At this juncture we take leave of William Worcester. This volume has been even more his than was the last. Besides, I have tried to follow William's example, set out in the conclusion of The first phase and succinctly put by Francis Bacon: ‘God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.’ Taking leave of William and of the Fastolf will affair is, therefore, the issue here; how to conduct that departure is the question. It is easily answered.

Easily, because boxes and letters, boxes of letters, have to be the way to do it, as they have been the way of doing things all along. First the boxes. ‘Memorandum uppon the presse at the ferther ende is a box wyth ii ore iij bondellis wyth evydence off Oxenhed and Hauteyn’, begins a ‘Bill off Memoranda’ of August 1479. The Hauteyn affair had been over, if anything was ever over (and done with), thirty years before. It was best, however, to keep the evidence, and the Pastons did, frequently reminding one another to do so. That is, and obviously, why they are the best-known family of the English Middle Ages, the royal family not excluded. Obvious and familiar as all this is, perhaps because it is, to see that evidence, not so much the Paston Letters themselves, lying almost doggo in the modern leather-bound volumes of the Manuscripts Room in the British Library, but the Fastolf Papers at Magdalen, especially to see them being taken out of medieval boxes in the room designed for them in the muniment tower, is exciting, stirring, moving.