John Paston, English politician (died 1466)

John Paston I was an English country gentleman and landowner. He was the eldest son of the judge William Paston, Justice of the Common Pleas. After he succeeded his father in 1444, his life was marked by conflict occasioned by a power struggle in East Anglia between the dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, and by his involvement in the affairs of his wife's kinsman, Sir John Fastolf. Between 1460–1466 he was Justice of the Peace for Norfolk, and was elected as a member of parliament in 1460 and again in 1461. A number of his letters survive among the Paston Letters, a rich source of historical information for the lives of the English gentry of the period.