Elizabeth Paston

Elizabeth Paston (1429 – 1 February 1488) was a member of the English gentry who is regularly referred to in the extensive collection of Paston Letters. She was the only daughter of a Norfolk lawyer, William Paston and Agnes Barry. In her late teens and twenties she resisted marriage to several men proposed by her mother and brothers, before marrying Sir Robert Poynings in 1458, with whom she had a son Edward Poynings. Following her husband's death at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461, she spent a period as a widow before marrying George Browne by whom she had two further children. Browne's execution in 1483 following his involvement in a rebellion against Richard III left her a widow again. Family Elizabeth Paston, born 1429 in Norfolk, was the middle child and only daughter of William Paston, Justice of the Common Pleas, and Agnes Barry, the daughter and co-heir of Sir Edmund Barry (d. 1433) of Hertfordshire. Elizabeth had four brothers, the eldest of whom, John Paston (died 1466), succeeded her father in 1444 as heir and head of the family. Marriage proposals and marriages By the standards of the time Elizabeth Paston married late; she was nearly 30 when she married in 1458. Her father William had left her £200 towards her marriage in his will, provided that she married according to the advice of her mother and his other executors. Potential marriages had been under discussion from at least the time she was nineteen in 1449 when marriage was proposed with a fifty-year-old widower Stephen Scrope, whose stepfather John Fastolf was John Paston's chief patron.