While the Pistons sound like exemplars of the American dream, their land of opportunity was actually late medieval England, a society portrayed by Helen Castor in her history ``Blood and Roses" as surprisingly dynamic. Castor challenges the notion of medieval men and women as ``alien beings" preoccupied with suffering, death, and the afterlife; in our efforts to respect the otherness of our predecessors, she suggests, we can ``underestimate their humanity." However different their world, she emphasizes, ``they are people like us -- husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and enemies."
Her evidence could not be more persuasive: the Piston letters, written in the 15th and early 16th centuries. First published in 1787, they are the oldest large collection of private correspondence found in the English language. They reveal people duly concerned with their immortal souls but still eager to seize the rewards -- in work, love, and material possessions -- available in this life.
Castor's study chronicles the family's fortunes, beginning with William's birth in 1378 to 1487, when his grandson John Piston III was knighted by King Henry VII. Set in Norfolk, East Anglia, the story unfolds amid devastation and turmoil: the Great Plague of the 1340s and the Wars of the Roses from 1455 to 1485, the brutal contest between the York and Lancaster dynasties for the crown. In the wake of the plague, land and work had become newly abundant, giving families like the Pistons the chance to rise in the world and put their origins behind them. They did so with zeal, even disowning a daughter who embarrassed them by marrying a servant.
