Amice Proctor

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

In the spring of 1511 a girl was born at Preston, Lancashire, in a rented room above a cooper's yard near the Fishergate, and the midwife who delivered her, a stout woman with a bag of herbs and a sharp voice, told the exhausted mother that this one would be quick and stubborn. Amice Proctor was the second daughter of Tristram Proctor, a fletcher, and Olive Crabtree, a brewster, and she grew up to become a midwife's apprentice, a craft that the midwife of her birth might reasonably have guessed at. She belonged to the Proctor line, the Yorkist keepers of the White Ledger, and she descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married in January 1486; but her life was lived among the poor women of the Lancashire market towns, at a bedside far from any ledger. Preston in her childhood was one of the busiest towns in the county, a cloth and grain market on a hill above the River Ribble, with a stone parish church, a grammar school, and a Guild Merchant that met once every twenty years and turned the town into a fair. Ships came up the estuary on the tide and unloaded fish and salt at the quay, and carts went out across the marsh with wool. Amice's earliest memories were of noise and smell: the tanneries down by the water, the ropewalk, the cattle drovers on market day, the bells of the friary. The family stayed there for several years after her birth, then removed to Padiham, where her father found more work, and where her elder sister Olive Proctor, born in 1508, had been born and where she would spend her life selling fish. The girls' father was a man of two trades. He made arrows, and he hunted vampires, and his alias in the White Ledger was The Steady Heron. Amice knew him as a quiet, patient man who taught her to sit still, and she said in later years that it was the only thing of value she got from him beyond his name. He died in 1525, when she was fourteen, and the household was thrown back on her mother's brewing. The two girls were expected to earn their keep. Olive took to the fish trade. Amice, who was slighter and more watchful, was placed with a widow who practised as a midwife in the parish, a woman whose name the records do not give and whom the family called only Mother Bell after her cottage by the bell-founder's yard. An apprentice midwife of that period did not have a formal indenture in the way that a fletcher's apprentice did. She attended a senior woman, carried her bag, boiled the linen and the water, held the lantern, and was gradually permitted to do more as she showed she could be trusted. The law had begun to regulate the trade only recently. Under statute and episcopal rule a midwife was supposed to be licensed by the bishop, to swear an oath before the church court that she would not use sorcery, would baptise a dying infant in the proper words, and would report the name of the true father in cases of doubt. Amice learned all of this from Mother Bell, together with a great deal of practical knowledge that no oath covered: how to turn a child in the womb, how to ease a long labour with a sling of cloth, which herbs stopped bleeding, which women should be sent for a priest and when. She never took the licence. Some of the family said the fee was more than she could afford, and others that she had no wish to stand before the church court and swear anything, and it may be that both were true. Mother Bell died in the 1540s, and Amice took over most of her patients, but she continued to describe herself in the parish records as an assistant and not a midwife, and she was called Amice the apprentice long after she had delivered several hundred children. It was a title that gave her a certain freedom. Nobody expected an apprentice to swear, and nobody could revoke a licence that had never been issued. It also meant that she was paid in eggs, cloth, a pot of butter or a hen, and that the sums in her account tin were always small. The work was harder than it sounds. A woman in labour in a Preston lane in the 1530s had no doctor to call, and the midwife's skill was often the only thing standing between the household and a funeral. Amice was sent for at any hour, went out in any weather, and stayed until the child had come or the mother had died. She saw women die of childbed fever and hemorrhage, and she saw children born too early to survive, and she carried the burden of it home. The Guild year of 1542 brought crowds to the town, and a cluster of births in the month after, and she is said to have delivered eleven children in nine days. She did not marry and had no children of her own, and when asked why she said, with her usual dryness, that she had seen enough of the business to know that she was better off on the outside of it. The Proctors were by no means blind to her, and the White Ledger of her line made use of what she knew. A midwife learned things that others did not, such as which household had a birth that would not be spoken of, which infant had been born marked, which mother had been visited before her time. When the old Proctor slayers of the county suspected a household, they came to Amice, and she told them what she had seen, in the flat tone of someone reading a list. Her sister Olive brought word of the market, and Amice brought word of the bedchamber, and between them the two women gave the White Ledger a picture of Preston and Padiham that no armed hunter could have assembled. She was never listed in the ledger as a slayer, and she had no craft or alias; the clerk of her line entered her simply as Amice Proctor, midwife's apprentice, of Preston. The Reformation changed her trade without ending it. When the old religious houses were dissolved she lost the blessings and relics that midwives had used, the girdle of the Virgin and the holy water, and under Edward and then Elizabeth she was expected to invoke no saints at all. She adapted, as she had adapted to everything, without comment. Her mother died in 1545 in the loft at Padiham, and Olive died in 1558, and after that Amice lived alone in a single room in Preston, working as long as she could stand. In the winter of 1563 to 1564 she caught a cough on the road from a birth at the edge of the marsh, and it did not leave her. She died in 1564, aged fifty-three, of what the register calls a winter cough, and the women of the parish, whom she had brought into the world or through it, carried her to the churchyard. Amice Proctor left no house and no descendants, and the ledger's entry for her runs to two lines. She is remembered instead in a habit of her family, who still say that a Proctor should know the midwife of any town she lives in. In the Slayerverse she stands with her sister as one of the quiet auxiliaries of the White Ledger, a woman who never lifted a stake and whose knowledge of the women of Preston did more to keep the county safe than many a longer tally. Her recorded last words, if they are hers, were an instruction to the girl who sat with her to boil the water and not to waste it.