Everard Clegg

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

Everard Clegg worked the same stretch of water for most of his life, and the villagers along it knew him before they knew his name. Born in 1659 in Downham, Lancashire, a small stone village under the flank of Pendle Hill, he was a man of the river and the ford, a ferryman on the Ribble at a time when bridges were few, tolls were argued over, and a flooded river could cut a parish in two for a week. He came into the Faulkner family by marriage, and the Red Ledger, which had little use for men who did not hunt, nevertheless found room for him in more than one margin. Downham in the 1660s lay in the country that the Restoration had returned to its old gentry and its old church. The Assheton family held the manor, the Pendle Forest to the south was still spoken of in low voices because of the witch trials of 1612, and the villagers were mostly farmers, quarrymen and hand-workers who ate oatcake, buttermilk and salt bacon and paid tithe grudgingly. Everard's family history is thinly recorded; the parish register shows his baptism and little more, and later family papers describe him only as a boy who had no inheritance and no wish to wait for one. What he had was a strong back and a gift for holding a boat in a current, and by his teens he was working as a hand on a ferry a little downstream, learning the depth of the water at every bend. The Ribble crossings of that time were ferries or fords, and a ferryman was a man of some standing, paid by the crossing and by custom, obliged to keep his boat sound and his rope taut and to carry the poor and the parish officers without fee. The vessel Everard learned on was a broad flat-bottomed boat drawn across on a rope, poled in the shallows and hauled in the flood, and he became expert at the difficult part of the work, which was reading the river before the river changed. He learned to smell rain coming off the fell, to tell a spate from the colour of the water, and to refuse a passenger at dusk when the light would not hold. By his mid-twenties he had a ferry of his own on a lonely reach below Downham, with a hut on the bank, a bell to be rung from the far shore and a small allowance from the manor for its keeping. It was at the ferry that he met Helen Faulkner. She was five years older than he, a hand-loom weaver of the neighbourhood and, as the Red Ledger's keeper knew and Everard did not at first, a vampire slayer of the Faulkner line. She crossed the river at odd hours, in the dark before dawn and the small hours after midnight, with a bundle that she said held cloth and that sometimes held something else. He asked no questions the first year and a great many the second. The story handed down in the Clegg family is that one night she rang the bell from the far bank in a rain so hard that it drowned the sound, and that he came anyway, hauled across against the current, and found her standing quite calmly on the bank with a drawn blade and a small, dead thing at her feet. She asked him to keep the crossing quiet. He said he had never seen anything to speak of. That was the beginning. They were married in 1684, in the church at Whalley, with the ferry closed for the day and the whole reach oddly silent. Helen was thirty and Everard twenty-five, and the parish took a view about that, but the two of them went on without regard for it. She kept her loom, in the hut on the bank, and he kept the boat, and between them the little household held two trades and one secret. Everard took on a task that the Red Ledger valued more than it admitted: he ferried Helen and her fellow hunters across the Ribble in the dark, at any hour, in any water, without a lantern if need be, and without asking what they were bound for. A hunter who could cross the river at a moment's notice could work both banks of the valley, and the reach below Downham became, in those years, a quiet hinge in the Faulkner map. Their son Dennis Clegg was born in 1687, three years into the marriage, and was the pride of the ferry. Everard taught him the pole and the rope from the moment he could stand. The Glorious Revolution had come and gone in 1688 with no more effect on the crossing than a change in whom the passengers cursed, though a party of soldiers marched through in that winter and used the ferry, and Everard, who was paid in coin for once, noted it with approval. He spoke of it later as the year that his son first spoke and the year that the king went out of the country, in that order of importance. Helen died in 1690, the year their second child was born. Katharine Faulkner, the daughter, took her mother's family name, as the house did, and Everard was left with a baby, a three-year-old and a river. What he did next is one of the better-remembered acts of the Red Ledger's supporters: he did not marry again, he did not send the children away, and he did not stop the ferry. He kept Helen's loom, wove badly on it, and taught himself to sew. The children were brought up on the boat, wrapped in oilcloth in winter and tied by a cord to the thwart in summer, and both of them learned the crossing before they learned their letters. A woman of the village, whose name the family did not preserve, helped with the washing and the milk. He raised them to be good ferry-hands and honest men and women, and he watched over the Faulkner hunters that came his way for a further forty years. Dennis grew up quiet and reliable, and worked the boat with his father until he died in 1726, aged thirty-nine, leaving Everard, then sixty-seven, to bury the child he had taught to swim. That was the hardest thing that happened to him. He carried on regardless, pulled by the rope, watched by the river. Katharine, sturdy and sharp-tongued, lived until 1745, and it was she who inherited the bell. The first Jacobite rising crossed the Ribble in November 1715 and Everard, then a man of fifty-six, was called to ferry a detachment of Hanoverian horse who wished to get ahead of the rebels at Preston. He refused, on the honest ground that the river was in spate, and charged them double when it dropped. In his last years he sat in the doorway of the hut with his pipe, a stooped figure with big hands, and the older villagers called him old Clegg of the water. A winter cough took him in the cold snap of 1732, at the age of seventy-three, and he was buried at Whalley next to Helen. The children of the crossing remembered him for a long time afterwards as a man who always answered the bell. Everard Clegg is recorded in the Slayerverse as a Faulkner in-law who never raised a weapon and was never once called, but who served the Red Ledger for half a century by the simplest means at his command, and whose bell, still rung from the far bank in family memory, stands for every quiet crossing made in the dark.