Blanche Stansfield

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

The register of the parish near Bootham Bar records the christening of Blanche Stansfield in 1600, in York, and beside it, in the hand of a clerk who evidently liked to finish a line, the words "of Wilfred the cooper and Dionisia his wife". It was a good year to arrive in that city, or at least a tolerable one. York had been the capital of the North and was no longer, the Council of the North still sat at the King's Manor, and the great Minster stood over a town of narrow lanes, close-packed timber houses, and a river that flooded the staithes every spring. Her father, Wilfred Stansfield, born in 1576, made casks and tubs in a yard off Skeldergate, where the barges from the Ouse unloaded wine and salt fish and the smell of fresh-split oak and river mud never quite left the clothes. Her mother, Dionisia Proctor, born in 1581, was a seamstress who took in the finer sort of plain work, shirts, bands, coifs and the linings of doublets, and who was born into the Proctor family of the White Ledger. That parentage mattered more to the household than to the neighbours. The Proctors were a name York respected without being able to say why, and Dionisia carried her family's habits with her the way some women carry a good pair of scissors: not to show, but to have. In the Stansfield house, the ledger business was a matter of low voices and closed doors, of certain visitors coming after dark from Selby or Malton, of a chest that was not opened in front of the children. Blanche was a watchful girl and noticed all of it. She noticed that her mother could go still, in the middle of stitching, when a bell rang wrongly, and that her father kept a hawthorn maul among the coopers' mallets. She did not ask. It was a house in which you learned by looking, and the lesson she took from it was that the surest place to see what was happening was from the corner of a room with a piece of work in your hands. She was apprenticed to weaving, not to the needle. There is no clear account of why; the family's own tradition says that she disliked being told to sit still with a thimble, and that a neighbour's loom fascinated her from the age of nine. York's cloth trade was in decline in her girlhood, and the worsted weavers of the city had lost ground to the West Riding towns, but there was still work for a woman with a good eye at the coarser mixed cloths and the linen-woollen that the drapers could sell to farmers and coachmen. She learned to dress a warp, to thread heddles, to fix a fault before the cloth left the beam. She took to it with an ability that made older weavers suspicious and younger ones envious. By twenty, she rented a loom of her own, a narrow one in a shed behind a tanner's yard, and paid for it with cloth. She was never rich. She was independent, which in that city and that century was rarer. Her brother Hamond Stansfield was born in 1604 and the household was rearranged around him, since it was decided that the boy would go to a smith, and the family moved to Selby to be near the master who would teach him. Blanche did not follow. She stayed in York, in lodgings above a chandler's, and kept her loom and her independence, and the two of them corresponded across the river country in the way of a family that has never learned to write more than a few lines at a time. Their letters, when they survive, are all weather and prices, and all the more affectionate for it. She sent him cloth for aprons; he sent her hinges and nails, and once a small iron shuttle-hook he had forged himself, which she used until the end of her life. The plague and the hard winters of those Stuart years marked the household. The great sickness of the 1620s and 1630s crossed the North in waves, and York's magistrates shut the gates against travellers and set watchers at the doors of infected houses, a practice which Blanche endured and never forgot. Her father, Wilfred, died in 1634, worn out by years of heavy work, and her mother, Dionisia, had died the year before, in 1633, so that within twelve months both of the people who had made the house were gone. She was thirty-three, unmarried, and the only one of the family left in York. She might have taken the loom and the little inheritance and gone to Selby to keep house for her brother. She stayed instead, and it was during that lonely decade that she became, in the family's telling, the person to whom other Proctors wrote when they wanted news of the city. She was not a hunter, and never claimed to be. But the White Ledger's cadet correspondents in York found in her a reliable friend. When a hunter came through from the Riding with a wounded arm, or a family of Proctors needed a quiet room for a night, or a stranger was said to have come into the district who slept by day and would not be asked into a church, it was often at the door of the weaver behind the tanner's yard that word was left. She did not carry a stake, but she wove wide, dark, heavy cloth, and it turned out that it made excellent wrapping for gear, hood, and cloak. A number of the Proctor hunters in the middle of the century went about in coats cut from her cloth, and remarked that it shed rain and kept its colour and did not snag on hawthorn. She had the sort of place in the family that is not given a rank and is missed as soon as it is empty. The civil wars came to York in a form she had dreaded. In 1644 the Marquis of Newcastle's royalist army withdrew into the city, and a great host of Parliament's and the Scots' armies laid siege to it through the summer; the siege ended in July with the battle of Marston Moor, a few miles west, where the King's northern army was broken. York's trade was ruined, its suburbs burned, and its citizens starved through weeks of blockade. Blanche, at forty-four, was still there, with her loom and a hoard of meal, and she is remembered for having kept several neighbours alive on it. It is a plain family memory, and not embroidered. The Proctors of the White Ledger did not agree about the war; some favoured the King and some Parliament, and the ledger's own pages carry no allegiance. Blanche, her nephew's children said later, held that a war was a bad time to make cloth and a worse one to be argued out of a friendship. She never married. In the tradition of the family, this was regarded as no misfortune: the Proctor houses had many wives and few weavers, and an unmarried woman with her own loom was an asset in a way that a wife could not always be. She had no children of her own, but she brought up more than one niece and nephew from the wider family over the years, teaching them, in the manner of her mother, that a thing well made was a form of argument. Her brother Hamond visited when he could and she remembered him always as the one who had gone, a large, careful boy leaving the city in a cart with his tools. He died in 1650, well before her, and she was one of the few relatives at his burial. In 1663, at sixty-three, she died in a fall from a horse. The family remembers it as a strange end for a woman who had spent most of her life at a loom, and there was some sad comment that she had taken up riding late, to visit relatives in the country, and had been thrown when her mare shied at something in the road. The Proctors have never made anything more of the incident. She was buried in York, beside the parents she had outlived by three decades. The White Ledger contains no tally under her name, and the chapter of the family's archive that treats of the northern correspondents lists her, without titles, as Blanche Stansfield, weaver, of York. Later generations in the Slayerverse have come to see in that plain entry something better than a rank. She was the person who held the door, the cloth, and the news, and who let the hunters go on their way without being made to explain themselves.