At the same time, there was another side to Fastolf’s character, which is revealed in that mine of curious information on the social life and manners of the time, the well-known _Paston Letters_. Through his intimacy with John Paston,[66] who was ultimately his executor and principal heir, many of his private letters and papers are there preserved, and they certainly do not exhibit him in a favourable light.[67] Hot-tempered, arbitrary and rapacious, harsh and mean to his dependents, an exacting creditor and a rancorous litigant, he was the reverse of Chaucer’s type of the “verray perfight, gentil knight.” Wealthy as he was and childless, he was still bent on making gain, partly no doubt to pay for the building of his great castle at Caister in Norfolk, the ruins of which may still be seen. No one perhaps knew him better or had suffered more from his hard dealing than his stepson. Some years later than the present work Stephen Scrope drew up a formal statement of his wrongs,[68] in which he not only complained that in the disposal of his wardship Fastolf had bought and sold him “as a beast,” but even charged him with being the cause of illnesses which had marked him for life[69] and with having at a later period used him so scurvily that he was compelled to sell his manor of Hever in Kent and take service with the Duke of Gloucester. Apparently this sign of independence did not meet Fastolf’s views, for he soon managed to get him into his own retinue, and, as the other admits, at this time he showed him “good fatherhood,” employing him at Honfleur and elsewhere, probably in a civil capacity,[70] until he returned home in pique at some slight. Fastolf’s dealings with regard to Scrope’s inheritance are somewhat obscure, but by some arrangement he contrived to secure Castle Combe for life.[71] As Lady Fastolf died in 1446, her son by her first marriage, to whom it should have then come by right, was thus kept out of it for thirteen years longer, only enjoying it from his stepfather’s death in 1459 until his own in 1472. But in spite of differences the two were apparently not altogether on bad terms; otherwise neither this translation nor that of the “Dis des Philosophes” would have been made, and still less would Scrope have spoken of Fastolf as he here does. His language indeed is something more than respectful and laudatory. While he fully endorses Wavrin’s description of Sir John as “moult sage et vaillant chevallier,”[72] there is a tone of humility which makes it difficult to realize that the writer was upwards of forty years of age and at least Fastolf’s equal by birth. The nature of their relations may be gathered from a singular letter to the latter about 1455 from Sir Richard Bingham, Justice of the King’s Bench, whose daughter Stephen Scrope had recently married.[73] In imploring help for him the writer says[74]: