[10]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.
[11] 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.
[12] He settled an amount of £100 a year on his wife for her own use,[11] but otherwise held her estates for himself until his death, at the expense of Millicent's son by her first marriage, Stephen Scrope [d][9] (Fastolf's stepson).
He was Bedford's Master of the Household, and was Governor of the province of Maine and Anjou, and on 25 February 1426, created a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.
[22] After a visit to England in 1428, he returned to the war, and on 12 February 1429, when in charge of the convoy for the English army before Orléans, defeated the French and Scots at the Battle of the Herrings.
[23] During the 1429 Siege of Orléans, the French had planned to abandon the city after they heard rumours (which were true) that John Fastolf was coming with a force to reinforce the English besiegers.
According to the French historian Jehan de Waurin, who was present, the disaster was due to Talbot's rashness, and Fastolf only fled when resistance was hopeless.
[21] Despite the scandal associated with the Patay incident, he held a number of military commands, including captaincies of Honfleur (1424–34), Verneuil (1429), and Caen (1430–37).
He was given Frileuse near Harfleur by Henry V and went on to build a considerable property portfolio in Normandy, including four manors in the Pays de Caux worth £200 per annum.
[31] From the 1430s he built Caister Castle in Norfolk as his main residence, with a London house in Bermondsey,[32] then a popular location for the wealthy, just outside the city.
[36] In the 1950s the Oxford academic K. B. McFarlane showed that Fastolf made large sums of money in France, which he managed to transfer back to England and invest in land and property.
Besides his share in his wife's property he had large estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, a house at Southwark in London and where he also owned the Boar's Head Inn.
From 1435, and more so in retirement, he was the author of numerous memoranda, which he fired off to the government of the day, about the strategy and policy to be pursued with regard to the war in France.
He seems to have been a somewhat lonely figure, and made several attempts to draft a will, establishing a Chantry College at Caister Castle but never legally documented his intentions and effectively died intestate.
Instead, after many legal disputes, and a brief siege by a rival claimant John de Mowbray, 4th Duke of Norfolk, it passed to the Paston family.
The bulk of Sir John's fortune passed to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he is remembered as a benefactor, and where there is a Fastolf Society.
Fastolf appears in Shakespeare's early play Henry VI, Part 1 as a cowardly knight who abandons the heroic Lord Talbot.
When Shakespeare came to write Henry IV, Part 1, set in the early years of Fastolf's career, he created a disreputable boon companion for the young Prince Hal, who was called Sir John Oldcastle.
Fastolf appears as a featured character in Koei's video game known as Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War, in which he is seen as a contributor to the cause of England, wielding a longsword as his primary weapon.