To understand the Paston purchase of East Beckham it is necessary to go back fifty years, from the 1430s to the 1370s. A family's grip upon property it regarded as its own was tenacious; that is a familiar theme in this study of the Pastons. The tenacity in this instance is that of their neighbours in North Erpingham Hundred, the Winters of Town Barningham. It was William Winter who purchased East Beckham in 1379; and with him the story begins.

His origins were obscure, not as shamefully base as the Pastons' probable descent from a bondwoman, but, if Judge William Paston's hostile jottings are to be believed, William Winter's father was no more than a 20-acre man. Clement, William Paston's father, according to the account of one of their opponents, was ‘a good pleyn husbond’ with 100 or 120 acres. Whatever the social consequences of the difference between 20 and 120 acres, that the fathers of these two successful lawyers were Norfolk farmers gives their family histories and the story of their competition for East Beckham a poignancy they would certainly not otherwise have: distance reduces difference.

William Paston's jottings are on one side of a sheet of paper whose other side lists in shorthand form the transactions which carried East Beckham from Sir Roger Beckham to the Winters and from that family to William Mariot of Cromer between 1379 and 1425.