Fulk Faulkner

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

Fulk Faulkner was born in Wigan in 1536, in a town of coal and cloth where the black seams of cannel coal ran near the surface of the surrounding country and where the smoke of household fires already lay low over the roofs of the market street. Wigan was an old borough with a fine parish church and a reputation for stubbornness in matters of religion, and the boy who grew up there learned to shut his mouth in company. His father, Oliver Faulkner, made arrows. His mother, Ellen Wentworth, brewed ale for the neighbourhood and, unknown to most of it, hunted vampires as The Swift Warden. He was the younger of two sons, and his elder brother Adrian Faulkner, born in 1534, was the one who would inherit the craft. Fulk never did. It was the great surprise of his childhood, and afterwards the great quiet fact of his life, that the calling passed over him. He was a thoughtful child, softer and slower than his brother, with a habit of going still when he was frightened. The household in which he grew up moved fast around him: Oliver sawing and gluing at the bench, Ellen slipping out at dusk with a covered basket, Adrian arguing and swaggering. Fulk found his own corner. He spent his hours out of doors, on the mosses and rough grazing beyond the town, where a boy who could keep a flock together for a farmer could earn a penny and a heel of bread. He liked animals for their plain honesty and their indifference to religion. By the time he was ten he was following a Wigan shepherd along the ridges of the Pennine foothills, and by fourteen he had made the decision to give up his father's bench for the crook and the dog. The world he grew up in was disturbed by the great religious changes of the Tudor crown, though in the hills the disturbance was distant. In the year he was born the Pilgrimage of Grace was raging through the north, and he grew up under the aftermath of the dissolved abbeys, whose old sheepwalks were now leased to gentlemen from the south. The old monastic flocks were broken up and sold, and new men bought the fells and stocked them for profit. A shepherd's work changed with it. He no longer worked for an abbey with its tradition of care but for a tenant farmer with his eye on the price of wool, and the wages were leaner. Fulk did not complain. He had a steady, unhurried way of going about his tasks, and the farmers who hired him found that their sheep came off the fells fatter than others'. The life of a shepherd on the fells was one of long silences. He lived for much of the year in a stone shieling on the high ground, a low hut roofed with turf and heated by a peat fire, with a dog for company and a store of oatmeal and cheese. In lambing time he slept in snatches, and in winter he dug sheep out of drifts. He learned to read the weather from the colour of the sky at dawn, the behaviour of the crows and the feel of the wind on his cheek. He came to know the moors as few men did, every beck and boggy patch, every ruined wall and every old stone cross. It was a lonely life, but he was not a lonely man. On Sundays he walked down to town, sat with his mother in the alehouse and listened to her talk. Though he did not carry the craft, Fulk was an invaluable member of the family's work. The high fells were the country in which a great deal of the family's business was done, and he was the man who knew them best. When Adrian was on the trail of something that had gone to ground in the hills, it was to Fulk that he came. He knew which shielings were empty, which caves were dry, which paths were used and which ignored, and he could tell at a glance when a flock had been disturbed by something other than a fox. Sheep, he said, know a great deal that men do not, and he read their fear as other men read print. More than once he brought word of a stranger in the high pastures that the whole family was watching, and the Red Ledger acknowledges the debt in a small marginal note in Adrian's hand: Fulk saw it first. He was a quiet man in company but not a cold one. He had a dry humour that emerged after a second cup of ale, and a gift for singing the old ballads in a low, true baritone. He was shy with women and never married, though the family memory records that a widow from Standish once kept a light burning for him. His mother Ellen, who died in 1570, worried about it a little, and Adrian teased him, but he seemed content. He had his dog, his flock and his fells, and he had a brother whose hunts he could quietly serve. It was, in its way, a full life. He did not seek recognition, and he received none, which suited him. His father Oliver died in 1569, the year of the rising of the northern earls, when the rebel columns and their pursuers tramped across the north and Lancashire roads were full of soldiers. Fulk was thirty-three and out on the hills with a flock when the trouble came, and he brought his sheep home by night, avoiding the roads, to keep them from being requisitioned. It was a small, shrewd act of self-preservation, and it saved the farmer he worked for a good part of his stock. The year after, his mother died, and he lost the last of his parents. He did not speak much of it, but the ledger notes that he went up to the high fell for a week and came down thinner. In 1573 the sweating sickness came to Wigan again, a late and local return of the old English plague that had ravaged towns in the earlier part of the century. It struck quickly, with chills, a drenching sweat and a fatal collapse, and it killed healthy men in a day. Fulk was thirty-seven. He had come down from the fells to help a neighbour bring in the last of the hay and he took ill that evening; he was dead before morning. Adrian carried his body home himself. It was his brother, in the end, who wrote his epitaph in the Red Ledger, a single line that read that the fells were poorer for the loss. In the great gathering of stories that later became the Slayerverse, Fulk Faulkner is remembered as the shepherd who saw first, a man who never held a stake but who watched the high country for his family.