What did the Pastons think of Joan the Meatless? Thomas Netter, who died in 1430, wrote:

Agnes and William Paston no doubt encountered Joan. She is not, however, in the Paston Letters. Why not? Was she not sufficiently sensational? I miss the point. The point is that Joan the Meatless lived (and no doubt died) in unsensational Norfolk, humdrum, homely Norfolk, as unlike, apparently, Huizinga's fifteenth-century universe as Caroline Walker Bynum's twentieth-century world. Yet there Joan was. She makes me think that I might have mistaken the Norfolk of the Pastons, or indeed the Pastons themselves.

When reading the Paston Letters it is easy to slip into the Dickensian view of English history, a view epitomised by Dickens' attitude towards English law: ‘The one great principle of the English Law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.’ Is the English past, like the English present, nothing but business? The Pastons make us think so; Joan the Meatless impels us to think otherwise. It is in an endeavour to think otherwise about the Pastons that I have written the first chapter of the book.