Margery Brewes

Margery Brewes was a fifteenth-century English gentlewoman best known through the Paston family correspondence. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Brewes and became the wife of John Paston III after negotiations that reveal the financial and family considerations surrounding gentry marriage.

Her surviving letter of February 1477 addresses John as her “right well-beloved Valentine” and is often described as the oldest surviving English Valentine letter. The document gives Margery a distinctive personal voice within one of the richest collections of private correspondence from medieval England.

Anne O’Brien’s A Marriage of Fortune makes Margery Brewes’s love for John Paston III a test of how far a fifteenth-century gentry daughter can resist the marriage strategy of her family. Their surviving love letters and the opposition of the Paston and Brewes households allow the novel to turn a documented private courtship into part of the larger struggle for property, status and security during the Wars of the Roses.