Читать книгу To the Letter - Simon Garfield - Страница 12

Chapter Six

Neither Snow nor Rain nor the Flatness of Norfolk

In 1633, The Prompters Packet of Letters, yet another popular how-to manual for an increasingly literate Europe, displayed a woodcut on its title page of two galloping horsemen. The first carried the mail in his saddlebag, the second, an aristocratic type with a whip, was probably there to protect the first. The mail carrier sounds a bugle as he rides, and the sound he emits appears in a speech bubble that says simply ‘Post Hast’. The phrase had already been in use for at least 60 years, a regular instruction for speedy delivery written on the outer letter as ‘haste, post, haste’.

But how typical was this galloping sight through the English countryside? How did the post work?

For the beginning of the answer we need to briefly revisit England in the fifteenth century, and a wealthy extended family called Paston, named after the seemingly idyllic coastal Norfolk village where they lived (seemingly idyllic until letters reveal local anarchy, executions, civil wars, domestic shortages and bitter cold). For the Pastons, letters were the glue that held the family together. Their correspondence consisted of frequent (usually weekly, sometimes on consecutive days) communication through several generations and the reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III. The many hundreds of letters that survive make up the most illuminating concentration of letters of fifteenth-century England. After a prolonged period of obscurity (the Paston line ended in 1732), the letters were rediscovered by local historians at the end of the eighteenth century and were acquired by the British Museum in the 1930s.

What can we learn from them now? Most are what we may call personal business letters – matters of property and legal affairs conducted colloquially through family members. A fair number are about love and marriage, several are about family decorum, and many are requests for supplies, not least heavy gowns and worsted cloth to ward off the winters. A modern reader may feel closest to Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston I (and mother to John Paston II and John Paston III), as she writes to her scattered family in London. Over the course of about 70 letters she acts as maternal moral advisor and estate manager, and despite her relatively comfortable domestic situation she must frequently ask for extra supplies of food and clothing. But these things are merely daily blips in the face of the grander issues, such as the threat of being overrun by charging armies. The bloody pageant of the Wars of the Roses unfurls in the background as she writes, and her days appear frantic (the majority of her letters are written ‘in haste’ as she regrets that ‘want of leisure’ prevents her writing more).

Unlike most of the male members of her family, Margaret Paston dictated her letters to a local scribe. On 7 January 1462 she began a letter to her husband in her usual way (‘Right worshipful husband, I recommend me to you’), and continued with news composed straight for the history books:

People of this country beginneth to wax wild, and it said here that my Lord of Clarence and the Duke of Suffolk and certain judges with them should come down and sit on such people as be noised rioutous in this country . . . In good faith men fear sore here of a common rising . . . God for his holy mercy give grace that there may be set a good rule . . . in this country in haste, for I heard never say of so much robbery and manslaught in this country as is now within a little time.*

Taken as a whole, the lexicographer and grammarian may also learn much from the Paston correspondence about the state of fifteenth-century English. The letters are packed with simple but well-formed sentences, and a high level of literacy and learning. We learn, as above, that the polite method of greeting is no longer ‘greetings’; family and friends, male and female almost all open their post to read a derivation of ‘Name of Recipient, I recommend me to you’. There are many early sightings of proverbs and other epithets: ‘I eat like a horse’, one Paston brother writes to another in May 1469, a metaphor not recorded again until the eighteenth century, and in a letter to the youngest Paston brother in 1477, a cousin advises him not to be discouraged by his prolonged pursuit of a wife, ‘for . . . it is but a simple oak that is cut down at the first stroke’.

But we also learn about one other great thing: the workings of the post. By the 1460s, the smooth running of the economy demanded an efficient mail system, but it was not always forthcoming. The Pastons were well connected (with strong links to the legal profession and parliament), but so many of their letters concern the fate of other letters – letters received, letters gone astray – that one can easily imagine the additional stress placed upon their lives by such a significant but unreliable service. They wrote at a time before the establishment of any official postal network, trusting their letters to friends or professional carriers. The system was thus little changed from the service at Vindolanda about 1,350 years before, a process of write, entrust and hope.

‘If you love me . . . you will not leave me’: Margery Brews sends one of the earliest Valentine greetings to her fiance John Paston III in February 1477.

