735, and 758 of this edition). The last never formed part of Fenn’s collection. I do not know of any other noted by him as ‘no longer in his possession.’ The letters missing of the Appendix are only Nos. 997 and 1019. Of the four said to be missing in Christie’s catalogue, 1016 is not a document at all, the number having been accidentally skipped in the Inventory, and the other three are in the British Museum. No. 1077, however, is inaccurately described in the Appendix.]

About fifteen years after the discovery at Roydon there came another discovery elsewhere. On the 29th March 1890 it was announced in the _Athenæum_ that the missing originals of Fenn’s first and second volumes--that is to say, the MSS. presented to King George III.--had likewise come to light again. They were found at Orwell Park, in Suffolk, in 1889, after the death of the late Colonel Tomline, and they remain there in the possession of his cousin, Mr. E. G. Pretyman, M.P., now Secretary to the Admiralty, who kindly showed them to me at his house soon after their discovery. They have come to him among family papers and heirlooms of which, being only tenant for life, he is not free to dispose until some doubts can be removed as to their past history; and I accordingly forbear from saying more on this point except that their place of deposit indicates that they may either have got mixed with the private papers and books of Pitt, of which a large number are in the Orwell library, or with those of his old tutor and secretary, Dr. George Pretyman, better known as Bishop Tomline. Dr. Pretyman had just been appointed Bishop of Lincoln when Fenn published his first two volumes, and it was many years afterwards that he assumed the name of Tomline. But whether these MSS. came to his hands or to Pitt’s, or under what circumstances they were delivered to either, there is no evidence to show. Possibly the King’s illness in 1788 prevented their being placed, or, it may be, replaced, in the Royal Library, where they were intended to remain.

The edition of these Letters published by Mr. Arber in 1872-75 was in three volumes. It was printed from stereotype plates, and has been reissued more than once by the Messrs. Constable with corrections, and latterly with an additional volume containing the Preface and Introduction by themselves, and a Supplement giving the full text of those newly-found letters of which the reader had to be content with a bare catalogue in 1875. My original aim to have a complete collection of all extant Paston Letters had been defeated; and there seemed nothing for it but to let them remain even at the last in a general series, an Appendix and a Supplement. The present publishers, however, by arrangement with Messrs. Constable, were anxious to meet the wants of scholars who desired to possess the letters, now that the collection seems to be as complete as it is ever likely to be, in a single series, and in a more luxurious form than that in which they have hitherto appeared. I have accordingly rearranged the letters as desired--a task not altogether without its difficulties when nice chronological questions had to be weighed and the story of the Pastons in all its details had for so many years ceased to occupy a foremost place in my thoughts; and I trust that the unity of the series will now give satisfaction. At the same time, the opportunity has not been lost of rectifying such errors as have been brought to my notice, which could not have been conveniently corrected in the stereotype editions.

Notwithstanding the recovery of the originals of the letters printed by Fenn, it has not been thought necessary to edit these anew from the MSS. Whether such a thing would be altogether practicable even now may perhaps be a question; at all events it would have delayed the work unduly. Fenn’s editing is, as I have shown in previous editions, fairly satisfactory on the whole, and it is not to be supposed that a comparison of all the printed letters with the original MSS. would lead to results of very material consequence. A large number have been compared already, and the comparison inspires the greatest confidence in his care and accuracy. His misreadings are really very few, his method of procedure having been such as to prevent their being either many or serious; while as to his suppressions I have found no reason to believe, from what examination I have been able to make, that any of them were of very material importance.

It was not editorial carelessness on Fenn’s part which made a new edition desirable in 1872. It was, first of all, the advance of historical criticism since his day--or rather, perhaps, I should say, of the means of verifying many things by the publication of historical sources and the greater accessibility of historical records. And secondly, the discovery of such a large number of unprinted documents belonging to the Paston Collection made it possible to study that collection as a whole, and fill up the outlines of information which they contained on matters both public and private. On this subject I may be allowed simply to quote what I said in 1872 in the preface to the first volume:--

‘The errors in Fenn’s chronology are numerous, and so exceedingly misleading that, indispensable as these Letters now are to the historian, there is not a single historian who has made use of them but has misdated some event or other, owing to their inaccurate arrangement. Even writers who have been most on their guard in some places have suffered themselves to be misled in others. This is no reproach to the former Editor, whose work is indeed a perfect model of care and accuracy for the days in which he lived; but historical criticism has advanced since that time, and facilities abound which did not then exist for comparing one set of documents with another, and testing the accuracy of dates by public records. The completion of Blomefield’s _History of Norfolk_, and the admirable index added to that work of late years by Mr. Chadwick, have also been of eminent service in verifying minute facts. Moreover, the comprehensive study of the whole correspondence, with the advantage of having a part already published to refer to, has enabled me in many cases to see the exact bearing of particular letters, which before seemed to have no certain place in the chronology, not only upon public events, but upon the Private affairs of the Paston family. . . .

