Customer Reviews

Blood and Roses: One Family's Struggle and Triumph During the Tumultuous Wars of the Roses

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I can't praise this book too highly. On one level, it is the story of a tumultuous period in late mediaeval (15th century)England (The Wars of the Roses). On another level, it is the detailed story of the rise of the Paston family from a bondsman farmer (tied to the land) to gentry who could marry into the aristocracy. The interplay of these two brings alive the former. Along the way, Helen Castor tells the more circumscribed story with numerous asides explaining the significance of things we would find difficult to relate to today (e.g., the vaguaries of legal rights to land, or the severe economic consequences of selling a forest to pay debt), but which were so important at the time.

If you have any interest in history at all (particularly English late mediaeval, though not, by any means, restricted to that) do read this book. Helen Castor writes beautifully and brings the period alive.

This is anything but "dry-as-dust" history - it will carry you along like the best of Dumas, even though it is non-fiction. Brava Helen; I can't wait for the next.

How little people change! In a world of chicanery and deviousness with a civil war raging, how does a family fend off enemies and progress in wealth and status? Castor uses the private correspondence of the Paston family to weave a fascinating story of a family's struggles and survival during the War of the Roses.

Battles, beheadings, political mayhem, worrying about the son in London who seems to be a spendthrift dilettante and the daughter sleeping with an employee when she should be aspiring to at least a knight if not a duke. It's all here along with whether it is better to rescue your wife trapped in the manor surrounded by men with crossbows, or let nature take its course!

I enjoyed this book very much. It is specifically about the family's history during the period of the War of the Roses, and this time really comes alive with all of its uncertainties and political instability. The book occasionaly gets mired in extensive detail about the property problems faced by the family - but certainly shows how much has changed in terms of security of land tenure and property rights since this period. It probably helps to have some initial knowledge of Plantagenet vs. York issues to get into the book, but as a layman myself, I was able to follow the bigger story, of deposed kings and usurpers fairly easily, and was thoroughly engrossed as well in the personality profiles of the kings, princes, peers, and queens depicted.

This is a highly unusual book. I believe this is the sort of material that's usually buried in PhD theses and never reaches a general audience.

Castor's exhaustive research shows as she reconstructs the history of the Paston family and its attempts to climb the social ladder of the landed gentry. In 15th century England, there is no title insurance. You can lose your land to claims of better connected people who may be the progeny of previous owners, or may be just better connected. You can also lose it in a seige and hope that your connections are good enough to have a hearing in a court where you hope to get connected people on your side. You can also lose this property, and be imprisoned as well, if an ancestor of yours was "unfree" and therefore not able to own the property you claim.

The John Paston Family seems ill equipped to play this game. While the book does not deal with domestic problems, there are some unmistakable facts. William's other sons, who have better and firmer inheritances are in deep background (until one comes around to lay claim) leaving John, the semi-disinherited older son, to fend for himself. He's in this situation because his mother renounced his father's written will in favor of an alleged death bed testimony. This testimony works to the favor of the younger sons which essentially sets John up for failure. This is a mother who beats a daughter, whom she keeps in spinsterhood (withheld dowry), such that her head cracks.

John's wife Margaret raises children and runs the contested manor, which becomes a war zone (she actually fights skirmishs and battles) while her husband networks in London. There is little detail what he does with his time, and he must have a lot of it on his hands. No wonder Margaret becomes cranky in the end. Unfortunately she takes it out on her two sons, both of whom, also set up for failure by parental decisions, risk their lives for this family enterprise.

The tale is interesting for what it reveals of life at this time, but it is overly long in detail. Descriptions of battles, tangential players and some quotes from letters (some so convoluted they produce more confusion than enhancement) could well be eliminated in favor of a smoother analytical treatement. It isn't until p. 200+ that the author reveals what you seem to think, (but wonder if you've missed) that these people might be creating their own problems.

Also hard to understand is the true fiscal plight of the family. They are always in financial straights, but are ordering clothing (lots of detail on items the modern reader cannot identify), shopping, entertaining and hiring soldiers and servants. They seem to be not only living beyond their means, but reaching well beyond them as well.

I like that the author describes the provenence of the letters at the end, and not the beginning. This is the time the reader can really appreciate their value.

Now I understand the Mediaeval belief in a wheel of fortune. This book really does portray middle class life in the fifteenth century with a realism rarely encountered. It is not easy reading but there is plenty of meat! I had never really understood before how the ups & downs of the nobility during a tumultous period affected the ordinary middle class. Now it is much clearer. One mystery remained for me. How could a son who apparently spent most of his life in the law courts suddenly be asked to join Edward 1V in a jousting tournament at Eltham? I can not imagine many of our current lawyers accepting such a challenge. An excellent book.