The Pastons occasionally write of finding ‘the first speedy carrier’ to rush information through, and they frequently called on a man called Juddy to journey back and forth on horseback to London (because of their status, the Pastons may have relied on Juddy almost as a private chauffeur). But the letters tell their own story of uncertainty; undelivered letters may mean unreliable carriers, or they may mean worse. At the start of her letter to her husband regarding Norfolk’s lawlessness, Margaret Paston wrote:

Please it you to weet [know] that I sent you a letter by [my cousin] Berney’s man of Witchingham which was written on St Thomas’ Day in Christmas; and I had no tidings or letter of you sin the week before Christmas, wherof I marvel sore. I fear me it is not well with you because you came not home or sent ere this time . . . I pray you heartly that ye will vouchsafe to send me word how ye do as hastely as ye may, for my heart shall never be in ease till I have tidings from you.

A hundred and forty years later, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth I, one may reasonably have hoped for improvement. In an intriguing bit of postal sleuthing, the historian James Daybell has forensically tracked one letter from 1601 as it travelled in vain from London to Dover and back again without ever reaching its intended reader. The letter, which now resides at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, was written by Sir Robert Cecil, the secretary of state. Its recipient should have been the MP Sir Francis Darcy, but Darcy is still waiting for it.

The letter was slight, merely a cover note informing Darcy that he was to receive other letters from court and an unnamed French book. Sir Robert left a large amount of blank space around his 57-word note written on a sizeable sheet, denoting power and profligacy. It was written by a scribe but signed by Sir Cecil. Addressed ‘To my verie loving friend Sir Francys Darcye knight at Dover,’ this wasn’t quite as optimistic as it would be if we sent such a letter today. It wasn’t the vagueness of the location that stumped the post – being a Sir, he probably would have been tracked down to some or other courthouse, coffeehouse, alehouse, or house of ill-repute – so much as the fact that Sir Francis had already fled Dover for elsewhere. The instructions on the outside of the letter – ‘post hast hast hast for life life life lyfe’ – was not only in vain, but evidence (for such a perfunctory message) of a sort of desperate madness.

The letter was carried along the Dover Road on horseback, presumably (as was the custom) by a number of riders working as a relay. The letter was endorsed with the words ‘For he Mats affayres’, which permitted it to travel free of charge by an early version of the royal mail, rather than by private carrier. The regally endorsed riders would be stationed at a series of established stops, either inns or signposts, a similar system to the one established within the Roman Empire. These ‘post-stage’ landmarks, which were usually towns dotted from eight to twenty miles apart, can also be thought of as the earliest forms of pillar boxes; before such a practical thing was invented centuries later, a regular series of deliveries and collections would be made along a set road, with letters being either dropped off as a final destination or handed on to the next rider like a baton. The Dover Road was one of England’s very few established routes, so the Robert Cecil letter arrived within a day, and, failing to find Darcy, finished its journey in the hands of Sir Thomas Fane, Lieutenant of Dover Castle.

The markings on the envelope provide yet more details, the Elizabethan equivalent of UPS tracking. The first endorsement was ‘London this 23 of September at 8 in the morninge’, possibly written, James Daybell suggests, by Rowland White, the Post of the Court responsible for gathering official correspondence from several quarters to the main depot in central London. The next endorsement, ‘London at past eight in the morning’, was followed by ‘Dartford at 11 in the fornone’, and then Rochester ‘at 2 in the afternon’. We also know it got to Sittingbourne at 7 and then Canterbury after 9, reaching Dover at some point the following morning. Sir Thomas Fane woke up to learn that Darcy had scarpered, and tried to locate him in the Kentish Downs, another failed mission.

Sir Thomas then sent the whole thing back to Sir Robert in a covering packet, which stopped off at all the places it had stopped off on its way down (reaching Dartford at almost 4 a.m.). In addition, the new packet was endorsed with an illustration of a gallows, presumably donating urgency, or the fate a trembling postmaster would meet if the letter wasn’t delivered.

Beyond all the clear absurdities of this frantic toing and froing through night and day across the pastures of England for nought, the example did at least point to one unmistakable truth: the post – even the fate of a single transaction – was important. The post may not have been particularly private (Sir Robert’s tired letter was opened before he got it back, perhaps by his secretary but conceivably by others too, and it may have passed through a dozen hands before it didn’t reach where it was intended) but there was no doubting the investment in trying to get it through. If you wrote it, many people would try to deliver it. The fact the post-stages existed at all, and the bureaucratic feat of tracking the letter at every calling station, meant there had indeed been slender improvement in at least one primitive branch of the postal service compared to the preceding centuries.