Blood and Roses - Hardcover

Castor, Helen

3.94

661 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571216706 ISBN 13: 9780571216703

Publisher: Gardners Books, 2004

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The Wars of the Roses turned England upside down. Between 1455 and 1485 four kings lost their thrones, more than forty noblemen lost their lives on the battlefield or their heads on the block, and thousands of the men who followed them met violent deaths. Yet almost nothing is known about the thoughts and feelings of the people who lived through this bloody conflict, whether king or noble, landowner or peasant. Almost nothing, but not quite. As they made their way in a disintegrating world, a Norfolk family called the Pastons were writing letters - about politics, about business, about shopping, about love and about each other. Extraordinarily, these letters have survived the centuries; they form the earliest great collection of private correspondence in the English language. More than five hundred years on, the Pastons' voices still have the immediacy of an overheard conversation. Blood and Roses traces the remarkable story of the Paston family across three generations. The world of the fifteenth-century aristocracy was a world of cut-throat snobbery and vicious power struggles, and the Pastons were newcomers to the game: an ambitious nouveau riche family striving to establish themselves among the landed gentry. They took part in the Wars of the Roses in supporting roles, but they were extraordinary characters in their own right: William Paston, the self-made man who founded the family's fortunes; his son John Paston, who embarked on his own battle to inherit the estates of the rich old soldier Sir John Falstaff, the model of Shakespeare's Falstaff; John's wife Margaret, who held the family together for forty years, raised seven children and defended the family's property from armed assault along the way; and their sons John II - a courtier with a passion for books and an eye for female company - and John III, the sensible, reliable brother, whose touching correspondence with his sweetheart includes the earliest surviving valentine in England.

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About the Author:

Helen Castor is a Fellow in History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She has spent over ten years working on the Paston letters. Born in 1968, she grew up in Warwickshire, and now lives in London with her husband and son.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Referring to publication of the Paston letters, the "literary sensation" of 1787, Horace Walpole said, "I cannot bear to be writing when I am so eager to be reading." The letters are a collection of roughly 1,000 documents written by four generations over the course of some 70 years that provide astonishingly intimate insight into late medieval English life during the tumultuous War of the Roses. The Pastons began as peasant farmers, rose to the status of minor Norfolk gentry and strove mightily to improve their lot through the courts, business and marriage. In this multigenerational biography, Castor tells their story as a sweeping whole and allows readers to understand these people's mental world, one so alien to us and yet strikingly familiar in the most unexpected of ways. Much of their story revolves around the acquisition of land and how they tried (not always successfully) to keep it out of the hands of their sometimes violent neighbors. Castor, a history fellow at Cambridge University, nicely summarizes the complexities of 15th-century politics and culture without losing her momentum. Beautifully paced and splendidly retold, Castor's tale of one family trying to survive and thrive against the odds is popular history at its best. 8 pages of color photos, 1 map. (Apr. 11)
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