Some characters do not require re-invention: Sir John Fastolf for example. No other fifteenth-century commoner, apart from the girl who beat him at Patay, has come under such close scrutiny. It is remarkable that so ordinary a fifteenth-century Englishman as Fastolf has become Falstaff, one of the greatest, because most complicated, comedians of all time. To observe Orson Welles as Falstaff is to be stirred into a grasp of history which no single document, no collection of documents, no historical archive can ever provide. Yet, even before Fastolf had retired from the French war he was a theatrical creation: he appears in the Mystère du Siège d'Orleans, which was written before 1439. What chance has the historian of characterizing a man who had become fictionalized half a dozen years after his tactical retreat at Patay? The dramatic history of the siege of Orleans was turned into a historical drama before 1435; in the very year that he was giving sound advice to the English government on the conduct of the war Fastolf was being portrayed on stage at Orleans doing the same thing. How odd: on one hand the Maid of Orleans, on the other Sir John Fastolf. On the same battlefield, on the same stage, but how hard to think of them that way, the way they were, the way they actually were. Joan defeats us all. But is Fastolf any more understandable? His servants, some of them, complained that he was a hard master; at the same time they said they would have no other and talked about loving him.