I was pleasantly surprised, recently, by Helen Castor's "Blood and Roses". I had expected another urbane, boring, and dusty history for England's most turbulent civil war- the War of the Roses. Instead, Castor presents a 15th century English family's struggle for peerage, identity, and future during England's most tumultuous pre Commonwealth period.

This remarkable 426-page 2006 paperback is destined to become a War of the Roses classic. The story is well documented (with 23 pages of endnotes, an extensive select bibliography, and a dozen photos). Clearly saying that their papers have a "unique place in the history of medieval England", Castor narrates from the Paston family's letters, their realty and legal contracts, and other original documents.

In 1400, the lowborn Paston family begins to struggle for land ownership, for money, for gentry status, and for political presence. Their rise is plagued with other families' jealousies, aristocratic theft, familial betrayal, and royal expectation, all during various would-be governments' dash to power. Through the years the Pastons play on every side. By the middle 1700s the family has achieved viscount status, castles, manor houses, and positions in the king's personal staff. Theirs is a dramatic tale worthy of history's notice and analysis.

The Paston narrative seems a microcosm for the turbulent times in which they lived, worked, plotted, loved, fought, and died. What finally happens with the Pastons? Read "Blood and Roses" and find out.

Even though it seems long at first glance, I read Castor in a short time. Her novel-like writing style kept me in the story. I couldn't put it down! This book is a must read for York versus Lancaster buffs, medieval English history enthusiasts, and Middle Ages genealogists. Get your copy soon.

Excellent, very readable account of family life in the late 1400's, set against tumultuous times of civil war. Although this is referenced history, it reads like a novel!
The story of the Pastons is illuminated from their unique letters that fortunately, were not lost to history, as so many contemporary documents. Their rise to the upper middle class, over 3 generations, from peasant origins seems remarkable, for the time and place!
The title was taken from a historical quote about the time that was filled with the stench of "blood and roses"

This book tells the story of the Paston family of England from the aftermath of the arrival of Black Plague in England (1348) to about 1503. These dark times saw the erosion and eventual complete collapse of royal authority in England and the loss of English power in France in a succession of multiple rebellions, usurpations of the throne, kings and royal heirs murdered and killed in battle, a mad king, many nobles executed for supposed "treason," considerable social unrest, dislocation and lawless anarchy (most of it due to the Wars of the Roses).

The Paston family was then of no national importance and never achieved lasting national prominence. They first emerged from the peasantry into "gentle" status (i.e. members of the local well-to-do landowners in East Anglia) in the lifetime of William Paston (1379-1444), son of a peasant farmer, successful lawyer, royal judge and skilled social networker who made the family fortune. The astute William was the ablest of the family and was the source of all its eventual prosperity, including the achievement in 1673 of the earldom of Yarmouth. Unfortunately the second Earl died virtually bankrupt and without heirs in 1732, extinguishing William Paston's direct line.

The second Earl's executors, however, discovered an enormous trove of letters and documents dating from the end of Henry V's reign through the reign of the first Tudor, Henry VII (about 1422 to 1509). The Paston Letters are unique among medieval English documents. They are incomparably more voluminous, extensive and personal than any other similar documents from the time.

The Letters were mainly written to serve the family's unceasing efforts to protect and increase their new social standing and wealth, but they also give a rich picture of life in such violent times and great insight into the personal lives of Paston family members and associates. Nothing else comes close to revealing so much of the actuality of lives of the time as perceived by those who lived them. The Letters immortalized the Pastons and are invaluable to history.

Author Castor's narrative is, of course, primarily based on the Letters, which she uses with great skill to construct a coherent story of more than three generations of Pastons, with an epilogue on the family's ultimate fate and a concise essay on the discovery and scholarship of the Letters. Castor is a gifted writer who makes her protagonists, both men and women, live for the reader.

The book does not directly concern the high politics of the day except as those politics affected the Pastons' search for political patrons who might help them protect their property and social status. The great interest of the book to us is the intimate glimpse it gives of life in a provincial gentry family seeking to protect itself in perilous times. The great accomplishment of Ms. Castor is the ability with which she makes these people and their beliefs speak to us so that we share their vanished world. As always the past is a foreign country where things are done differently indeed; but, thanks to Ms. Castor's skill, today's reader has an able and eloquent guide to those foreign parts. An outstanding book.

