Dionisia Clegg

Spouse of Abraham Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Dionisia Clegg was born in 1596 at Pontefract in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in a house that stood so close to the castle hill that her earliest memory, by her own later telling, was the sound of the garrison's bell coming down through the wet air of a November morning. The town was a liquorice town, though nobody then thought to boast of it; the sweet root was grown in the gardens on the slopes, and the smell of boiled sap and coal smoke lay over the lanes together. Her father kept a loom in the lower room of a narrow timber-framed dwelling on Micklegate, and her mother wound bobbins and took in yarn from the carders. The family belonged to no great house and no slayer line. They were the sort of people whom the Faulkner and Proctor ledgers seldom noticed until one of them was married into the White Ledger and had to be written down. She learned the trade in the way that daughters of the cloth learned it, which is to say by standing beside it. At seven she was tying broken warp threads; at eleven she was trusted to throw the shuttle while her father was at the market; by fifteen she wove a plain, hard-wearing woollen and a coarser linen-wool mixture that sold at Wakefield and Doncaster to carriers who paid in small silver and in promises. The looms of that country were narrow, and a weaver's day was measured by the light in the window, because a candle was a cost that the profit would not bear. Dionisia was said to be the last in the lane to close her shutters in summer and the first to open them in winter. Neighbours remembered her hands, which were long and dry and permanently roughened along the inner edge of the palm, and her habit of humming under her breath a tune with no words, which she kept time to with the beam of the loom. She was not a slayer, and no calling ever came to her, but she grew up in a Yorkshire that was quietly aware of the Proctors. The old families along the coaching roads spoke of the White Ledger the way people speak of a distant relative who is rich in reputation and short of money: with respect, a little wariness, and no wish to be asked for a loan. It was through the trade, and not through any hunt, that she met Abraham Proctor. He was a cooper of the market town, born in 1594, a broad, slow-spoken man who made firkins and kilderkins for the brewers and pails for the dairymen, and who came to her father's door one spring to bargain over a length of sacking cloth for lining his workshop. The bargain took most of a month. They were married in 1619, in the parish church, on a morning of thin sunshine that the family afterwards counted as lucky because it did not rain on the bride. Marriage moved her only a few streets, but it changed her place in the story of the house. Abraham's people, the Proctors of the White Ledger line, kept the family's tally with a seriousness that Dionisia at first took for stubbornness. The ledger lived in a locked chest under the cooper's bench, wrapped in oilcloth against the damp, and the men and women of the family who hunted came and went at odd hours, with mud on their boots and little to say. She learned quickly not to ask, and more slowly to understand. What she gave the house was something the ledger could not record: a steady hand at the table, a quiet way of finding lodging for visitors, and the loom itself, which brought in cash when the barrel trade was slack. When Abraham was away on a night's business, she kept the fire and the lamp and told any callers that he was at the brewhouse. In the White Ledger's marginal notes she appears once, as a spouse, as one who kept the door, and that is a fair summary of how the family regarded her, though a fuller summary would add that the door was never once found unlatched. Two children came in the first years of the marriage. Cuthbert Proctor was born in 1622, a sturdy, watchful boy who took to his father's adzes as soon as he could lift them, and Florence Proctor followed in 1624, small and quick and unwilling to be told anything twice. Dionisia raised them between the beam and the hearth, with a cradle set where she could rock it with her foot while the treadles went. She taught Florence to read from a hornbook and a battered psalter, and taught Cuthbert his sums by making him count the picks in a finished ell of cloth. These were the early Stuart years, and they were hard ones. The harvests failed in the sour summers around the middle of the 1620s; the price of bread rose; carriers on the great north road brought stories of plague in one town after another, and the whole of the West Riding lived with the knowledge that a fever could cross the county in a week. Dionisia set a bowl of vinegar at the door, boiled her linens, and kept the children out of the fair. The household came through it, and she never said how much of that was care and how much was chance. The family's rivalry with the Faulkners of Lancashire was, for her, a matter of conversation across a fire rather than of any contest she witnessed. In her house it took the form of small competitions of pride: whether the White Ledger's tally for the year had outrun the Red, who had heard what from a carrier out of Preston, which family had the better claim to have marked the Guest at Towton. Abraham held that the fault lay plainly with the Faulkners; Dionisia, who had a weaver's respect for a thread followed to its end, said only that nobody living had seen the beginning of it and so nobody living could swear to the middle. It became a running joke between them. When Cuthbert, at fourteen, repeated his father's view at supper as settled fact, she asked him whether he had held the thread himself, and the boy went red and ate his bread. The story was retold in the family long after, as a small piece of proof that not every Proctor in Pontefract was a partisan. By the early 1640s the quarrel of the realm was worse than the quarrel of the ledgers. The civil wars split the northern gentry down the middle: the great families around Pontefract were for the King, Fairfax and the clothing towns of Leeds and Bradford for Parliament, and the roads that had carried cloth now carried musketeers and quartered horse. Prices of everything rose, and trade dried up as the merchants at Wakefield and Leeds could no longer be sure that a bale sent out would arrive. Dionisia wove for whoever would pay and asked nobody's allegiance; she sold blue coating to a troop of horse one week and grey to a Parliamentary quartermaster the next, and remarked in the family that the customer who wore the cloth did not much alter its quality. It was a practical neutrality, and it may have kept the house from being plundered. The winter of 1643 was bitter, with the snow lying on the castle hill into March, and the town short of coal and short of meal. She took the cough that season, a dry, deep winter cough that settled on her chest, and did not lift. She died that year, aged forty-seven, and was buried in the churchyard with the loom silent for the first time in three decades. Abraham lived on until 1653, and the house he kept was a quieter one. Cuthbert went on to his father's trade and lived until 1686; Florence, who had inherited her mother's quickness and her mother's stubborn humming, lived until 1691, long enough to be the family's memory of Pontefract in the years before the wars. Both told their own children of a woman who could not be hurried and who could not be made to take a side, and the phrase that survived in the family, that Dionisia Clegg held the thread and not the quarrel, was repeated so often that it was carved, in a later generation, on the lid of a workbox. She never carried a stake or fired a pistol, and the White Ledger has no tally under her name. It records her only as the wife of Abraham Proctor and the mother of two children. But those who read the record closely, as the family's archivists in the Slayerverse still do, find beside her name a single small pen-mark that a later hand identified as a shuttle, drawn there by someone who had come to think that the ledger could not have been kept without it.