Florence Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The loom stood under the north window of the upper room, and that is where Florence Proctor's life began, in a manner of speaking, for she was born in 1624 in Halifax, Yorkshire, and was laid in a basket beside it. Her mother, Dionisia Clegg, was a weaver who took in work from a clothier on Southgate and who could throw a shuttle without looking at it. Her father, Abraham Proctor, was a cooper whose yard rang with mallet and hoop from first light. Between the two trades the household made a modest living, and between the two noises the small girl learned to listen for what lay underneath them. Her elder brother, Cuthbert Proctor, born in 1622, was already learning to write when she could barely walk, and it was a family joke that she got the hands and he got the head. The weaving of the West Riding in her childhood was mostly of kerseys and broad woollens, and the work was divided in ways that a child soon understood. Women and girls carded and spun, men and women wove, and the cloth went out to be fulled at the mill on the beck and stretched on the tenters on the hill. A weaver who worked at home was paid by the piece, and the payment came slowly. Florence was set to the spindle at six and to the loom at twelve, and by fourteen she could weave a plain cloth as fast as her mother. There was no school for her beyond the catechism and the psalms, but she learned reckoning from the pay-day disputes, and she learned the patterns of a good cloth from the woman who made them. The house smelled of lanolin, wood smoke and hot oak, and it was never entirely quiet. The Proctors were of the White Ledger line, and although neither of her parents had been called, the tally was part of the furniture of the house, as ordinary as the salt box. Abraham kept the family's small collection of papers in a cask with a false bottom, and he occasionally read from them on winter evenings, in the same voice he used for scripture. Florence heard the old names, Walter Proctor and the Yorkist hunters, the story of Towton and the vampire who slipped away, and the reasoned fury with which Yorkshire folk still spoke of Lancashire. She listened, and asked questions, and she was told firmly that the rivalry was a matter of tallies and reputations, never of blood. That was one lesson she carried her whole life and practised with unexpected discipline. The civil wars turned her youth into a season of alarm. She was eighteen when Parliament and King broke apart in earnest, and the Calder valley became a border between two worlds. Soldiers were quartered in Halifax and its hamlets, and a weaver with a room to spare might find herself housing men whose politics she disliked. Dionisia Clegg died in 1643, when Florence was nineteen, and the girl took her place at the loom and in the kitchen with hardly a pause. Her father, silent and older than his years, kept the coopering going, and she wove for the family's bread. When Abraham died in 1653, it was Florence, not Cuthbert, who closed the yard, sold the tools, and found a smaller house near the cloth market where she could keep the loom and her brother could keep a room. She never married, and she never seemed to regret it. She was a broad, quick woman with strong forearms and a tendency to speak her mind, and there were suitors, a fuller and a widowed dyer among them, but she declined all of them in the same way, with a short laugh and no explanation. What she wanted, the family later suggested, was a house of her own where nothing depended on another person's temper. She had one, and she made it work. She took apprentices, mostly girls from the villages, and taught them to weave a straight selvage and to count threads without looking. Several of them went on to run looms of their own around Halifax and Sowerby, and some of them mentioned her in their wills. Florence's part in the ledger tradition was not a hunter's part, and she would have been embarrassed to hear it described as one. But a weaver's house on a Yorkshire coaching road is a useful thing to a family with an inheritance like the Proctors'. Carriers stopped at her door for water and a warm hearth, and they talked. She heard which farms had lost stock in an odd fashion, which lanes people would not walk after dusk, and which barn had been bricked up in the night. She passed this on to her kinsmen, among them the Proctor hunters who worked the moors, in the shape of plain notes set down by Cuthbert. She sold cloth by day and traded observations by evening, and for decades the White Ledger owed a few of its entries to a woman who never carried a blade. The Faulkner side, the family remembered, knew there was some such network but never learned who ran it. Her brother was the centre of her later years. Cuthbert, dry and exact, lived nearby and ate at her table on Sundays, and the two of them kept up a running quarrel about the price of wool, the sermon and the proper way to fold a piece of cloth. They were, in temperament, almost opposites, and that made the friendship durable. When the great plague year of 1665 frightened the country, she barred her door and passed food through the window to any neighbour who needed it, having decided that fear was less useful than bread. Cuthbert died of the plague in 1686, and she buried him and wound up his papers with a determination that surprised the parish. She kept the fair copies he had made of the White Ledger and put them where nobody could burn them. In her sixties she still climbed the fells above Halifax on summer Sundays to gather bilberries and to look at the weather, and it was on the moors in 1691, at the age of sixty-seven, that she died in an accident, apparently a fall on wet ground where the path runs along a gritstone edge. She was found by a shepherd's boy before nightfall and carried down on a hurdle. The parish buried her without much ceremony, though a long line of former apprentices followed the coffin. The loom went to the eldest of them. Florence Proctor left no children, no husband and no great deeds that any ledger could tally, and yet her name recurs in Proctor memory with a warmth that few of the famous hunters received. She was remembered as the sister who held the family together after the war and the plague, a working woman who saw more than she said. In the wider Slayerverse, where the fighters take the credit, she stands as an example of the people who made fighting possible: a weaver on a Yorkshire road with her ear to the world, and her shuttle never still.