Fulk Rishton

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

Nothing survives of Fulk Rishton's parents except a suspicion that they were poor. He was born in 1491 at Rochdale, in Lancashire, on the edge of the Pennine moors, and the records that mention his early life are silent about who raised him, which the family took to mean that whoever it was left little to remember. What remains is the town. Rochdale in his boyhood was a market place on the River Roch, wedged between the wool and the stone. The hills above supplied gritstone from the quarries along Blackstone Edge and grazing for the sheep whose fleeces were spun and woven in every second cottage, and the church stood on its rise above the river, with a tower that masons were always tinkering with. Smoke, wet wool and the sour smell of fulling stocks hung over the streets. A boy of ten who wanted a trade could hardly have avoided the sight of stone being cut. He was bound as a mason's apprentice at fourteen, in 1505, to a master who worked out of a yard behind the church and took contracts across the parish. The work began with a barrow. For a year Fulk carried stone, sharpened chisels at the forge, and mixed lime mortar, which burned his hands raw, and only then was he permitted to rough out a block under supervision. He learned the setting of a course, the use of the plumb line and the square, the way a sound stone rings under the mallet and a flawed one gives a dull note. Masons in that era were itinerant by habit, working a season on one job and moving to the next, and lodged in temporary shelters against the walls they were building. He had a good eye for a moulding, and by nineteen was carving the small grotesques that masters left to their apprentices: a face on a corbel, a beast on a boss. His thumbs were permanently scarred and his shoulders unusually broad. He spoke slowly and seldom, and had a dry humour that took his fellows a week to notice. In the spring of 1509 his master sent him over the moor to Whalley, in the Ribble valley, to help mend a length of the abbey's precinct wall, and it was there that he met Idonea Faulkner. He lodged near her alehouse, bought his ale by the quart, and chalked his score on the lintel as the custom was. She checked it against her tally stick, found it exact to the farthing, and told him so with some surprise. He began to walk past the door on evenings when there was nothing to be gained by it. The courtship, such as it was, took a year and was conducted largely across a counter, in short remarks about barley, weather and the price of lime. Neither of them was sentimental. He once described it to a mason friend as the only time he had lost an argument and been glad. They were married at Whalley in 1510, when Fulk was nineteen. His master allowed it, though apprentices were not supposed to wed, and let the matter drop into the sort of silence that masters kept for the hands they wished to hold on to. In the master's book Fulk remained the apprentice for the rest of his life, long after his work was as good as any journeyman's, because the old man was careful with money and never paid the small fee to have the entry changed. Fulk did not seem to mind the title. Through his wife he came into a household that bore two names, Faulkner and Proctor, and kept two ledgers in ancient competition, the Red and the White, and he was let into a secret that would have astonished the parish: that his wife's father, Thomas Faulkner, and her mother, Isabel Proctor, hunted vampires. He took this, as he took most things, with a long pause and a request for the salt. He was never a slayer and never wished to be. His contribution was one only a mason could have made. Within the first year of marriage he cut a recess in the chimney stack of the house beside the brewhouse, lined with dressed stone and closed by a slab that sat flush with the wall and could be lifted by anyone who knew where to press. The Red Ledger's copies were kept there, dry and out of sight. He built two more such places in the years that followed, one under a threshold and one behind a hearthstone at a farm on the Clitheroe road, and told nobody outside the family what they were for. Idonea's brothers called him the family's best piece of gear, which he took as a compliment. The tally of the Whalley cellar and its hiding places was, in a sense, his handiwork. In August 1513 the Flodden campaign drew men from every northern parish, and Fulk marched north with the Rochdale and Whalley companies, carrying a bill and a bag of oatmeal in the wake of the Stanley levy. Their son Oliver Faulkner was a few months old, and Fulk had left him in the cradle with a small carved lion on the rail. He stood in the rain on Branxton Hill among Lancashire men who were, on the day, part of a victory that the Scots would remember for a hundred years, and he saw enough of it to say very little afterward. He came home in October, thinner, with a cough that lingered until Christmas. He never described the field to his children. What he did tell them, when Oliver was old enough, was that he had spent the night after the battle helping a stranger lay out the dead in rows, and that the lesson he took from it was that order was a kindness. It was a mason's view of grief, and it stayed with him. Their second child, Isabel Rishton, was born in 1516. By family custom the surname passed through daughters, so Oliver kept his mother's Faulkner name and Isabel took her father's; Fulk agreed to this with a shrug and the observation that a man with a chisel had no great need of a surname. The children grew up in a house where a father and a mother were rarely home at the same hours, since Idonea brewed by night and Fulk worked wherever the stone was. He took contracts at Clitheroe and Slaidburn, and did a season on a chapel roof further up the valley, coming home every second Saturday with dust in his beard. He taught Oliver to hold a chisel and Isabel to read a plumb line, and neither was called to the slayer's work, which the parents counted as a piece of luck too large to mention. In the wet spring of 1535 a fever went through the Ribble valley, taking the old and the worn. Fulk, forty-four and worn by three decades of stone dust, caught it on a job at Clitheroe, and was carried home in a cart. He died within the week, with Idonea at the bedside and the lion from Oliver's cradle on the sill. He was buried in Whalley churchyard among the old crosses. His grave was marked with a plain slab that he had cut himself years before, at a slack season, and left in the yard against the need; it bore no inscription, only a mason's mark and a small pair of compasses. The dissolution came to Whalley two years later, and the walls he had mended for the abbey passed into the hands of a Crown commissioner. The Faulkners' Red Ledger names him only once, in a marginal note that reads, in a clerk's hand, that the stone cupboards were sound and their maker honest. The Proctor side had cause to be grateful too, since his hiding places were used by cousins across the moor when the risings made it unsafe to carry paper on the road. He is remembered less for what he did than for what he built, and his walls held. In the Slayerverse he appears as the mason who married into a war and made a place in it out of stone.