Note 118.1 — THE PASTON LETTERS Edward IV (continued 3)

[From Fenn, iii. 418.] It is difficult to assign with confidence either a date or a meaning to this strangely worded epistle. The signature itself is a mystery. The order of the Temple of Sion is unknown to archæologists, and the place from which the letter is dated cannot be identified. From the peculiar device used as a signature, resembling what in heraldry represents a fountain, Fenn threw out a suggestion that Fountaine was the writer’s name, remarking that a family of that name resided at Salle, in Norfolk, and might have been related to Paston as the writer claimed to be. But there seems to be an air of irony about the whole communication which forbids us to construe any of its statements seriously; nor do we find the slightest allusion to this letter or its contents in all the rest of the correspondence. For my part, I am inclined to think it was a mocking letter addressed to John Paston by one of the prisoners in the Fleet, where Paston had himself been confined in 1464. His imprisonment on that occasion was probably of short duration, but I cannot tell the precise date of his release. He was committed to the Fleet, as we are informed by William Worcester (Itinerary, p. 366), on Saturday the 3d November. If I am right in my conjecture about this letter, he had, perhaps, been already liberated; but some of his late fellow-prisoners, probably members of the Inner or Middle Temple like himself, who had formed themselves into a fancy ‘Order of the Temple of Sion,’ amused themselves by speculating on the probability that he was not yet quite clear of the toils of the law, and that he would be obliged to come back and spend Christmas in gaol, among the jolly companions whom he had recently deserted. I may remark that the name of Thomas Babington occurs in Dugdale’s Origines Juridiciales, p. 163, as having been elected a reader in the Inner Temple in 22 Hen. VII., when he seems to have been an old man; for, owing to his sight failing, he was excused from reading, and John Port, who was afterwards Attorney General, and, later still, Justice of the King’s Bench, read in his place.

119.1 i.e. your fellow-Christians.

119.2 Fenn interprets this word free will, which I cannot think to be the meaning intended.