Dennis Clegg

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

Dennis Clegg was born in 1687 at Padiham, Lancashire, a small stone-built town on the River Calder below Pendle Hill, where the streets ran steeply down to the water and the smell of wet wool and coal smoke hung in the valley most of the year. He was the elder child of Everard Clegg, a ferryman who kept the crossing on the river below the town, and of Helen Faulkner, a weaver who was also, unknown to nearly everyone in Padiham, the vampire slayer called The Quiet Ford. He grew up in the last years of the Stuarts, in a cottage where the loom stood in the room next to the fire and where his mother's shuttle was as loud a part of the day as the clock of the parish church. The Lancashire of his boyhood was a land of hand-looms. Padiham and the villages around it lived on linen and fustian and the coarser woollens, spun by women and children in the cottages and woven by men and women on wooden looms whose frames took up half a room. Cloth was carried on packhorses over the moors to Manchester and Halifax, and the great chapmen came round on market days to buy it in the piece. Oats and barley were the staples, with oatcake baked on a bakestone, butter, cheese, and meat only at Christmas and after slaughter in the autumn. Roman Catholic families, including gentry near Whalley, kept to their old faith under penal law, while the Protestant Dissenters at Padiham chapel had only been given licence to worship openly after the Toleration Act of 1689, when Dennis was a toddler. It was a country where people knew what their neighbours believed and quietly overlooked it. His mother died in 1690, when he was three. He remembered her, later, mostly as a smell of lanolin and a rhythm of thumps, and a hand that would put a stopped shuttle back in his fist. His sister Katharine Faulkner was born that same year, in the last months of Helen's life, and the household after the funeral was Everard, a three-year-old boy and a new baby, in a cottage with a river at the door. Everard was a broad, silent man who did his work by hauling on a rope with the tide of the current, and it is not recorded that he ever spoke of his wife's other life. What the family later understood was that Helen's rifle, her silver and her tally of the Red Ledger passed by arrangement into the keeping of Faulkner cousins at Lancaster and did not remain in the ferryman's house. Dennis grew up knowing that his mother had been a weaver and nothing more, and that his surname was not the name that his sister carried. He was raised in the ferry cottage among the smells of tar and river weed, and in the natural way of boys on such a river he learned to pole, to sound a pool, to judge a flood by the colour of the water and to read a man's temper from the way he stood at the landing. When he was ten or so he was set to work with his father on the ferry rope. When he was fifteen the family took in a lease of some fields above the town, and it was on that upland ground that he found his calling as a yeoman. A yeoman in those decades was a freeholder or a tenant who farmed his own land with his own hands, a step above the husbandman and well below the gentry. Dennis had oats, a cow, some sheep on the common grazing and a horse. He took his work seriously, and by his thirties he was a man whom other farmers consulted at the Padiham market cross about the price of grain. In appearance he was tall and rawboned like his father, with his mother's light, quick eyes, and he was known for a slow, cautious way of speaking that made him sound older than he was. Neighbours called him steady. He kept accounts in a small notebook in a fair round hand, attended the chapel on Sundays and disliked debt so strongly that he would work an extra week to avoid owing a shilling. He was also, according to family tradition, suspicious of anything that arrived by night. This was the ordinary caution of a man whose mother had died young and mysteriously and whose Faulkner cousins spoke in low voices when he was in the room, and it is possible that Katharine's later reserve about their childhood came from the same source. He never married and had no children. The family record does not say why; his sister thought he was married to his acres and his ferry, and he seems to have been content with the explanation. The great event of his life, in public terms, was the year 1715, when the first Jacobite rising swept into Lancashire. A rebel army under Thomas Forster and a number of Catholic gentry marched south from Scotland and Northumberland in November, entered Lancaster and then Preston, and were beaten there by government troops under General Wills and General Carpenter, who took the town after a brief fight around the barricades. Dennis was twenty-eight. Farmers all around Padiham had to decide, in the space of a fortnight, whether to keep their heads down, to serve with the militia or to slip away over the fells. Dennis did the first and in a modest way the second, carrying oats and messages for the local militia under the eye of the constable. The countryside afterwards filled with prisoners, half-starved Highlanders and English rebels marched over the roads, and the smaller landowners near Padiham found their barns requisitioned for weeks. He said afterwards that he had never seen so many frightened men in one place, and that the frightened ones were not always the ones under guard. He seems to have felt the Faulkner name more as a burden than as a gift, and his relations with the Red Ledger, which was kept in its own line of the family, were distant. He knew the story of the Guest of Towton as a tale told at the fireside, and it was Katharine, not Dennis, who preserved the little stock of remedies and warnings that Helen had left. Yet he did his part when he was asked. When a cousin from Lancaster needed a barn for a night, or a man to carry a sack of silver filings across the river without questions, Dennis obliged, and no ledger entry bears his name because no slayer's work was ever done in his sight. The family's later accounts say that the Red Ledger owed him a good deal, for the ferry at the foot of Padiham, first his father's and afterwards his, was more than once the quiet way by which hunters crossed the Calder unseen. Dennis Clegg died in 1726 of a fever, aged thirty-nine, in the same year that the mill-dams on the Calder were flooded by a wet autumn. The illness took him in a week, in the season when the low ground was thick with mist, and his sister came from Lancaster to nurse him. He was buried at Padiham beside the grave of his mother, with a slate stone that his father paid for, and Everard outlived him by six years, dying in 1732. His farm went to Katharine, who let it rather than keep it, and his little account book is the chief evidence that he lived at all. He is remembered in the Red Ledger family not as a fighter but as the man who held the crossing. In the long story of the Slayerverse, Dennis Clegg is one of those people through whom a great matter passed without ever touching them directly: a yeoman with no craft and no rifle, who stood on the bank of a Lancashire river and, without asking, made way.