[Sidenote: Accuracy of Fenn’s text.] ‘The care taken by Sir John Fenn to secure the accuracy of his text can be proved by many tests. It might, indeed, be inferred from the elaborate plan of editing that he adopted, exhibiting in every case two transcripts of the same letter, the one to show the precise spelling and punctuation of the original, the other to facilitate the perusal by modern orthography. A work on which so much pains were bestowed, and which was illustrated besides by numerous facsimiles of the original handwritings, signatures, paper-marks, and seals of the letters, was not likely to have been executed in a slovenly manner, in so far as the text is concerned. But we are not left in this case to mere presumptive evidence. The originals of the fifth volume have been minutely examined by a committee of the Society of Antiquaries, and compared all through with the printed text, and the general result of this examination was that the errors are very few, and for the most part trivial. Now, if this was the case with regard to that volume, which it must be remembered was published after Fenn’s death from transcripts prepared for the press, and had not the benefit of a final revision of the proof-sheets by the editor, we have surely every reason to suppose that the preceding volumes were at least not less accurate.

‘At all events, any inaccuracies that may exist in them were certainly not the result of negligence. I have been favoured by Mr. Almack, of Melford, near Sudbury, in Suffolk, with the loan of several sheets of MS. notes bequeathed to him by the late Mr. Dalton, of Bury St. Edmunds, who transcribed a number of the original MSS. for Sir John Fenn. These papers contain a host of minute queries and criticisms, which were the result of a close examination of the first four volumes, undertaken at Fenn’s request. Those on the first two volumes are dated on the 3rd and 7th of May 1788, more than a year after the book was published. But on vols. iii. and iv. there are two separate sets of observations, the first of which were made on the transcripts before they were sent to press, the other, like those on the two first volumes, on the published letters. From an examination of these criticisms, and also from the results of the examination of the fifth volume by the committee of the Society of Antiquaries,[13-1] I have been led to the opinion that the manner in which Sir John Fenn prepared his materials for the press was as follows:-- [Sidenote: Mode in which Fenn prepared the letters for publication.] Two copies were first made of every letter, the one in the exact spelling and punctuation of the original, the other in modern orthography. Both these copies were taken direct from the original, and possibly in the case of the first two volumes they were both made by Fenn himself. In vols. iii. and iv., however, it is stated that many of the transcripts were made by Mr. Dalton, while those of vol. v. were found to be almost all in his handwriting when that volume was sent to press in 1823.[13-2] But this statement probably refers only to the copies in the antique spelling. Those in modern spelling I believe to have been made for the most part, if not altogether, by Fenn himself. When completed, the two copies were placed side by side, and given to Mr. Dalton to take home with him. Mr. Dalton then made a close comparison of the two versions, and pointed out every instance in which he found the slightest disagreement between them, or where he thought an explanation might be usefully bracketed into the modern version. These comments in the case of vol. iii. are upwards of 400 in number, and extend over eighteen closely written pages quarto. It is clear that they one and all received the fullest consideration from Sir John Fenn before the work was published. Every one of the discrepancies pointed out between the two versions is rectified in the printed volume, and there cannot be a doubt that in every such case the original MS. was again referred to, to settle the disputed reading.

‘One or two illustrations of this may not be unacceptable to the reader. The following are among the observations made by Mr. Dalton on the transcripts of vol. iii. as prepared for press. [Sidenote: Examples.] In Letter viii. was a passage in which occurred the words, “that had of your father certain lands _one_ seven years or eight years agone.” Mr. Dalton’s experience as a transcriber appears to have suggested to him that “one” was a very common misreading of the word “over” in ancient MSS., and he accordingly suggested that word as making better sense. His surmise turned out to be the true reading, and the passage stands corrected accordingly in the printed volume. In Letter xxiv. there was a discrepancy in the date between the transcript in ancient spelling and the modern version. In the latter it was “the 4th day of December,” whereas the former gave it as the 3rd. On examination it appears that the _modern_ version was found to be correct, a Roman “iiij.” having been misread in the other as “iij.” Thus we have very sufficient evidence that the modern copy could not have been taken from the ancient, but was made independently from the original MS. Another instance of the same thing occurs in the beginning of Letter xli., where the words “to my power” had been omitted in the literal transcript, but were found in the modern copy.

