What did William Paston do with the pounds his legal practice (purchased, so to speak, with Geoffrey Somerton's pennies) brought him? The short answer is that he bought land. The answer to the next question (why did he buy land?) is set out in a conversation between the Archdeacon of Barchester and Major Grantly:

The disadvantages of landowning in fifteenth-century England (on the other hand) are well known; they have been extensively studied: collecting rents and getting dependable farmers for demesne land was more difficult than at any time between the ninth and the nineteenth centuries. That these were stiff tasks which the landlord and his agents worried about and worked at is abundantly documented in the Paston letters: we have to be selective.

Sir John Heveningham's plaintive excuse for not helping out John Paston, ‘I have as moche as I may to gader myn owune lyfflode, and truli, cosyn, I can not gadere that well’, is perfectly illustrated for the Pastons themselves by the memorandum of 22 August 1477: ‘The names of the maners of Agnes Pastons and William Paston in Norfolk, how thai shulde be taken hede to this harvest anno xvij.’