Godfrey Danby

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

Most of what the world knows of the drovers' roads across the Pennines it learned from the men who walked them, and Godfrey Danby walked them for nearly forty years. He was born in 1467 at Padiham, in Lancashire, a small grey town on the River Calder a few miles west of Burnley, where the last houses gave out onto rough pasture and the moor rose immediately behind the church. His father, like his grandfather, was a man who dealt in beasts; the names of the family have not come down, and the ledgers say only that he was born to cattle. Godfrey was the sort of boy who could be trusted with an animal and not much else, quiet, obstinate, with an uncomplaining gait, and by ten he was walking at the tail of his father's herds with a long hazel goad and a satchel of oatcake and cheese. The drover's trade in the later fifteenth century was an odd mixture of freedom and misery. Cattle and sheep were bred in the hills and the north, and sold to butchers, graziers and the great towns that lay to the south and east; between the two lay long roads, ancient trackways across the moors, grazing along commons and verges, and toll bridges, alehouses and markets where the price was set by argument. A drover bought at a fair, drove the herd for days or weeks, and sold for what he could get; he was paid in silver groats and pennies, and he carried them in a leather purse sewn inside his shirt. He needed to be able to count, bargain, endure rain and know which river could be forded. Godfrey learned all this and one thing more: how to read a herd. A beast that stopped grazing, a dog that whined at the wrong hour, a whole herd shying at a gap in a hedge: these were messages, and he learned to hear them. He was a large, slow-moving man with a weather-beaten face and a beard the colour of dry heather. He spoke seldom and chose his words with the care of a man paying them out of a purse. He was scrupulous with other people's cattle and mildly contemptuous of anyone who wasn't. He owned a stout dog called Tarn, and later another, and he carried, tucked in his belt, a small horn that could be heard a mile off on a still evening. Alehouse keepers along the road knew him as a good customer, drinking modestly, paying promptly, and telling nothing. By the time he was twenty he had walked cattle as far as Wakefield and York, and had sold hides and beasts in the markets of both. It was on the York road, in the summer of 1489, that he met the girl who would become his wife. Quenild Faulkner, born in 1468, the youngest child of Hugh Faulkner and Idonea Slater, was working as a dairymaid on a farm near Colne, where his herd had stopped to be watered, and she came out with a bucket and a hard stare to say that the cattle had trampled the beck. He apologised and paid for the damage. She looked him up and down and told him that he could make it up by helping to carry the churns. He stayed three days. In the second week of the following spring he came back with a gift of cheese from a Yorkshire dale and a formal request to her father's household, or what was left of it, since Hugh had died in 1487. Her brother Thomas, who was in York with his new wife, sent word that he approved. They married in 1490, when Godfrey was twenty-three and Quenild twenty-two. It was a plain wedding, a Mass in the parish church, a meal of beef and ale, and a dance in the barn. What Godfrey learned a few weeks later was that his wife was a vampire slayer, and it is a measure of his temperament that he accepted the news with a slow nod and a comment that he had suspected something of the sort when she had counted his cattle at a single glance. He asked what she needed. She said she needed a man who knew the roads. He was the perfect fit. Where Quenild went out on the moors by night, Godfrey knew every track that led to them, and he knew, as a drover knows, which farms were shut up too early, which villages smelled of tallow and fear. The years that followed were the best of his life. They lived in a low stone house near Padiham with a cattle-shed and a garden, and he was away on the road for weeks at a time and home for days, a rhythm that suited them both. Their children were born in his years of settled routine: Piers Faulkner in 1493 and Agnes Faulkner in 1494. Neither became a slayer. Godfrey cared little; he wanted a son who could handle a herd and a daughter who could handle a dairy, and he got both. He taught Piers the tally of cattle by their marks and Agnes the value of a fat beast at Skipton fair, and he took them on the road with him, a little way each summer. He did more for the Red Ledger than the ledgers admit. A drover was a natural intelligencer. He saw the country, met many people, and heard the talk in every alehouse, and he passed it on to his wife and, through her, to the Faulkner hunters. In 1496 it was Godfrey who noticed that two farms on the Calder road had lost every one of their cattle in a single week without a sound, and it was on his information that Quenild and her cousin took a vampire in a barn near Todmorden. In 1503 it was he who guided a Yorkshire hunter, of the Proctor line, over the moor in fog after the man's guide fell ill, and he was on friendly terms with the White Ledger's men ever afterward. He did not think of the rivalry as a personal matter. A herd was a herd. He was forty-four when Quenild died in 1511, and he took it hard. He did not stop driving cattle but he no longer went over the tops in winter, and neighbours noticed that he had stopped whistling. Two years later, in 1513, when the Flodden campaign drew men from every northern parish and the price of beef climbed with the army's hunger, he drove one of the largest herds of his career to the muster at a good price, and returned with a pocketful of silver and no interest in spending it. He gave most of it to his children. Piers was then twenty and Agnes nineteen, and they were both settled enough to take over the beasts. He passed his last seven years mostly at home, reading the weather and talking to Tarn's grandson. The winters of the early 1520s were hard in Lancashire. A cough took him in the winter of 1520, and he died aged fifty-three in his own bed with the horn hung on its nail. Piers and Agnes lived on until 1558, dying in the same year, which the family told with some awe. Godfrey Danby is not found in the Red Ledger as a slayer, but the phrase against his name, in Quenild's hand, is the one that the Slayerverse still repeats: he knew the road.