Sir John Fastolf (6 November 1380 – 5 November 1459) was a late medieval English landowner and knight who fought in the Hundred Years' War. He has enjoyed a more lasting reputation as the prototype, in some part, of Shakespeare's character Sir John Falstaff. Many historians argue, however, that he deserves to be famous in his own right, not only as a soldier, but as a patron of literature, a writer on strategy and perhaps as an early industrialist. Lineage and family Coming from a minor gentry family in Norfolk, John Fastolf was born on 6 November 1380 at the manor house of Caister Hall, a family possession which he later turned into Caister Castle, but of which little now remains aside from the water-filled moat. The son of Sir John Fastolf (died 1383) and Mary Park (died 2 May 1406), he belonged to an ancient Norfolk family originally seated at Great Yarmouth, where it is recorded from the thirteenth century. Notable members of the family in earlier generations included Thomas Fastolf, Bishop of St David's, and his brother, Nicholas Fastolf, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Many of the name had been bailiffs of Great Yarmouth since the time of Edward I, and a certain Hugh Fastolf was sheriff of Norfolk in 1390. On 13 January 1409, in Ireland, Fastolf married Millicent Tibetot (1368–1446), daughter and co-heiress of Robert, Lord Tiptoft, and widow of Sir Stephen Scrope (son of Richard, Lord Scrope). This marriage brought him significant amounts of land, including the manors of Castle Combe and Bathampton in Wiltshire, Oxenton in Gloucestershire, and several properties in Somerset and Yorkshire. These lands brought him an income of £240 per annum, a considerable sum which amounted to five times the revenue Fastolf gained from his own estates. He settled an amount of £100 a year on his wife for her own use, but otherwise held her estates for himself until his death, at the expense of Millicent's son by her first marriage, Stephen Scrope (Fastolf's stepson). Fastolf's wife was significantly older than him, and the couple had no children. Early years According to Fastolf's biographer Stephen Cooper, given his family's background Fastolf must have received an appropriate education for the standards of the time. In a court testimony given in France, 1435, he claimed to have visited Jerusalem as a boy, between 1392 and 1393, which must have been in the