Alice Bulcock

Spouse of Harry Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Alice Bulcock spent her working life carrying other people's water, and the records of the Faulkner household in Clitheroe mention her more often as a pair of hands than as a person. Yet she was the woman who kept Harry Faulkner's house running for twenty-nine years, who raised two daughters through the worst of the Tudor upheavals, and who was remembered by her own children in a way that the ledgers, which counted only vampires, had no column for. She was born in 1510 at Whalley, Lancashire, in the same year and the same village as another girl, Ellen Wentworth, who became a brewster and a vampire slayer, and the two women knew each other all their lives without ever becoming friends. Whalley in Alice's childhood was a village organised around the great Cistercian abbey, whose walls, gatehouse and fishponds dominated the river bend. The abbey employed a large part of the parish in one way or another, on its granges, in its kitchens, at its mill, in its guest-house where travellers slept on straw pallets. Alice's people were among those who lived by carrying, scouring and fetching. There are no surviving records of her parents beyond the surname Bulcock, a local name of the Ribble valley, and it seems that she was sent out to service at about the age of eleven, the usual age for a poor girl in a district where a household with a spare bed took a child from a household without one. Her first place was in the house of a Clitheroe attorney, where she slept on a truckle bed under the stair and learned to carry a full bucket up and down the cellar steps without spilling a drop. Service in a small-town household of the 1520s was a long and specific education. A servant girl rose before dawn to draw the fire, brought in the water from the well in the yard, scoured the pewter with sand, boiled the linen in lye, and fed the household on oat bread, pottage, cheese and, on good days, a bit of bacon. She learned to make candles from tallow and rushlights from rushes dipped in grease. Alice also learned reading, more or less by accident, from the attorney's clerk, who taught her to spell out her name from the account book, and she was to sign her own name, unusually for a woman of her class, in the parish register when her first daughter was christened. This small accomplishment was what she valued most in herself, and she quietly saw to it that both her daughters could read. The Faulkner house lay two streets away from the attorney's. Harry Faulkner, born in Clitheroe in 1511, was a fletcher who worked in the workshop that his father Edmund Faulkner had kept, and Edmund, the elder son of the Tudor marriage, raised a Faulkner on the Lancashire lands, was known in the family as The Flodden Archer, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger who had once served in the northern levy at that battle. Harry's mother Grace Pickering, a weaver, had died in 1524, when Alice was fourteen and Harry thirteen, and the house had been without a woman ever since. Harry had a brother, Maurice, and a sister, Margery, who were still small. It was the kind of household that needed a servant, and Alice came to it first as a hired girl who did the washing and cooked on feast days and only later as a wife. They married in 1530, when she was twenty and he was nineteen, and there was no dowry beyond what she had saved from her wages and a feather bed given by the attorney's wife. The wedding was small, in the parish church at Clitheroe, and the feast was held in the Faulkner house with the doors open to the street. Alice knew the house already, and her chief adjustment was learning to sit down in it. Harry was quiet and exact, a man who measured a goose feather against his thumb and threw away a third of them, and his wife was quick and talkative, and the two of them turned out to be well matched. He made arrows for the market, and, in the years when the crown's statutes required every man to own a bow and practise on Sundays, the demand was steady. She kept the house, the accounts, and his patience. Two daughters followed. Olive Faulkner was born in 1532 and Jocosa Faulkner in 1535. The elder was named for the Proctor woman who had once sold fish in Padiham, a distant cousin whom Alice had never met, and the younger was named for a great-aunt of Harry's whose peculiar name was a family joke. Alice taught them to read from a battered primer and to spin from a distaff, and she taught them what she knew about the world, chiefly that a woman with her own money was safer than one without. She did not have any hand in the family's work with the ledgers, and the Faulkner slayers of the day did not consult her about it. She knew, all the same. She knew what was kept in the loft, what Edmund put in his pack on certain nights, and what it meant when a Faulkner man came home at dawn with dirt on his knees and no explanation. She kept her mouth shut and the kettle on. The disorders of the reign entered her house from every side. The northern risings after the dissolution of the monasteries, in 1536 and 1537, took men out of Clitheroe by the dozen, and Alice, six years married with a baby on her hip, watched her old village of Whalley stripped and its abbot taken away to be hanged. Her brother-in-law Maurice married in 1537 a Thorne woman from the Northumbrian border, Meg Thorne, a slayer, and Alice, who found the newcomer alarming and marvellous in equal parts, taught her how a Lancashire kitchen was run. When Edmund Faulkner died in 1541 the workshop passed to Harry entirely, and the household was suddenly a great deal heavier. In the religious changes that followed she went to church when the law said so and kept her private prayers in the old form, as most of her neighbours did. Her later years were quieter and also harder. Her daughters married and moved into houses of their own, or at least so the record implies, and Alice found herself again a woman running a kitchen with too few people in it. In these years she also began to cough. The winter of 1558 to 1559 was among the worst of the decade, with a fever epidemic running through the north that carried off a large share of the old and the poor, and the cough that Alice caught in December settled on her chest and did not shift. She died in early 1559, aged forty-nine, of what the register calls a winter cough, and Harry, who had been her husband for twenty-nine years, buried her in the churchyard at Clitheroe without a stone, since the family did not yet have the money for one. He lived on for another twelve years. What the family kept of Alice was chiefly a manner of speaking and a set of household rules that were handed down through her daughters: that the fire was never to be left to die overnight, that bread was cut toward the body, that the door was barred before dusk and unbarred only after the church bell. Some of these were merely thrift, and some, it is likely, were things she had learned from watching the Faulkners' hunters. Olive Faulkner died in 1566 and Jocosa Faulkner in 1586, and the daughters' letters, where they survive, speak of their mother in a tone that is plain and affectionate. In the Slayerverse she stands for the many women who married into the Faulkner and Proctor households, saw the ledgers, and asked no credit for keeping the houses in which the work was done. The Red Ledger's clerks did not enter her under any tally, and she would have thought that entirely reasonable.