I agree with the review of Nicholas Warren, that this book is more than just a dry historical account of a side-bar to the War of the Roses. I was especially struck by the legal minutiae which is revealed in the letters of the Paston family. Not only is the language of these often private letters familiar from the reading of Shakespeare, revealing that Shakespeare's Middle English was prevelent in the vernacular decades before the plays were written, but it is rich with sentence structure and words we simply no longer have in English.

I admired Castor's literary trick of portraying the Paston family's fortunes, misfortunes and turns-of-fortunes in the terms of the wider world. The English monarchy's descent into the war of the Roses is paralleled deliciously by the legal back-and-forths of John Paston. His tribulations really reflect a microcosm of the bigger stage he is trying to act upon.

I would fault the writer, however, for her over-identification with the Paston family. This is easily done, given the immediacy of the language in the letters, as well as the drama in the lives of the people involved. Also, the class the Pastons occupied, as low-born folks rising socially and economically against all obstacles, is particularly well revealed, given the fact that we are not taught that yuppies existed in 15th century England. This is a revelation. But, the writer has overlooked the core nature of her subjects.

When neccesary, and judiciously, Castor makes moral suggestions about the motivations of the people involved in the book's events. We learn that some lords who rode roughshod over landowners' rights in order to procure a tasty estate, did so extra-legally, and earned the disdain and loathing of their peers, often enough. So the writer will weigh in and suggest (not heavy handedly) that this duke, or that rich merchant was a scumbag for seizing someone's lands. However, she fails to apply this same (not restricted to using a modern perspective, but in fact, viewing the events as the contemporaries also would) moral compass to her subjects in the Paston family.

Not that she allows us to forgive them their avarice entirely, or that she hides their baser motivations, but she does make excuses , for example, of John Paston during his abhorrent behavior over the Falstoff estates.

From my perspective, given the evidence of even his wife and friends telling him to compromise with those challenging his right to the estate of Sir John Falstoff, as well as his alienation of those loyal servants of Falstoff, John Paston is revealed as a scoundrel. I think Castor should have called him out, as she did Thomas Daniel, the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, as well as the other jerks we meet through the letters, and the legal records they left behind.

It was easy for me to see that Paston was using legal avenues to try to steal estates, screw over loyal servants of the dead Falstoff, and that he did so with a sense of entitlement (strange for the grandson of a bondsman, but, hey, that helps make the book such a revelation) which is very familiar, given modern economics. Those he dealt with weren't saints either, but were also avaricious self-severs.

John Paston is not an easily likeable hero. He's a bit of a villain who abandons his familial duties and his friends' loyalties in order to advance himself, often unsuccesfully. Not only does he neglect his nearly-spinster sister's need for a husband (which was an interesting side-side-bar that had me wondering what tragedy had happened to the woman), but he ticks off his sons, who labour for his cause in London and in Norfolk, including taking up arms to secure disputed manor houses from the men-at-arms of powerful lords; as well as disinheriting his own brothers, against his mother's wishes. Castor tries to be reasonable about this character flaw, but Paston is a crappy relative, not only by our standards, but by those of his often bewildered peers.

John Paston also reveals himself to be a coward, who won't send a son or himself to fight for the new Duke of York against the Lancastrians, then petitions said duke self-righteously for favors. While I appreciate pacifisme, Paston's absence from the field, and his unwillingness to commit himself to the cause of either side, may to some show him to be a shrewd negotiator, but it also shows (certainly to his contemporaries) that he's not willing to sacrifice for others; only for himself. Castor makes his ordeal seem like an admirable, good fight; I think the guy's "yuppie scum", to use a not-so-outdated term of the late 20th century.

But, she writes the book and presents the information in such a way that one is easily able to arrive at conclusions different from the author's. This reveals good writing, and unbiased scholarship, so I applaud that in Castor's work.

The fact that this book can be bought for so little money is a gift to most scholarship of the period. This book should be (probably is) required reading in a variety of history classes: not just plain, old early Middle Ages British history, but English legal history, social history and for an insight to the education available to members of the lower gentry in the mid-1400s. I know the Renaissance was beginning, but I was really surprised by the literacy of the Paston family, only two generations removed from peasant status. Husbands and wives sharing correspondence, with all the veiled suggestions and tender heart declarations you might expect are documented here; also, Paston educated all his kids, sending them to school in London. His family was up and coming, modern and riding the socio-political lightening, for sure! I will always love this book for revealing such facts to me.

This book was a very good read. It was more about the personal struggles of one family than about the details of the war of the roses, however there was just enough general history to allow readers to place the family events in time. As a whole, a great book.