‘Mr. Dalton’s part in the work of transcription appears clearly in several of his observations. One of the transcripts is frequently referred to as “my copy”; and an observation made on Letter lxxxvi. shows pretty clearly that the copy so referred to was the literal one. At the bottom of that letter is the following brief postscript:--“Utinam iste mundus malignus transiret et concupiscentia ejus”; on which Mr. Dalton remarks as follows:--“I have added this on _your_ copy as supposing it an oversight, and hope it is properly inserted.” Thus it appears that Mr. Dalton’s own transcript had the words which were deficient in the other, and that, being tolerably certain they existed in the original, he transferred them to the copy made by Fenn. Now when it is considered that these words are written in the original MS. with peculiarly crabbed contractions, which had to be preserved in the literal version as exactly as they could be represented in type,[15-1] it will, I think, appear evident that Mr. Dalton could never have ventured to supply them in such a form without the original before him. It is clear, therefore, that his copy was the literal transcript, and that of Fenn the modern version.

‘Again, in Letter xxxi. of the same volume, on the second last line of page 137, occur the words, “that he obey not the certiorari.” On this passage occurs the following query--“The word for ‘obey’ seems unintelligible. Have I not erred from the original in my copy?” Another case will show how by this examination the errors of the original transcripts were eliminated. In Letter xxxiv., at the bottom of pp. 144-5, occurs the name of Will or William Staunton. It appears this name was first transcribed as “Robert Fraunton” in the right or modern version; on which Mr. Dalton remarks, “It is William in orig.” (Mr. Dalton constantly speaks of the transcript in ancient spelling as the “original” in these notes, though it is clear he had not the real original before him at the time he made them). Strangely enough, Mr. Dalton does not suspect the surname as well as the Christian name, but it is clear that both were wrong, and that they were set right in consequence of this query directing the editor’s attention once more to the original MS.’

[Footnote 13-1: _Archæol._ vol. xli. p. 39.]

[Footnote 13-2: _See_ Advertisement in the beginning of the volume, p. vii.]

[Footnote 15-1: The following is the exact form in which they stand in the literal or left-hand version:--‘Utia’z iste mu’d maligu{s} t’nsir{t} & c’up’ia e{s}.’]

[[‘The care taken by Sir John _opening quotation mark missing_]]

To this I may add some further evidences of Fenn’s editorial care and accuracy. When the second volume of my first edition was published in 1874, my attention was called, as already mentioned, to the existence at Holland House of the original of one of those letters[15-2] which I had reprinted from Fenn. It was one of the letters in Fenn’s third volume, and only one[15-3] other letter in that volume had then turned up. I carefully compared both these papers with the documents as printed, and in both, as I remarked in the Preface to vol. ii., the exact spelling was given with the most scrupulous accuracy, so that there was scarcely the most trivial variation between the originals and the printed text. But a more careful estimate, alike of Fenn’s merits and of his defects as an editor, became possible when, on the publication of the third volume of the same edition, I was able, as I have already shown, to announce at the last moment the result of a cursory inspection of the originals of his third and fourth volumes. And what I said at that time may be here transcribed:--

‘The recovery of these long-lost originals, although, unfortunately, too late to be of the use it might have been in this edition, is important in two ways: first, as affording an additional means of testing Fenn’s accuracy as an editor; and secondly, as a means of testing the soundness of some occasional inferences which the present Editor was obliged to draw for himself in the absence of the originals. More than one instance occurs in this work in which it will be seen that I have ventured to eliminate from the text as spurious a heading printed by Fenn as if it were a part of the document which it precedes. Thus, in No. 19,[16-1] I pointed out that the title, in which Judge Paston is called “Sir William Paston, knight,” could not possibly be contemporaneous; and the document itself shows that this opinion was well founded. It bears, indeed, a modern endorsement in a handwriting of the last century much to the same effect as Sir John Fenn’s heading; but this, of course, is no authority at all. In the same way I showed that the title printed by Fenn, as a heading to No. 191,[16-2] was utterly erroneous, and could not possibly have existed in the original MS. This conclusion is also substantiated by the document, which, I may add, bears in the margin the heading “Copia,” showing that it was a transcript. The document itself being an important State Paper, there were probably a number of copies made at the time; but as no others have been preserved, it is only known to us as one of the Paston Letters.

