What happened on the day Sir John Fastolf died we shall never know; there are too many conflicting and contradictory statements from too many interested parties for the truth to be disentangled. What happened after 5 November 1459 will have to be told in another volume. It is a sad story.

In his corrected working copy of the book Sir Stephen Scrope had translated for Sir John Fastolf, The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, William Worcester, making his corrections in March 1473, could not resist annotating those ‘dicts and sayings’ which had particular, personal meaning for himself. Against ‘women be snares’ he (a married gentleman) wrote ‘nota’; against ‘he is free that is free of honesty’ he put his other name (he used two), ‘Botoner’, presumably in a moment of self-pity; against a passage on ‘villainous speaking’ he could not resist entering ‘Botoner nota bene’; and against ‘hevynes is a pasion touching thingis passed and sorowe is a fere of thingis for to come’ he wrote, with touching self-justification ‘pro Botoner’.

More specific were his recollections of what we might properly call ‘The Tragedy of Sir John Fastolf’. Against the ‘dict’ that one should not make great buildings which others will inherit he wrote, with feeling, ‘pro Johannes Fastolff milite ditissimo qui egit contra istud concilium’; and alongside ‘whi old peple enforceth theym to kepe theire Ritchesse and he aunswerd theyme bicause that after theire dethe thei had lever leve it to their ennemyes than to be in daunger of theire freendes’ he put simply (and, as it were, with all passion spent), ‘pro J. Fastolff’.