The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with

In 1448, Margaret Paston, a wife and mother in her twenties, wrote to her husband John urgently requesting more weapons: she needed crossbows, poleaxes, windlasses and jacks. In John’s absence, a local lord was trying to take over Gresham, their property in Norfolk, and was mounting a violent siege of the manor house. Margaret was leading the defence. She was multi-tasking, however. In the same letter she also asks John to send some almonds and sugar, as well as woollen cloth for gowns for their young sons and broadcloth for a hood for herself.

The missive survives as part of the Paston letters, the largest extant set of medieval correspondence relating to a single family in England. The Pastons were not nobility: they were up-and-coming gentry, social climbers jockeying for position in the tumultuous century of the Wars of the Roses. The letters are well-known, and books such as Helen Castor’s Blood and Roses have brought the whole family to life for us.