Fenella Thorne

Spouse of Blaise Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from the House of Thorne.

Fenella Thorne was born in 1554 at Rothbury, Northumberland, a village in Coquetdale where the river runs fast out of the Cheviot foothills and the moors close in on every side. She was the daughter of Adam Thorne, a fletcher, and belonged to the House of Thorne, the border reivers of the Northumbrian marches whose descendants would later hunt in the Appalachian mountains. The fletcher's shop stood at the end of a lane of stone cottages, and its air was a compound of scorched horn, hot glue and the sharp resin of birch and ash shavings. Queen Mary had just married Philip of Spain, and the country was tossed between old religion and new, but in Rothbury the concerns were nearer: the state of the harvest, the price of oats, and whether the Scots or the Charltons would come down the dale that winter looking for cattle. Adam Thorne made arrows and bolts, but by Fenella's childhood his real business was mending, since the long bow was fading and the border still needed shafts for hunters, poachers and the watch that patrolled the marches. She grew up in the smell of his workshop and learned by watching him how to judge a shaft for straightness, how to split goose feathers for the fletchings and how to bind them with waxed thread. Her father was a hard, mild man who whistled while he worked and whose hands were permanently stained brown. He was not a hunter himself, but his cousins were, and they came to his bench for hawthorn stakes cut to a length and sharpened to a point that no ordinary tool could give. Fenella learned to strip hawthorn of its thorns and to dry it slowly over a low fire, so that it would not split. It was her first lesson in what the family did and how it was supplied. Her mother is remembered only as a sturdy woman, and Fenella was an only child, so the workshop and the house both fell to her early. By fifteen she was cooking, cleaning, mending and keeping the accounts, and it was said in Rothbury that she could manage a household better than most matrons. She learned to salt a side of mutton, to bake oat bannocks on a griddle, to brew a small ale and to keep a fire in through a blizzard. She grew tall and wiry, with dark hair, a wide mouth and a way of humming a border ballad when she thought nobody was listening. Her voice, according to a family story, was better than she admitted, and at a harvest supper she once sang the whole of a long ballad about a raid on Otterburn without stopping. In 1569, when Fenella was fifteen, the northern earls rose against the queen, and the Cheviot valleys were full of rumours. Rothbury lay close to the routes that rebels took to reach the Scottish border, and a few families were drawn in. Adam Thorne, cautious like most of his kin, closed the shutters, gave shelter to a cousin who came in with a wound and refused all callers. She helped her father dress the man's shoulder and hide him in the loft above the shop, and she learned that summer that the border's danger came from both directions, from the queen's officers as well as from the night. When the rising collapsed and the earl of Northumberland fled to Scotland, the district was combed for sympathisers, and the fletcher's household was never searched. Years later she said it was her first lesson in the value of a quiet house. At nineteen she went into service as a housekeeper, first in a gentleman's household near Alnwick and then, after a change of hands, in the household of a Yorkshire yeoman family who had connections with the north through the wool trade. It was a step up in a woman's life: the housekeeper carried the keys, ordered provisions, supervised the maids and brewed for the whole farm. Fenella was capable at the work and unusually calm. A family that lodged hunters, or at least their stories, found her unshockable, and more than one visiting cousin of the Proctors, sleeping over on the road to York, remarked that the Thorne girl who ran the yeoman's kitchen never needed to be told to bar the door. Her employers came to depend on her, and it was in this household that she met the son, Blaise Proctor. Blaise Proctor, born in 1558, was a yeoman of the Yorkist family, a farmer of a few hundred acres with sheep on the hill and oats in the lowland, and a member of the Proctors' cadet branches. He was four years younger than Fenella, which was unusual, but he was steady and quiet, and he recognised in her a person who understood both work and silence. They married in 1579, when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-one, in the parish church near his farm, with a Thorne uncle who had walked from Northumberland as her only kin present. The marriage brought the House of Thorne into the Proctor line, in a modest and domestic way that no ledger entry records. She took over the management of the farmhouse, and for the first time in her life she had a household that was her own. Two children came in quick succession. Oswald Proctor was born in 1580, and Dionisia Proctor in 1581. Fenella brought them up with the care of a woman who had learned the world's dangers in a fletcher's shop. She taught them to say their prayers and to shut the window at dusk, to keep a bundle of hawthorn twigs in the fireplace and to answer to their names when called. She told them ballads and stories of the border, and the girl, who had a good ear, learned them by heart. She was not a strict mother, but she was a consistent one, and the children noticed that whenever a stranger came to the farm at night she went to the door herself and looked at his face for a long moment before letting him in. Whatever she saw there was never explained. In the Armada summer of 1588 she took the children to the top field to watch the beacon on the hill being built, and pointed out to them the line of hills where the next signal fire would burn. She was thirty-four, and she seems to have been at the height of her powers, respected in the district, sought after by neighbouring farm wives for advice on brewing and remedies, and content with her place. Then, in the years that followed, her strength began to fail. A wasting illness took hold of her, slowly at first, and then with a speed that surprised the local surgeon, who could do nothing beyond bleeding and syrups. She grew thin, and her hands, once so quick with thread and knife, lay still on the coverlet. She kept her cheerfulness to the end, and asked her daughter to sing her the border ballad she had known since girlhood. Fenella died in 1595, aged forty-one, and was buried in the parish churchyard. Her husband Blaise outlived her by twelve years, dying in 1607, and her children carried on the farm. She is remembered in the Proctor family papers as the woman who brought the Thorne habit of watchfulness into a Yorkshire house, a housekeeper's authority that turned into a household's discipline. In the Slayerverse she is a minor but affectionate figure, the fletcher's daughter who taught her children to trim a hawthorn stake as well as to spin a ballad, and who showed that a well-run kitchen could do as much to protect a family as any weapon.