Abraham Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

If you had walked through Halifax in the spring of 1615 and asked for the Proctor lad who made buckets, you would have been sent to a yard beside the Hebble brook where a twenty-year-old cooper called Abraham Proctor was hooping a barrel with more concentration than the job appeared to need. He had been born in 1594, in that West Riding town of cloth and steep hills, the youngest of the four children of Lawrence Proctor and Sibyl Birtwistle, and the only one of the four who worked with his hands for a living. His brother Richard and his sister Katherine were vampire slayers, and his sister Christiana kept the White Ledger honest with her pen; Abraham, by contrast, made vessels that held water, beer, butter and salt. In a family of tally-keepers he tallied barrels. Halifax was a remarkable town for the time. It stood on the steep sides of the Calder valley, and its wealth came from the clothiers of the surrounding hills, who wove kerseys and broadcloths in their own cottages and brought them down to the Piece Hall's predecessor, the cloth market, on Saturdays. Everything the trade needed required containers: dye tubs, fuller's earth, soap, oil, beer for the thirsty workers, butter and cheese from the dairy farms on the moor. A cooper in Halifax was never short of work. He also had a foot in every trade, since he sold to the dyers, the brewers, the fishmongers and the carriers, and heard everything that was said in the yards. It was a good place for a Proctor, though Abraham had come to it by a longer road than his brothers, since the family had moved between Richmond and the west, following his father's wool business. His training was traditional. He was apprenticed for seven years to a master cooper, learning to select oak that had seasoned properly and to rive staves along the grain rather than saw them, to shape them with the drawknife and the jointer, to fire the inside of a cask over a small blaze so the wood would bend to the hoop, and to drive the iron or willow bands into place with a heavy hammer until the whole thing rang. It was labour that produced sore shoulders, cut hands and a large appetite. Abraham was well built for it, broad in the back and steady-handed, and he acquired a cooper's habits: a preference for order, a dislike of waste, and a habit of tapping any object he was given as if to hear whether it was sound. Friends recalled that he could tell the contents of a cask from its note. The family he came from cast a long shadow over him. His father, Lawrence, was a wool factor and a recusant, who kept the family's papers safe through hard times, and his mother Sibyl a dairywoman. Both had long since accepted that their children would be divided, some to the hunt and some to the ordinary trades, and neither pressed Abraham to change. What the family thought of his choice was a subject on which they were divided; Richard, the slayer, is said to have teased him for hitting things with a mallet instead of a stake, and Katherine defended him with the unanswerable observation that someone had to make the barrels the hunters' oats and salt beef came in. Christiana simply wrote to him every month. In 1619 he married Dionisia Clegg, a weaver, twenty-three years old, in one of the Calder valley's hillside chapels. Dionisia had a loom in the upper room of her parents' cottage and had been supplying cloth to the local clothiers since she was fifteen. She was quick, funny and rather formidable at a bargain, and Abraham, who was the opposite on all three counts, fell in love with her at a market stall while she was refusing a lower price. Their house was a stone cottage on a hillside terrace, with the loom on one floor and the cooper's yard on the ground below, so that all day there was the double sound of shuttle and mallet, the rhythms nearly matching. It was noted by neighbours that no Proctor household had ever been so orderly, or so full of noise. Two children followed. Cuthbert Proctor was born in 1622 and Florence Proctor in 1624. Neither was called, and Abraham did not want them to be. The family's hunting business was not concealed from him, since his siblings and his father had made sure he knew what the White Ledger was, but he had decided early that his part would be to keep the household running, and he regarded it as one of the valuable roles in a family such as his. He taught Cuthbert the cooper's trade in the yard, and Cuthbert, who lived until 1686, took it over. Florence, who lived until 1691, learned to weave at her mother's loom. The house was always warm and smelled of oak shavings and wool grease. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns tested the household. The town's mortality rose in the bad years, and the Calder valley froze so hard in some winters that the dye tubs cracked, but the cooperage always found work: coffins were not his line, but he made a good many of the barrels that carried a town through a hard year. He was a careful man with money and a generous one with his neighbours, and he was known to send a cask of small beer round to a house under quarantine without being asked. When his brother Richard or his sister Katherine passed through on their way to some hunt, they would leave weapons in his yard, stacked among the staves, and he would clean them and say nothing. The civil wars divided the northern gentry and turned Halifax into a hard place. The town stood for Parliament, in a district where the clothiers had their own reasons for disliking the king's taxes, while much of the surrounding gentry leaned the other way. In 1643 the royalist forces under the Earl of Newcastle came down on the West Riding, and Halifax was left exposed. That was the year that Dionisia died, in 1643, at the age of forty-seven, after a winter of billeted soldiers and short rations, and Abraham, at forty-nine, was left with a loom he could not bring himself to sell. He kept it, and Florence used it. He lived another ten years. In 1653 a fever came through the lower town and took him, at the age of fifty-nine, and Cuthbert and Florence buried him beside Dionisia. The White Ledger has no tally under his name, because he never took a life, but a Proctor note of the 1650s describes him as the man who kept the family's feet on the ground. In the Slayerverse he is remembered by that one plain kind of usefulness: the cooper of Halifax, whose barrels held.