Clement Widdop

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

Clement Widdop was born in 1589 in Clitheroe, Lancashire, under the shadow of the little Norman keep that squats on its limestone knoll above the Ribble valley, and he spent the whole of his fifty-five years within a day's ride of that rock. He belonged to no slayer house and never claimed the calling. His place in the Faulkner records is that of a man who married into the Lancastrian line and then, for thirty-four years, made himself useful to it in ways the Red Ledger seldom bothered to write down: he mended, stitched, carried and kept quiet. Clitheroe in the year of his birth was a small borough with a great deal of sheep around it. The town had a market charter, a grammar school, a castle that was already more ruin than fortress, and a scatter of lanes where tanners, glovers and cordwainers worked beside one another because they needed one another. Hides came in from the pastures of the Forest of Bowland and the Ribble dales, went into the tan pits by the water, and came out as the raw material of a saddler's trade. Clement's world smelled of oak bark, neatsfoot oil and wet wool. The Reformation was still a living memory in that country; many families in the Ribble valley kept the old religion quietly, and a boy learned early which neighbours were safe to talk to about it and which were not. He was apprenticed young, and the trade suited him. A saddler in the reign of Elizabeth and then of James made far more than saddles: pack-saddles for the carriers who worked the pannier-ways over the Pennines, bridles and girths, harness for the plough teams, leather bottles, straps, holsters, the heavy stitched jerkins that farmers wore in winter. The work demanded a steady hand with an awl and waxed thread, and an eye for how a strap would fail long before it did. Clement was known, according to the few family stories that survive, for stitching that could be trusted, a reputation that in a horse country carried more weight than charm. He was a lean, watchful man, slow to speak, with a permanent stain of dye on his right thumb and a habit of testing every buckle by hanging his whole weight from it before he would let it leave the shop. In 1610, when he was twenty-one, he married Avice Thwaites, a herbalist three years his senior. She was already better known in the district than he was. Avice gathered her plants on the moor edges and along the hedge-banks, dried them in the loft above the workshop and sold or gave them to anyone who came to the door with a fever, a cut or a colicky child. The two of them made an odd pair in the market, the quiet leatherman and the woman who could name a hundred weeds, but the arrangement worked: the shop smelled of tanned hide below and of feverfew and yarrow above, and neighbours who came for one often left with the other. Their household was never rich, yet the accounts of the period suggest it was never in debt either, which in the plague years was a distinction in itself. Two daughters were born to them. Helen Widdop arrived in 1611 and Heloise Faulkner in 1613; that the second child carried the Faulkner surname while her father was a Widdop is one of the small puzzles of the family papers, and it fits the old custom by which the name passed through the women of the line. It is enough to say that Avice's side of the household stood close to the Faulkners of Lancashire, and that the Widdop workshop was one of the places where the Red Ledger's people could be sure of a quiet word, a repaired strap, a warm corner. Clement never explained the arrangement, and nobody in the family asked. When Heloise grew up, she married Roland Thorne in 1638, and Clement lived to see his younger daughter enter a house of border hunters. He was not a man to make a speech about it, though the harness he made for the wedding journey was noticed by everyone who saw it. His usefulness to the Faulkners was of a practical kind. Slayers of the period travelled hard and fought worse: pistols, staves and hawthorn stakes needed holsters and scabbards that would not swell in the wet, and a hunter who came off a horse in the dark on the Rossendale road needed a girth that had not been sewn by a cheat. Clement made that leatherwork without question and without invoice, and he asked only that the returned pieces be brought back to him so he could see how they had stood up. Family memory kept a story of a torn sheath handed across the counter one morning with dried blood along the seam and no explanation; he re-stitched it in silence and hung it on the peg to dry. He had the discretion of a man who knew the difference between what he was told and what he had worked out for himself. Whatever the Faulkners' hunts were, he learned them by the condition of the gear rather than the confidence of the hunters. The early Stuart years were harsh in the north. Bad harvests in the 1620s pushed up the price of oats and bread, the winters bit hard, and epidemic sickness moved along the trade roads with the carriers. Clement and Avice weathered these years with the help of their two trades, since a herbalist was never short of customers when the fever came round. There were losses close to hand, as there were in every household of the time, but the Widdop shop survived on the strength of its stitching and its cures, and its daughters grew up. Clement saw the market square change in those decades: more shops of cloth and less of hides, the carriers arriving from Whalley and Skipton with news of Parliament and the king's quarrels with it, and a gathering unease about taxation and religion that the whole of Lancashire felt and divided over. The civil wars split the northern gentry, and they split Clitheroe families too. By 1642 Clement was fifty-three and too old to be a soldier, but a saddler is never too old to be wanted in wartime. Both armies, and every foraging party of both armies, needed harness and repairs. Manchester held for Parliament, while great houses like Lathom stood for the king, and country people between them were pressed for horses, fodder and mending. Clement worked for whoever paid in coin, said nothing of politics, and kept the ledger of his own accounts in a hand so unemotional that it has been read since as evidence of a very careful neutrality. The Faulkners, on the whole, kept their heads down and their hunting going through those years, since the dead did not stop rising because kings had quarrelled, and in the confusion the vampires of the district had more cover than usual. Clement died in 1644, of a fever, aged fifty-five, in the same year that Marston Moor broke the royal cause in the north and Lathom House was besieged. He was buried in Clitheroe with the ordinary rites, and Avice, who outlived him by twelve years and died in 1656, is said to have hung his last unsold bridle in the loft among the drying herbs, where it stayed for a generation. Their daughters, Helen, who died in 1662, and Heloise, who died in 1665, carried the shop's habits into their own households. In the Red Ledger he has no tally, because he never made one, but a margin in an early hand records that the saddler of Clitheroe was one of the family's reliable friends. Within the Slayerverse he stands as the kind of husband and father that a hunting family rested on: not a slayer, and not asked to be one, but a craftsman whose stitching held.