Talk:Paston Letters

William Paston
There were two links to different William Pastons within this article; both redirected right back to this very article; i deleted them both, as that seemed a bit circular and redundant, until such time as there can be real links. Cheers, Lindsay 16:37, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Another online version of the letters
Of potential interest/use: http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/paston.htm (It has modern English translations, too, which is handy.) --Skud (talk) 22:24, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

This reads much more like a narrative than an encyclopedia article
This article reads more like a narrative than an Encyclopedia. Facts are stated with characterizations of the perspectives of the subjects. Opinions on how interesting the letters are themselves appear. There are lots of biographical facts with no clear relationship to the subject. They may be related, but the letters rarely come up in these narratives. Here is an example to demonstrate my concerns:

"Sir John Paston, who was a cultured man, had shown great anxiety to recover Caister, but in general he had left the conduct of the struggle to his mother and to the younger John. Owing to his carelessness and extravagance, the family lands were also diminished by sales, but nevertheless when he died unmarried in November 1479 he left a substantial inheritance to his younger brother John. About this time the Letters become scanty and less interesting, but the family continued to flourish. The younger John Paston (d. 1504), after quarrelling with his uncle William over the manors of Oxnead and Marlingford, was knighted at the Battle of Stoke in 1487. He married Margery, daughter of Sir Thomas Brewes, and left a son, William Paston (c. 1479–1554), who was also knighted, and who was a prominent figure at the court of Henry VIII. Sir William's second son, John Paston (1510–1575) was the father-in-law of Sir Edward Coke. Sir William's third son, Clement (c. 1515–1597), served his country with distinction on the sea, and was wounded at the Battle of Pinkie."

Note that the letters are only brought up once, and with characterized as "less interesting". There are no citations in this entire paragraph. In fact, there are no citations for all but the first paragraph of the Chronology section. Most concerning is that at the end of the article, I don't know much about the letters at all and how they related to the tons of biographical facts I just read.

I'm trying to make it more like a Wikipedia article, but I could use an expert's opinion. There are a lot of details in this article. Comparing it to other articles on Wikipedia, are all the biographical details, including passing mentions of family members, etc., really WP:NOTE? And where would we get some citations for all this stuff? The letters? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wllm (talk • contribs) 01:38, 15 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Note that the text of this article is largely copied verbatim from the (public domain) 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. That, I expect, is the source of the somewhat dated tone and language, and why it's inconsistent with the general tone of Wikipedia. When Wikipedia was being bootstrapped a large number of articles, like this one, were copied from public domain sources. Pburka (talk) 23:22, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

BBC and destroyed letters
Since my removal of this was undone: "The BBC said in 2019 that the letters should have been destroyed because of the subversive views that some of them espouse", says the article. This lends importance to the statement, and make it sound like something the BBC, one of the most respected broadcasting corporations in the world, has put a certain amount of thought into. But if one follows the link, it's an image caption. It's not clear where the opinion that they ought to have been destroyed comes from. To me, it seems like we're making a bigger thing out of this than we should. /Julle (talk) 01:37, 10 March 2020 (UTC)


 * What we should be doing is to give appropriate weight to the views expressed by reliable sources. There's only a single sentence on this, it's not in the lede, and there's nothing to suggest that the BBC had such a view as a cornerstone of their policy or anything. I don't think it's unduly emphasised. But if you think it's badly worded, or would be better suited elsewhere in the article, please make a suggestion. There are a great many much stronger statements in the article -- for example about the letters providing the "most insight" into "the overall history of England" -- which are completed uncited so its completely unclear where they came from. It's fine to have these views in the article, but it's also appropriate weight to have a single sentence mentioning the viewpoint from the BBC source. MPS1992 (talk) 21:36, 22 March 2020 (UTC)