The Pastons were made by marriages. There were three that made them: Clement's to Beatrice Goneld; William's to Agnes Barry; John's to Margaret Mautby.

The least important of the three was William's – or so it appears at this distance. Agnes was an heiress; with her William got three manors as well as a loyal wife. She lived too long – so far as the family was concerned: her £100-worth of property (her inheritance, her jointure, and her dower) was not at the disposal of the head of the family, her son John I, from 1444 to 1466, or her grandson John II from 1466 to 1479, for thirty-five years. Thank God (they may have said), she did not remarry. She also had no influential, or in other ways helpful, relatives. Sir Edmund Barry, her father, who died in 1433, seems (and possibly was) a curiously detached figure in local, that is Norfolk, society. He did not live in Norfolk but at Horwellbury near Royston in Hertfordshire. He cut no figure in Hertfordshire society either; his house there, however, was handy for London. May that not be a clue to his interests? It was, for instance, at Hertford on 25 December 1396 that Edmund indented with John of Gaunt ‘to serve him in peace and war’ for life for a fee of £10 per annum out of the Duchy lands in Norfolk.