‘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 [17] 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 vjti.” 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 [18] 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.
‘It must be acknowledged, however, that Fenn’s mode of editing was not in all respects quite so satisfactory. Defects, of which no one could reasonably have complained in his own day, are now a serious drawback, especially where the original MSS. are no longer accessible. Occasionally, as we have seen, he inserts a heading of his own in the text of a document without any intimation that it is not in the original; but this is so rare a matter that little need be said about it. A more serious fault is, that in vols. iii. and iv. he has published occasionally mere extracts from a letter as if it were the whole letter. In vols. i. and ii. he avowedly left out passages of little interest, and marked the places where they occurred with asterisks; but in the two succeeding volumes he has not thought it necessary to be so particular, and he has made the omissions sub silentio. For this indeed no one can seriously blame him. The work itself, as he had planned it, was only a selection of letters from a correspondence, and a liberal use of asterisks would not have helped to make it more interesting to the public. Occasionally he even inverts the order of his extracts, printing a postscript, or part of a postscript, in the body of a letter, and placing at the end some passage that occurs in the letter itself, for no other reason apparently than that it might read better as a whole.
‘Thus Letter 37 of this edition[18.2] (vol. iii., Letter vi., in Fenn) is only a brief extract, the original being a very long letter, though the subjects touched upon are not of very great interest. So also Letter 171 (Letter xxx. in Fenn’s third volume)[18.3] is a set of extracts. Letter 182 (vol. iii., Letter xxxix., in Fenn)[18.4] is the same; and the first part [19] of what is given as a postscript is not a postscript in the original, but actually comes before the first printed paragraph.
‘In short, it was the aim of Sir John Fenn to reproduce with accuracy the spelling and the style of the MSS. he had before him; but as for the substance, to give only so much as he thought would be really interesting. The letters themselves he regarded rather as specimens of epistolary art in the fifteenth century than as a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the times. To have given a complete transcript of every letter, or even a résumé in his own words of all that concerned lawsuits, leases, bailiffs’ accounts, and a number of other matters of equally little interest, formed no part of his design; but the task that he had really set himself he executed with admirable fidelity. He grudged no labour or expense in tracing facsimiles of the signatures, the seals, and the watermarks on the paper. All that could serve to illustrate the manners of the period, either in the contents of the letters, or in the handwritings, or the mode in which they were folded, he esteemed most valuable; and for these things his edition will continue still to be much prized. But as it was clearly impossible in that day to think of printing the whole correspondence, and determining precisely the chronology by an exhaustive study of minutiæ, there seemed no good reason why he should not give two or three paragraphs from a letter without feeling bound to specify that they were merely extracts. Yet even these defects are not of frequent occurrence. The omissions are by no means numerous, and the matter they contain is generally unimportant in itself.’
I took advantage, however, at that time, of the recovery of so many of the missing originals to make a cursory examination for the further testing of Fenn’s editorial accuracy. Two or three letters I compared carefully with the originals throughout, and in others I made special reference to passages where doubts were naturally suggested, either from the obscurity of the words or from any other cause as to the correctness of the reading. The results of this examination I gave in an Appendix at the end of the Introduction to the third volume in 1875, and such errors as I was then able to detect are corrected in the present edition.