John Paston was a close confidante and advisor to Sir John Fastolf.
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The castle had a 100 ft (33 m) high tower and was built between 1432 and 1446 by Sir John Fastolf, who was the inspiration for William Shakespeare's Falstaff.
Between 1432 and 1459 the village was in the possession of Sir John Fastolf, a prominent soldier in the Hundred Years' War who gave his name to Shakespeare's character Sir John Falstaff.
Hellesdon was one of several manors owned in the fifteenth century by Sir John Fastolf, the original of Shakespeare's Falstaff, and as with other of his properties, his death in 1459 led to something close to a private war between the Paston family and John de la Pole, 2nd Duke of Suffolk for possession of it.
The Fastolf family, whose most celebrated member was Sir John Fastolf, are recorded here from the thirteenth century.
It has long been thought that it was the site of the Battle of the Herrings in 1429, when Sir John Fastolf beat off an attack on an English convoy taking supplies to the siege of Orleans; but in his biography of Fastolf, The Real Falstaff, Stephen Cooper argues that the battle is more likely to have taken place at Rouvray-Sainte-Croix.
In the fifteenth century the lord of the manor was Sir John Fastolf of Caister in Norfolk (1380-1459), following the English conquest of Normandy and Maine.
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