Ellen Wentworth

Soldier slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Swift Warden. Craft: Night Trapping.

The dead man at the Whalley wake sat up in his shroud a little after midnight in 1541, and Ellen Wentworth, thirty-one years old and the brewster who had supplied the ale, was the only person in the room who did not run. That night made her a vampire slayer, and it is the event by which the Red Ledger of the Faulkners remembers her, though she had already lived thirty-one years as something quite different: a girl of Whalley, Lancashire, born in 1510 in the shadow of the great Cistercian abbey, who married into the Faulkner name and spent most of her life making beer. She was born the year after Henry VIII came to the throne, in a cottage near the abbey gatehouse, into a household that lived by the abbey's custom, selling to its guest-house and buying its surplus grain. Nothing is known of her parents beyond the name Wentworth, which was common along the West Riding border and was carried into Lancashire by traders. She grew up hearing the abbey bells mark the hours, watching the lay brothers go out to the granges and the monks process to the choir, and learning that a brewhouse was as sacred a place as any chapel. The monks brewed by the tun for the whole house and the visitors, and the girls of the village were taken on in the buttery and the brewhouse to learn the work. Ellen learned it there, the malting floors and the mash tuns, the steeped barley turning sweet on the boards, the yeast skimmed from one brew to start the next. In 1532 she married Oliver Faulkner, a fletcher three years her junior, from Rochdale. Oliver's father was Fulk Rishton and his mother Idonea Faulkner, and by the family custom that passed the surname through daughters Oliver took his mother's name and carried it, while his sister Isabel Rishton kept the other. Ellen was twenty-two and he was nineteen. They were married at the parish church with a feast that the two households could barely afford, and they set up in a narrow house with a workshop at the back where Oliver bound feathers to shafts. Ellen took over the yard and made it a brewhouse, so that the couple practised two trades under one roof, arrows sold on one side of the door and ale sold on the other. It was, by the reckoning of the neighbours, an odd household, because the wife was louder than the husband and made twice the money, and nobody could find an unkind word to say about either. Two sons were born in the house on the hill: Adrian Faulkner in 1534 and Fulk Faulkner in 1536, the younger named for his father's father. Ellen brewed through both her lyings-in, with the mash tun by the bed. She had a quick and practical way with children, and the story in the family is that Adrian could walk the whole length of the brewhouse on the beams before he was six. The years of their youth were also years of disaster in the district. The abbey at Whalley was dissolved in 1537 after the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the last abbot, John Paslew, was executed at Lancaster, along with others who had joined the northern risings that followed the dissolution of the monasteries. Ellen saw the buildings that had fed her childhood emptied of everything of value, the lead stripped from the roofs and the stone carted away, and her early sense that no institution was permanent settled into a hard clear mind that later served her in the field. The wake that changed her life came on a cold night in the autumn of 1541. A farmer near Whalley had died in his bed of a wasting sickness that had gone through his household, and the family had asked for ale for the mourners. Ellen carried the barrels herself. The body lay on trestles in the main room with a candle at head and foot, and the neighbours were drinking quietly in the corners when the corpse opened its eyes, turned its head and rose upright with the cloth still bound round its jaw. The mourners screamed and scattered through the door. Ellen, who had a heavy oak paddle in her hand for the barrel, hit the thing across the temple as it lunged for the nearest child, and then hit it again, and only afterwards understood what she had seen. Within days a kinsman of Oliver's, one of the Faulkners who knew what such things were, came to the house and told her what the calling was. She was thirty-one, a mother and a brewster, and she had never touched a weapon. Her name among the hunters became The Swift Warden, and the archetype the Red Ledger gave her was Soldier, a slayer who kept her ground, obeyed discipline and made a plan before a fight. Her craft was Night Trapping. She observed that the creatures were most predictable when they came for the same door twice, and she developed a method of setting a house as a trap: a barred yard, a lantern hung in a window, a pit dug where a step ought to be, a cordon of neighbours placed out of sight. Her gear was a matchlock pistol, an expensive and heavy weapon in that decade, kept oiled and wrapped in a cloth on a shelf above the barrels, and a bundle of hawthorn stakes that Oliver, the fletcher, turned on his own lathe and hardened in the fire. The pistol was mainly a device for slowing a creature down; the stakes finished the work. A misfire was common, and Ellen kept the match cord dry in a tin. Oliver never became a slayer, and he did not pretend to. The fletcher's trade fitted him for support, however, because he knew wood and iron, and he fitted his wife with what she asked for and did not question her nights out. He said little in public, and his one recorded remark about the matter was that a man could not complain if his wife's work paid better than his own. The children knew what she did. Adrian, the elder, showed the calling himself in time, and Ellen trained him as she had trained herself, with patience and without sentiment. Fulk did not; he became the ordinary son, and the ledgers note that Ellen loved him no less for it and did not push him. He died in 1573, four years after his father and the year before the household finally divided. Her hunts were local and undramatic, in the manner of the Red Ledger's country slayers. She trapped a vampire in a barn at Chadderton by luring it into a yard she had prepared, and on another occasion held a house at Rochdale for three nights against something that came in through the thatch. The Red Ledger records more than a dozen entries in her name across the 1540s and 1550s, a number that the family regarded as respectable for a woman who never left her own parish for long. She kept up a running rivalry with a Proctor slayer of Preston over whose tally was the cleaner, a contest of entries and reputations that was never violent and once ran to an exchange of formal letters over whether a particular kill counted, which neither side would concede. The reign of Elizabeth brought its own troubles. In the winter of 1569 the northern earls rose against the Queen, and the roads of the north filled with soldiers and rumour, and Oliver died that same year, aged fifty-six, of childbed, the ledger says, though the family tale is that the sickness was carried from a neighbour's lying-in house where he had gone to help with a fire. Ellen carried on with the brewhouse alone and died the next year, in 1570, of old age, aged sixty. She was buried near Oliver, and a Warden's stake was said to have been placed in the coffin, though nobody troubled to check. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as a brewster who could hold a line, whose trap-house method was taught to later Faulkners, and whose name in the Red Ledger is written with a small drawing of a barrel beside it.