Adam Thorne

Member of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

A fletcher's shop smells of hot glue, goose feathers and ash-wood shavings, and in the Yorkshire of the middle sixteenth century it was a busier place than the histories of gunpowder might lead a reader to expect. Adam Thorne, born in 1519 at Rothbury in Northumberland, spent his working life in that smell, making arrows for a country that had not yet given up the longbow, and his family papers preserve little else about him except that he made them well, and that he raised a daughter alone in a walled city that was not his own. His place in the record is that of a minor figure of the House of Thorne, the border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, later mountain hunters, whose daughter Fenella would in 1579 marry Blaise Proctor. Rothbury lay in Coquetdale, where the river Coquet comes down from the Cheviots through steep, wooded country to a village of stone houses around a green. It was cattle and sheep land, hard and cold, and the reiving families of the valley, the Thornes among them, lived under the constant expectation of raiders. Every household kept a sword, a steel bonnet and a bow. The bow, in particular, was a working tool of the border: a yew stave as tall as a man, drawn to the ear, that could send a cloth-yard shaft through a jack of plate at sixty paces. Adam's father, whose name is not recorded, saw that a boy with poor eyes for the fell and clever hands for the bench might do better as an arrow-maker than as a rider, and apprenticed him at twelve to a fletcher in the village. The apprenticeship taught him the anatomy of an arrow. Shafts of ash or aspen, straight-grained and seasoned for a year, were planed and rounded and tapered toward the head. The nock at the tail was cut with a small saw. Feathers, from the grey goose by preference, were split, trimmed and glued with hide glue warmed in a pot, then bound to the shaft with silk thread. The head, of iron, came from the smith, a bodkin for armour or a broad head for game, and was fitted with hot resin. A good fletcher could make a dozen shafts a day and sell them at the sixpence a dozen that the statutes and the market allowed. Adam grew into the trade as a man grows into an old coat. He was a stocky, patient, slightly deaf man with strong forearms and a habit of humming through his nose while he worked, and neighbours said that his arrows flew true because he sighted along each one as if it were a friend. The border did not leave him alone, however, and the Thorne name carried obligations. The House of Thorne was a house of slayers as well as reivers, and in the dark of the marches its people fought creatures that the king's law knew nothing of. Adam himself was never called and never hunted. Instead he served, as a fletcher could, by making what the hunters needed. Ash and hawthorn were his woods, and he cut stakes as readily as shafts, sharpening them on a whetstone at his bench, hardening the points in the fire and packing them in bundles for cousins who came by at night and asked for quantity rather than beauty. He learned to fit arrowheads that a hunter could use against creatures that steel alone did not trouble, and to tip a shaft with a sliver of blessed thorn. The cousins paid in small coin, or in kind, and did not speak of it. The events of the age blew across the marches and through him. The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s scattered the priories of Northumberland and shut the church's marking of the year; the northern risings of 1536 and 1537 pulled men from every valley. Some time in the 1540s, in the years after the wars with Scotland had devastated the borders, Adam left Rothbury. Why is not recorded. The family says only that he took his tools and a small purse and went south, to the great walled city of York, where the guilds still gave a craftsman a place and a living. He found a shop in a lane off the Shambles, with a room above and a yard behind, near the practice butts where the city's men were still required by law to shoot on Sundays. It was a good place for a fletcher, and he prospered modestly. York was a city of guildhalls, wool markets and the minster close, and Adam, a northerner among northerners, settled into it. He joined the fletchers' and bowyers' company, paid his quarterage, and took his place in the Corpus Christi procession until the pageants were suppressed. He grew used to the sound of the Minster bells and the constant ring of hammers from the masons' yard, and to the smell of the Ouse in summer. In 1554 his daughter Fenella Thorne was born, and the family papers, which say almost nothing of his wife, say that from that year the shop was a household. Fenella's mother went unrecorded in the Thorne accounts and Adam raised the child himself, with the help of an aunt from the border and a neighbour who kept hens. He taught her to sort feathers, to grade shafts by weight, to tell a good grey goose quill from a bad one by feel, and she sat on a stool at his bench through the winters of her childhood with her small hands full of down. He was a quiet father and, by all accounts, a comfortable one. In the evenings he sat by the hearth with a cup of small ale and told her the border stories, of Redesdale and the raids, of the towers with their ladders drawn up, of the watchers who kept the fell, sometimes ending with a cheerful little warning that the country between the Tyne and the Tweed had things in it that did not belong to any king. Fenella did not become a slayer, and Adam never pressed her to, but she learned the old caution and its small practical rules. He did not neglect the church, attending the minster's services in all the changes of the crown, and in the difficult years of the northern rising of 1569, when the earls rose for the old religion and York became a place of arrests and executions, he kept his shop shut, his head down and his stakes hidden in the wood-pile. He lived to see his daughter grown, but not to see her matched. By the middle of the 1570s Fenella, in her early twenties, was being courted by Blaise Proctor, of the Yorkist house of the White Ledger, a young man who came to the shop for arrows and stayed to talk, and Adam, stiff in the joints and short of breath, set aside a purse of coin, saved over twenty years, to pay for the wedding feast. The Proctors regarded the coming match as a happy addition to a house that had always relied on strangers with steady hands. Adam Thorne died in 1577, aged fifty-eight, of a fever, two years before the wedding of 1579 at which Fenella married Blaise Proctor. It is the sad arithmetic of his life: the purse paid for the feast, and a neighbour of the guild gave the bride away in his place. He was buried in the parish churchyard, his tools passing to a journeyman of the guild, and Fenella lived on until 1595. He is listed, in the Slayerverse chronicles of the Thorne house, as the fletcher of Rothbury and York, a man who armed a family of hunters without ever drawing a bow against anything more terrible than a straw butt on a Sunday.