A Time to Read and a Time to Write: Dates, Days, and Saints in the Paston Letters

The Pastons are the most famous family of fifteenth-century England other than, perhaps, the various royals. Their fame rests on the preservation of the many hundreds of letters they wrote to each other and to outsiders, mostly between the 1440s and the 1480s. (1) However, when the letters are read as a window into the tangled politics of East Anglia and the wider realm in the second half of the fifteenth century, dating them poses a problem. And though determining their dates is a matter of some scholarly concern, it is the year of a given letter--a useful bit of information but one that is frequently omitted--that is usually the main consideration. (2) Our interest here, however, is not the year but rather the style or form of a date (or dating tag) within the year--whatever year it happened to be--and we look instead at how the days, dates, months, and even hours of letter writing were spelled out. This focus on the microdating of the letters sheds no light on the larger contours of Paston affairs and fortunes, but it does offer an opportunity to explore the way in which the dating of letters can direct us to such issues as mentalite, lay piety, the routines of daily life, and a conscious and articulated concern for the regiment of calendar and clock. As we explore the mechanics of letter writing and the mnemonics of communication, we see how Paston letter writers chose to site themselves within the various cycles of time and faith. To their authors, stating the year was often of little importance, as letters were delivered within a short interval of being written, and each new one just went atop its predecessors, probably literally as well as in the mental logbook of sender and recipient. (3) But the Pastons were usually more punctilious about some sort of dating of the lesser divisions of the year, and most of their letters carry a useful notation of one type or another, as we shall see. If the year of a letter was taken as self-evident to its recipient and therefore was an expendable item, a more precise day or date of composition would eliminate confusion if items arrived at different intervals, given the vagaries of the post and the problems of catching up with people who were on the move. We can begin our analysis by asserting that any date--and any sort of date--was better than no date at all. However, even this seemingly safe entree must be qualified, as we have a fair number of undated letters. And while no date of any sort seems a rather glaring omission, it was not out of conformity with the conventions or the style of a good deal of medieval epistolography. While the Paston letters were in the newsletter model rather than in that of humanist letters or letters of wisdom or exhortation, the omission of a date in a fair number of their letters never seems to have drawn an adverse comment or aroused the anger of its recipient. (4) What can we say about those undated letters? Each Paston who wrote an appreciable number of letters had at least a few undated ones to his or her credit (or discredit). Some may have been just drafts, and the date would have been added to a final version, entered on an outer wrapping, or perhaps left to the courier for oral delivery. But in some instances the undated letter was signed, sealed, and delivered. However, even with the undated letters we are not always at a dead end; we can divide the fifty or so undated letters, from eleven different Pastons, into two categories, two styles of being undated-- which might seem a bit like dividing by zero. (5) Some letters say nothing at all about their date of composition, leaving the dating conundrum for their future editors to grapple with; from internal evidence we can go no further. But other undated letters do say something about their time of composition, using a style of dating or timing that clearly sufficed for both parties. These are the letters dated in what I refer to as existential dating style. …

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