Agricultural History Review, Volume 36 Part 2 (1988), pp. 132–144

The Paston Letters have two distinctive features as sources of agricultural history. On the one hand they illustrate exceptionally well some organizational features of estate management on a smallish estate, notably the absence of closely structured specialization amongst estate officers and the personal involvement of members of the family in minor matters. At the same time the letters demonstrate the problems of estate management in one of England's most commercialized regions during the 1460s and 1470s, and they suggest that the 1460s in particular were a period of agrarian depression in Norfolk. The combined effect of these observations is to show how even as a rentier family the Pastons were intimately involved in the commercial dilemmas and social conflicts arising from crisis management. 

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