The Trinity have you in his (sic) keeping, and send you good speed in all your matters. PETITION OF JOHN PASTON, ESQ. (_Paston Letters_, Vol. I, pp. 106-8) To the King, our Sovereign Lord, and to the right wise and discreet Lords, assembled in this present Parliament. Beseecheth meekly your humble liegeman, John Paston, that where [as] he and other ... have be peaceably possessed of the manor of Gresham, within the county of Norfolk xx year and more, till the xxij day of February, the year of your noble reign xxvi, that Robert Hungerford, Knight, the Lord Molyns, entered in to the said manor ... the said Lord sent to the mansion a riotous people, to the number of a thousand persons ... arrayed in manner of war, with cuirasse, briganders, jacks, salettes, glaives, bowes, arrows, pavyse (shields) pans with fire burning therein, long cromes (hooks) to draw down houses, ladders, pikes, with which they mined down the walls, and long trees with which they broke up gates and doors, and so came into the said mansion, the wife of your beseecher being at that time therein, and xlj persons with her; the which persons they drove out of the said mansion, and mined down the wall of the chamber wherein the wife of your said beseecher was, and bare her out at the gates, and cut asunder the posts of the houses and let them fall, and broke up all the chambers and coffers within the said mansion, and rifled, and in manner of robbery bare away all the stuffe, array, and money that your said beseecher and his servants had there, unto the value of ccli ... saying openly that if they might have found there your said beseecher and one John Damme, which is of council with him, and divers others of the servants of your said beseecher, they should have died. And yet [i.e. still] divers of the said misdoers and riotous people unknown, contrary to your laws, daily keep the said manor with force, and lie in wait.... And also they compel poor tenants of the said manor, now within their danger, against their will, to take feigned plaints in the courts of the hundred there against the ... servants of your said beseecher, who dare not appear to answer for fear of bodily harm, nor can get no copies of the said plaints, to remedy them by the law, because he that keepeth the said courts is of covyn with the said misdoers and was one of the said risers....