I gave a talk at the Norwich Records Office recently on how to use historic letters and archival sources to create theatrical performances, the following is a part of that talk.
Since 2018 I have been creating performances for the Paston Footprints project, which celebrates the 14th to 17th-century letters of the Norfolk Paston family.
The largest collection of domestic letters from the Medieval and Early Modern period, the Paston Letters give a human face to the challenges confronting strategic landowning families during the War of the Roses, the Tudor Era, and the Restoration of the Monarchy after the English Civil War. The letters reveal the challenges and strife associated with a family who transitioned from yeoman to the aristocracy from the end of the Black Death in the 14th century to the ascendency of many families loyal to the Crown after the Civil War in the 17th century.
Letters are interesting, and sometimes insightful, but they are primarily descriptive and not active. It is very easy to fall into the trap of creating a show that is only describing events or telling you things rather than doing things.
When I started on the Paston project I was quite new to creating plays like this from historical documents. So I dug into my research and got a bit lost at first in how you bring to life these letters and stories from a distant past.
I stared at my many books in dismay. I went to the British library and looked at the actual letters (a lot of which were impossible to read but thrilling to see none the less!)
And then finally, after much soul searching and procrastination, I got to writing the scripts! But writing from letters is challenging for a number of reasons.
Let’s start with a letter. Here is a letter by Margaret Paston to her husband, John I. I am working solely with modern translations of the 15th century letters, which is not the way they were written in the original 15th century writing style, as they are very hard to understand for people without medieval literature training.
I love this type of work because it gives me the opportunity to nerd out over history and learn things I didn’t know before and it allows me to think from the point of view of the public who, some of which, are experiencing these stories for the first time. When working on the Viking Exhibition for the Norwich Castle I even learned a bit of Old Norse Runes. And my work pulled off, as two girls in their early 20s who are big fans of the Vikings, took down my use of the Runes in our production of Shieldmaiden and translated them for their own entertainment! So, I do study quite indepthly the period when I am working on it, but my purpose is to bring it to life for the public. I am in some ways the conduit between the historians and the general public.
But let’s come back to this letter. Let’s see what clues we can find in this letter.
Margaret Paston to John Paston I
March 1st, probably 1461
May it please you to know that it has been made known to me by someone who is well disposed towards you that, if you come here freely, an ambush has been set in this district. They plan to conduct you into the presence of such a lord in the North who will not help you, but will be a danger on your life or great and insupportable loss of your property. And he who has now taken this enterprise upon himself was under-sheriff to G. Saintlow. He has great support in this due to the influence of the son of William Baxter who lies buried in Grey Friars. And it is reported that this son has given much silver to the lords in the North to accomplish the business. And now he and all his old companions are getting busy and are very ready for action and merry, confident that everything is and will be as he would like it. I am also told that the father of the Bastard in this district, said that this county should now be secured for him and his heirs also; by which I understand they think they have no enemy except you, etc… Therefore please be more careful in managing the safety of your person, and also do not be too hasty to come into the district until you here that the world is safer. I believe the bearer of this will tell you more by mouth of what he will be informed about the disturbance in the district.
May God protect you. Written in haste on the second Sunday in Lent by candlelight in the evening.
By yours, etc.. M
This letter is full of information and drama. An attempt is on her husband’s life, we have a plot which is larger than just the region of Norfolk, and Margaret is obviously worried about this, so we have an emotionally charged letter. However it is very descriptive. How might we use such a letter.
I always start with asking myself, what clues are in the letter? What can we draw from it? How might a strand of this letter lead to a whole production or storyline? In my recent audio walks, how might this letter help me create a creative historic walking tour? Perhaps this letter can inspire a moment of dramatic interruption where action happens around us and then our walking tour narrator fills us in on the action.
