The text of this hard-to-categorise book amounts to 150 pages; notes and bibliography account for a further sixty-four pages; the index is a miserly three pages. The ten figures comprise murky photographs which look as if they were taken some time in the 1950s: did the author when young tour Norfolk with his box camera? He is, sixty years on, a distinguished professor emeritus. Was it nostalgic piety that impelled him to write the book? It is difficult to think of any other reason. Margaret Paston's piety would fit on the head of a pin, or in terms of pages, about as many as have been deemed fit for the index. The tone throughout is apologetic: ‘bags of verbiage’ is an apt phrase he deploys at one point; at another he talks of ‘small beer’: a glass quarter-full would have been a more accurate description. Early on he warns us that ‘much of what I have to say … takes the peculiar form of discussing what she was not’; later he tells us that ‘any sort of conclusion … is going to be a tame one’. One gets the feeling that nostalgia has not been enough. His conclusion is that Margaret is the most sympathetic of the Pastons; he may be right, but they were such a nasty bunch, that it is like saying Hess was the most sympathetic member of the Nazi hierarchy. I have always reckoned Margaret something of an old bat, in old age at any rate; that seems to have been the opinion of her two eldest sons. Did she at the end compose ‘a generous and comprehensive will’? I have read many more generous, more comprehensive. Do we not sentimentalise these old ladies, assume (from very little evidence, nine-tenths of it ambiguous) that they were bound to be agreeable, were inevitably pious? Take the woman who would have won the ‘Old Bat of the Century’ award had there been one: Alice Chaucer. She was first and foremost an unsentimental snob. Margaret was a snob too: she was a Mautby and never became a Paston even in the muffled manner in which Alice became a de la Pole, a family descended (after all) from Hull dockers. The Pastons were a little better than that, but, having shortly before been peasantry, not by much. Piety, family piety apart, does not come into it. Margaret's piety is that of her class and time, and that kind of piety barely (if at all) warrants the name. It was so thoroughly of this world, one looks in vain for any indication of a sense of transcendence. There are numerous egregious errors in a poorly presented book. Who was John Gloys? I thought that I wrote the ODNB entry on the Paston family (not Roger Virgoe or Helen Castor). It might be thought that I have been unfair; believe me, I have not. If this is the New Middle Ages, please may we have our old Middle Ages back?