Edward Stansfield

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

Edward Stansfield was born in 1586 in the Pendle country near Burnley, Lancashire, in the shadow of the great whaleback hill that dominated the district and gave it its name. It was rough, upland ground of thin soil, stone walls, sheep and small farms, scattered with hamlets whose people lived by a mixture of grazing, hand-loom weaving and whatever trade a village needed. Edward's family, who are not named in the Red Ledger's notes, were of the sort that did not leave records; he is said to have had no surviving brothers or sisters, and the accounts of his boyhood are thin. What is clear is that by the time he was a youth he had chosen the one trade that every valley in the North needed and that few young men had the shoulders for: he became a smith. He served an apprenticeship at a forge in a Burnley lane, where his master shod horses for the drovers on the Colne road and mended ploughshares, reaping hooks and cart tyres for the farms round about. A smith's work was learned by doing. He began with the bellows and the water bucket, then moved on to tongs, then to the hammer, and after some years to the tricky arts of drawing out a shoe, welding a break, and quenching steel at the right colour. The forge was a dark, hot, smoky room with a blackened thatch and a stone hearth, and the ring of anvils was the local music. Edward was tall, broad in the back and slow in his speech, with forearms scarred by sparks and a habit of talking to the horses under his breath. The farmers who brought their beasts learned to trust him at once. He never rushed a shoe, and he never left a nail sharp inside the hoof. At about the age of eighteen, when his apprenticeship ended, he went across the moors to Bolton in search of steadier work, and found a place in a forge on the road that climbed to the tavern kept by Hugh Thwaites. The tavern was the place where the carters and drovers drank, and Edward, who had a horseman's habit of checking his customers' animals, was a frequent visitor. There he met Hugh's elder daughter, Margery Thwaites, a weaver who had been born in 1585 and who was a year older than he was. She was quick-witted and sharp with her tongue, and he was slow and gentle, and the pairing amused the whole tavern. It seems to have begun with a hinge. Edward brought a new one for the back door, Margery said it was the wrong size, and he came back the next week with another, which was also wrong, and after the third visit even Hugh was said to have laughed out loud. They married in 1605, when he was nineteen and she twenty. He was a young man with no property beyond his tools, and the dowry was a small one, but the household made do. They took a cottage in Bolton with a lean-to shed that Edward turned into a small forge, and he took work from the neighbours, mending and shoeing and making the small ironwork a house needed: hinges, latches, pot-hooks, spades and nails. Margery's loom stood in the upper room, and the two trades played counterpoint through the day, the hammer below and the shuttle above. Neighbours said you could tell the time in that house by the sound alone. The couple's children, Mary Faulkner and Abraham Faulkner, were born in 1608 and 1611, and both took the Faulkner name rather than their father's, following the family custom by which the surname passed through the mother's side. Edward accepted this without complaint. He was not a Faulkner by blood, and he was not a hunter, but he knew what his wife's family did, and he asked no questions about the odd visitors who came at night. He raised his children with the plain, practical decency of a craftsman: he taught Abraham to hold a hammer, to judge a fire by its colour and to keep a tool sharp, and he made Mary a small pair of tongs when she was seven because she wanted to help. Both children later became slayers, and the family remembered that they handled their gear with a smith's respect for the weight of iron. It was Edward, more than anyone, who made the family's weapons possible. A vampire slayer's kit in the early seventeenth century included hawthorn or ash stakes tipped with iron, blades, chains, hooks and hinged traps, and a great deal of that had to be made by hand. Edward forged iron caps for stakes that would not split, made light traps with spring jaws, and mended blades after hard nights, all without ever being asked to explain what they were for. He would hold a broken knife up to the light, examine the fracture, and say only that it had been struck against something harder than a tree. It was his unspoken contribution, and Margery's cousins in the Red Ledger knew it, and treated him with a courtesy that verged on ceremony. In 1612 his birthplace made the news for the wrong reason. The Pendle trials sent several local people to Lancaster Castle and the gallows, and for months afterward neighbours looked sideways at anyone from the district. Edward bore this with a stiffness that his wife understood. He had grown up among some of the accused and knew them as poor, cranky, ordinary people, and he said little of it. But he sometimes stood at the forge door in the evening looking north toward the hill, and Margery let him. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns pressed on the household as they pressed on every household: two winters when the forge fire was the only warm thing in the lane, a bad spring when the price of iron doubled, and finally, in 1625, the pestilence. The plague reached Bolton that summer, and Edward, who would not leave the horses of a sick carter unshod, caught it among the animals and the poor. He died in 1625, aged thirty-nine, after a few days of fever, and was buried quickly, as the rules of the time demanded. Margery survived him by twenty-six years and never took another husband. Mary lived until 1656 and Abraham until 1685. Edward is remembered in the annals of the Slayerverse as the smith who armed the Red Ledger without ever being written into it, a man who married into the Faulkner line and gave it iron, and whose hammer, kept by his son, was said to ring true to the end.