‘Another State Paper (No. 238),[16-3] of which a copy was likewise sent to John Paston, has a heading which Sir John Fenn very curiously misread. It is printed in this edition[16-4] as it stands in the first, _Vadatur J. P._, meaning apparently “John Paston gives security, or stands pledged.” But it turns out on examination that the reading of the original is _Tradatur J. P._ (Let this be delivered to John Paston).

‘To return to No. 19, it will be seen that I was obliged to reprint from Fenn in the preliminary note a few words which he had found written on the back of the letter, of which it was difficult to make any perfect sense, but which seemed to imply that the bill was delivered to Parliament in the 13th year of Henry VI. I pointed out that there seemed to be some error in this, as no Parliament actually met in the 13th year of Henry VI. The original endorsement, however, is perfectly intelligible and consistent with facts, when once it has been accurately deciphered. The handwriting, indeed, is very crabbed, and for a considerable time I was puzzled; but the words are as follows:--“Falsa billa Will’i Dallyng ad parliamentum tempore quo Henricus Grey fuit vicecomes, ante annum terciodecimum Regis Henrici vj{ti}.” I find as a matter of fact that Henry Grey was sheriff (_vicecomes_) of Norfolk, first in the 8th and 9th, and again in the 12th and 13th year of Henry VI., and that Parliament sat in November and December of the 12th year (1433); so that the date of the document is one year earlier than that assigned to it.

‘Again, I ventured to question on internal evidence the authorship of a letter (No. 910)[17-1] which Fenn had assigned to William Paston, the uncle of Sir John Paston. At the end is the signature “Wyll’m Paston,” with a reference in Fenn to a facsimile engraved in a previous volume. But the evidence seemed to me very strong that the William Paston who wrote this letter was not Sir John’s uncle, but his brother. The inspection of the original letter itself has proved to me that I was right. The signatures of the two Williams were not altogether unlike each other; but the signature appended to this letter is unquestionably that of the younger man, not of his uncle; while the facsimile, to which Fenn erroneously refers the reader, is that of the uncle’s signature taken from a different letter.

‘It may perhaps be conceived that if even these few errors could be detected in Fenn’s work by one who had not yet an opportunity of consulting the original MSS., a large number of others would be discovered by a minute comparison of the printed volumes with the letters themselves. This suspicion, however, is scarcely borne out by the facts. I cannot profess to have made anything like an exhaustive examination, but so far as I have compared these MSS. with the printed text, I find no evidence of more than very occasional inaccuracy, and, generally speaking, in matters very immaterial. On the contrary, an inspection of these last recovered originals has greatly confirmed the opinion, which the originals previously discovered enabled me to form, of the scrupulous fidelity and care with which the letters were first edited. For the most part, not only the words, but the exact spelling of the MSS. is preserved, with merely the most trifling variations. Sir John, indeed, was not a trained archivist, and there are what may be called errors of system in his mode of reading, such as, for instance, the omission of contractions that may be held to represent a final _e_, or the rendering a final dash by _s_ instead of _es_. In such things the plan that he pursued was obvious. But it is manifest that in other respects he is very accurate indeed; for he had made so careful a study of these MSS. that he was quite familiar with most of the ancient modes of handwriting, and, on the whole, very seldom mistook a reading.

‘I may add, that this recent discovery enables me to vindicate his accuracy in one place, even where it seemed before to be very strangely at fault. At the end of Letter iii. of the fifth volume,[18-1] occurs in the original edition the following postscript:--“I warn you keep this letter close, and lose it not; rather burn it.” On comparing this letter with the original, the Committee of the Society of Antiquaries, some years ago, were amazed to find that there was no such postscript in the MS., and they were a good deal at a loss to account for its insertion. It now appears, however, that this letter was preserved in duplicate, for among the newly-recovered MSS. I discovered a second copy, being a corrected draft, in Margaret Paston’s own hand, at the end of which occurs the P.S. in question.