I first ask the following questions:
Who is she? What hints do we have of Margaret’s character from this letter? (Perhaps a little, but not as much as I might need to turn her into a dramatic character. We do know, however, that John and Margaret are living apart and it is hard for her husband to get home. In a previous letter she was very sad he wasn’t home for Christmas, and said she felt like a widow, which also allows heartbreak and longing to enter the picture. )
Who are the other people in the letter? (a lot of names I don’t know, I better look them up, and also see from other letters if they are important enough to the larger story of Margaret and John to make them characters in my play or a large part of the theme of whatever play or storytelling event I am creating)
What is the world like? (Here we have a lot of clues. We are living in a dangerous world with a lot of factions against the Pastons. People have powerful enemies and friends.
What is the drama? (This one is easy, there is a lot of drama here, so it helps think of a scene or a large event that might be in the production.)
Any events of interest?
How would you reveal this to your audience?
Now this is the biggest question.
Upon reading letters like this, I decided to create a performance that celebrated the forbearance and work of women like Margaret and the other Paston women to bring out their stories, which are often more complex and more resilient than a lot of popular imaginings on women of the past. With this, seeing what hints there are to her character as found in a letter like this can help create the kernel of a story. So what type of woman do we think Margaret is? From this letter we see she is worried about her husband’s welfare. But she is also savvy on the local politics and what is happening in the district, and in the greater Northern regions so prevalent in the War of The Roses.
I need to look at some more letters.
Here is another letter from Margaret writing to her husband John who is now imprisoned in Fleet prison by his enemies.
Margaret Paston to John Paston I,
Probably August 1465
Most Honourable Husband, I commend myself to you and entreat you with all my heart out of respect for God to be encouraged and trust in the grace of God that you will overcome your enemies and your troublesome business completely. If you will be encouraged and not take your problems so sorrowfully that you harm yourself. And believe truly that you are strong enough for all your enemies, by the grace of God. Your mother is your good mother and takes your business if I come up to see you, once I know your intentions, it will not be long before I am with you, by the grace of God. And as for any other things of importance in this locality, I believe I shall arrange it so it will be safe. I have given your elder son 20 marks that I received from Richard Calle, and I have been unable to get any more from him since you left.
And I entreat God with all my heart to send us tidings about you, and grant you victory over your enemies.
Written in haste on Saturday,
Yours M.P.
Also, I am giving your son 10 marks of your father’s small change that was in the chest, because my brother Clement says that 20 marks was too little for him.
This letter reveals so much about Margaret. She is concerned for her husband’s welfare. In a previous letter, she was complaining to her husband about him not being home for Christmas, and described herself as feeling like a “widow”, and yet here she begs him not to come home. So we know that she is someone who is willing to put her needs aside for her husband’s. But she also is quite strong and capable in this letter. She knows the situation, she is informing her husband what he should do, she is able to hold the fort at home, in spite of the fact that she was probably in real danger as well. The postscript is also interesting. I like how in the midst of these dramatic events, we also have domestic issues that are found in any household. Margaret worries about giving her teenage son enough pocket money for his needs at school. She’s able to discuss these worries in ways that are relatable in the present day, even when the dramatic events seem out of an adventure story. This is what is so interesting about the Paston letters, they reveal the everyday alongside the epic events. It is very important to include this type of colour in your performance so that you can create relatable and engaging characters for your audience. These little moments also allow us to go beyond the melodramatic, into the real lives of the past.
I am quite passionate about using historical documents and letters to create events for heritage organisations that can both educate and reveal local and global histories to the public, but also let the past speak for itself, so that I am drawing attention to material that other people may not have read, or have the opportunity to read. It’s like creating a living essay, which illustrates and draws attention to the complexity of past characters and stories, so that we see it is just as complex and challenging as our lives today. I hope that by doing this, we allow past characters to go beyond cliché and become living beings we have empathy for and perhaps see a relationship between lives in the past to our own lives. This work can also interest a new generation of people to these stories through dramatic and embodied performances which are both entertaining and educational for a variety of diverse audiences.
