Giles Armitage

Spouse of Alice Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

The mill at Knaresborough made a noise that Giles Armitage later said he could not sleep without. Born there in 1494, in the Yorkshire town where the River Nidd cuts down through a limestone gorge beneath the castle, he grew up in a house built so close to the wheel that the cups on the shelf walked a little toward the edge each evening and had to be pushed back. His father worked the mill before him, and his father's father, and no one in the family had ever been asked whether the trade suited them. Giles was a miller as other boys are left-handed. He learned the sound of the stones before he learned his letters, and he could tell by ear when the grain was too damp, when the spindle wanted grease, and when a bad winter had put ice in the race. A miller in the Tudor north was a man everyone needed and few trusted. He took his toll from every sack, a measure out of every twelve or sixteen, and the whole parish suspected him of taking a handful more. Giles minded the suspicion less than most of his trade because he was scrupulous to a fault. He kept a tally stick for each household, notched in the old fashion and split down the middle so that buyer and miller each held half, and he would not grind for anyone whose notches did not fit. It made him slow to make friends and quick to be believed. In a country of short weights and long memories, a man whose stick matched the other half was something close to a public institution. He was nineteen in 1513, when the Flodden campaign drew men from every northern parish, and his mill, like every mill, was asked to grind for the marching army. Carters came in from the Great North Road with sacks marked for the muster, and he worked three nights together without sleep. He did not go himself; the bailiff told him that a man who could keep ten thousand loaves in flour was worth more at the stones than in the line, and Giles, who was privately relieved, did not argue. When the survivors came back down the road that autumn, thin and quiet, he stood at the mill door and counted them, as many of the Yorkshire millers did, though he never could say why. He met Alice Proctor at Wetherby market, a dozen miles to the south-east, where he had gone to settle a dispute over a load of oats. She was a glover, then in her early twenties, with a stall under the shelter of the market cross and a pair of needles that moved faster than he could follow. She was quick, dry, and very exact about a stitch. He was, by his own account, buying gloves for his father, who had never worn a glove in his life. They were married in 1522, and Alice came to live at the mill above the Nidd, bringing her cutting knives, her last, and a bundle of doeskin that she refused to let anyone else unpack. From the first winter, he said, the house smelled better than it had since his grandmother's day. It was only slowly that Giles discovered the nature of the family he had married into. Alice was the daughter of Jeremy Proctor, the shepherd of the fells above Wetherby, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner who had died two years before the wedding. Her brother John Proctor was a vampire slayer, her sister Heloise a quiet presence at a loom, her brother Ambrose a tanner, and her younger brother Nicholas was yet to take up the work himself. The Proctors, it turned out, belonged to a slayer family: they kept an entry in the White Ledger, the tally begun by Walter Proctor in 1455, and they had views on the rivalry with the Faulkners and the lost matter of the Guest at Towton that no one aired in front of strangers. Alice told him in the second winter, over a gloving table, in the flat voice of someone confessing to a debt. Giles considered it for most of an evening. Then he asked whether the mill might be of use, and that was the whole of his reaction. The mill, as it happened, was of considerable use. A watermill stands at a crossing of roads and tracks, and a miller knows who comes and goes at odd hours, which carters have grown cautious of a certain lane, and what the dog does when it will not enter the yard. Giles never learned to fight and never wished to. He kept the Proctors' lodging in the loft above the wheel for any slayer who needed a dry bed, and he made it a rule that the door was never barred after dark on Wednesdays, in case someone came. He was a listener by profession. When a boy came in with a story of a pale man at the ford, or a farmer complained that his flock was thinning in a way that the wolves, long gone, could not account for, Giles wrote nothing down and told Alice at supper, and Alice told John. Their children were Margery Armitage, born in 1523, who took her mother's quickness, and Piers Armitage, born in 1526, who took his father's quiet and in time took up the slayer's work, to the visible unease of his father and the visible pride of his mother. Giles did not forbid it. He had watched the Proctors long enough to understand that a calling arrived by itself and could not be argued away. He did, however, teach Piers the mill, so that the boy would always have a trade that fed him, and he made him swear on the stones that he would never grind on a day when a hunt was waiting. Piers swore. It was the only oath, Giles used to say, that his son ever kept to the letter. The years of the northern risings, in 1536 and 1537, were hard on a mill. The whole of Yorkshire was alive with talk of the dissolved monasteries, of rents and of the old religion, and the roads were crowded with men in arms and men afraid of them. Giles ground for whoever brought him grain, rebel or royal, and made a point of not asking which. It nearly cost him the mill when the great houses of the district took sides. He was a plain man, and he said, to a bailiff who demanded to know where his loyalties lay, that they lay in the sack, and that the sack did not care who had sown it. The answer was repeated in three parishes, and he was left alone. He and Alice spent that winter listening to the road, with the hunters of the family keeping to the edges of the story. The long years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from 1549 to 1560, passed over the mill like weather. Prayer books changed, and changed again, and the church at Knaresborough twice heard its own liturgy turned inside out. Giles, who sat through every version in the same pew, concluded that the substance of the faith lay in the quiet of the hour before the first service, when the parish was still counting its grain. By then he was a man in his fifties, thickened at the waist and permanently floured about the hair, and slower on the mill stairs than he cared to admit. The mill itself was in good order, and Margery and Piers were grown. He died in 1555, in an accident on the fells. He had gone up onto the high ground above Wetherby to look at a stretch of moor that Alice's family kept an interest in, and he was found at the foot of a crag after a day of mist, his stick beside him and his hat still dry in the heather. It was said at the time that he had been looking for a lost sheep, which would have been in character, and that he had put his foot where the peat had slid. Alice, who outlived him by thirteen years, would never say whether she believed it. She carried his tally stick with her for the rest of her life, with the notches that matched no other half. Giles Armitage is remembered in the Proctor family as the miller who married into a slayer family without once asking for a share of its glory, and who kept the door unbarred on Wednesdays for as long as he lived. The White Ledger does not list him, and no hunter ever wrote his name against a tally, but a later keeper, going through the Knaresborough papers, noted that the mill had been a safe house for three generations and that its miller had never lost a confidence. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people who stood beside the hunters rather than in front of them: the ones who knew the sound of a quiet night, and knew when it had gone wrong.