The smell of split oak and hot iron hoops was the first thing Denys Shuttleworth knew, and it was the last thing that could be said to have stayed with him. He was born in 1633 in Ormskirk, Lancashire, a market town of gingerbread, flax and dark brick chimneys on the flat mosses west of the Pennines, and he grew up in a yard where barrels were made for the ale houses, the fish salters and the farmers who sent butter down the Douglas to be shipped to Liverpool. His parents are not named in the family papers, which is common for the trading people of the region; the Faulkner ledger notes only that his father was a working man with a mallet and a stubborn temper, and that the boy learned from him at the age of nine that a barrel is only as good as its worst stave.
Ormskirk in the 1640s was a town on the wrong side of a war. Lancashire was Royalist in its gentry and Parliamentarian in its towns, and the Earl of Derby's men and their enemies passed through the county in turn, burning barns and pressing horses. Denys was a boy of nine when the fighting began and a youth of eighteen when the last Royalist hopes were ended at Worcester, and in between he watched his neighbours divide over kings and bishops while the price of oats went up. He was apprenticed as a cooper at fourteen to a master on the Aughton road, served his seven years, and came out a craftsman: a man who could raise a cask from a ring of staves over a fire, drive the hoops home with a hoop-driver and a mallet, and test the joint by eye and ear. Coopers were needed everywhere, for herrings, tallow, soap, lime and beer, and a good one was never out of work.
In 1651 he married Quenild Chaloner, a midwife, who had been born in 1629, four years before him. It was an unusual match by the customs of the time, since a wife two years older was rarely the first choice, but the couple were said to have met over a difficult birth in a cooper's house, when Denys was sent for hot water and stayed to hold the lamp. Quenild was a woman of firm hands and few words, the sort of midwife who was sent for by the wives of farmers and by the wives of the gentry alike, and who was not afraid of the cold road at three in the morning. The couple lived over the cooperage in a narrow house with a lean-to for the staves, and their household ran on her earnings as much as his: a shilling here for a delivery, a gallon of ale and a joint of mutton there for a good outcome. They were not rich but they were never short of a neighbour's regard.
Their daughter Odelina Faulkner was born in 1654 and their son Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner in 1655. The surname is the curious thing. The Faulkner custom, long observed, allowed the family name to pass through daughters when the line required it, and although Denys himself was not a Faulkner by birth, his wife's household or her connection to it carried the name, and the children were christened with it. The family papers do not explain this in detail, but they do say that Denys accepted it cheerfully, remarking that a cask took the mark of the brewer and not of the cooper, and that he was content to be the man who made the vessel. He and Quenild raised the pair in the Anglican fashion under a church that had lately been purged of its Laudian ornaments and then, after 1660, restored to them, and they saw both children christened, schooled to a plain hand, and set on their own trades.
What Denys knew of the Faulkner ledger he learned through his marriage and his children, and he never stood in the hunting line. He was not a slayer. He had no craft, no alias and no gear, and he said so without regret. His use to the household was practical and unromantic. A cooper who understood timber could season hawthorn, and he had a plentiful supply of offcuts; he shaved and trued the stakes for the family and sealed them against damp with tallow and pitch. He also built the small iron-bound chests in which the Faulkner records travelled, and he was a discreet neighbour who did not ask what a night visitor wanted with a barrel of lime at midnight. The ledger records, in the flat hand of a cousin, that Denys once took in a hunter with a wound in the shoulder, laid him in the loft over the yard, and told the constable the man was drunk.
The great plague year of 1665 came to Lancashire in patches, and Ormskirk heard of it long before it arrived. Quenild, the midwife, refused to shut her door, arguing that the women in labour would not wait, and for a season she carried a sponge of vinegar and rue in her apron pocket. Denys built coffins for a summer when the parish clerk could not keep up, and there is a story in the family that he took the measure of the sick with a length of hoop-willow, so that he would never need to enter the house. They both survived that year, and they lived on to see Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner take up his own trade and Odelina marry. Quenild died in 1692, at sixty-three, after a lifetime of other people's children, and Denys, then fifty-nine, was left in the house over the cooperage with the smell of oak and no one to hold the lamp.
He was an old man by the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which the town greeted with bonfires and a good deal of muttering about the Irish, and he had firm views on it that he expressed to anyone who bought a barrel. He worked on into his sixties, his hands stiffening but his eye as sure as ever. The family who visited him found him a dry, humorous man with a fondness for a pipe on the cooperage step and an unfashionable respect for women's judgment. In his last years he watched the cousins pass the Red Ledger from hand to hand, and he asked only that whoever kept it should measure twice before they cut.
Denys died in 1704, aged seventy-one, of the plague, a sickness the region had not properly known for a generation and which the neighbours put down to travellers and bad ground. He was buried at Ormskirk beside Quenild, and the cooperage passed to his son. In the ledgers of the Slayerverse he is listed as a spouse, a craftsman and a father, an ordinary man who was, in the family's phrase, the hoop that held the staves. The Faulkners who came after remembered him for the plainest of virtues: he made things that held, and he never asked what they were for.
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