Grizel Proctor

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

Grizel Proctor was born in 1534 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, and for fifty years she was the midwife to whom the moorland parishes sent when a child was coming at the wrong hour. She was the daughter of Nicholas Proctor, a carrier known to the slayers of the family as "The Slow Warden", and of Elspeth Thorne, a horse-dealer out of the House of Thorne who was called "The Red Warden", and she grew up in a slayer family that kept the White Ledger. She never took up a stake herself, and she never married. What she took up instead was the oldest night-work of all, and she did it so well that her name is better remembered in the dales than that of any Proctor with a tally. The household into which she was born was a busy and a watchful one. Her elder brother Ninian Proctor was four years her senior and already a figure of authority by the time she could walk, an earnest boy who minded her in the hay-loft above the Proctor yard while their parents were out buying and selling. Her younger brother Wilfred Proctor came along in 1538 and took up most of the attention she had been getting. She was a thin, sharp-eyed, black-haired child who asked questions that the grown people did not wish to answer. Why did her mother keep a hawthorn branch over the lintel? Why was the ledger case moved at night? Why did her father's carrier-wain sometimes come home with its canvas cut? She was given half the truth and worked out the rest. By twelve she knew perfectly well what the family did, and she had decided, without discussion, that it was not for her. The decision was a matter of temperament and not of cowardice. She watched her father come home with his shoulder bruised and her mother ride out at dusk, and she concluded that the family already had as many people in the dark as it needed and that nobody was looking after the ones who stayed behind. When she was fourteen she went to be apprenticed to the midwife of the parish, an aged widow named in the register only as "the widow Kell", who lived in a cottage by the churchyard with four cats and a collection of herbs hanging from every rafter. The old woman took her on because she did not faint, and kept her because she listened. For five years Grizel carried the bag, boiled the water, held the lamp, and learned the long catalogue of what could go wrong in a birth and what could be done about it. She learned to turn a child in the womb with her hands, to cut a cord cleanly, to know from the colour of a woman's face whether to send for the priest. It was a hard apprenticeship in a hard decade. The years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown meant that the old midwife, who had been licensed by one bishop and was watched by the next, had to be careful what charms and prayers she said at a bedside, and Grizel learned to attend a labour with a quiet mouth and a steady pair of hands. When her father died in 1555 she was twenty-one, and when her brother took up the slayer's calling the year after, she was the first person he told. She did not offer advice. She made him a pair of stout linen gloves that would not tear on a thorn and told him to wash his hands before eating. In the family it was always understood that Grizel looked after the living. She worked in an area bounded by the Wharfe on the south and the high fells on the north, roughly thirty miles of country that she covered on a grey pony with a canvas bag, a lantern and a bottle of strong spirit. She was called out at midnight to a shepherd's wife in a stone croft four miles up a track that no cart could take, and she was called out in December to a miller's daughter in the village. She delivered, by her own reckoning, more than a thousand children, and she buried a few of their mothers, and she was never known to refuse a call because of weather, distance or the ability of the family to pay. In the parishes they said that Grizel Proctor's lantern had never gone out. Her profession had a curious relation to the family's secret work. A midwife is let into the house at its most exposed hour and sees things that other people are never shown: the sick child whose mother has hung a cloth across the window, the woman who flinches at the daylight though she is perfectly well, the husband who has been away three nights and returns with his eyes too bright. Grizel noticed all of it. She learned that a fever with certain marks on the neck was not to be treated as a fever, and she had a private test, of a quiet question about whether the household had been visited by a stranger, that she used on suspicious cases. When the answer was yes, she did not argue and did not alarm anyone. She finished her work, rode straight home, and sent a short message to her brother Ninian, written in the oldest family shorthand, which the White Ledger preserves. The ledger names six such notices over the thirty years of her working life, and in at least four of them the slayers arrived in time. They are recorded without comment, as "word from Grizel", a phrase that came to have a certain force in the family. She did not keep a tally of her own, and she insisted on this. She said that her tally was the other kind, and she kept it in the parish register, in the margins of the little book in which she noted the births she attended. When asked, she would say that she was a Proctor of the ledger as much as anyone, only that she wrote in the other column. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 was an odd season for a midwife, for she was called to women whose husbands had gone with the rebels, and to women whose husbands had been hanged afterwards, and she attended all of them without asking on which side anyone had stood. She hid two children in her pony's panniers on the road once, to carry them to a safe house, and told the soldiers who stopped her that they were bundles of linen. It was the only time she was known to lie to an officer of the crown. She did not boast of it. Her mother Elspeth died in 1572, and Grizel was with her; her brother Ninian was killed in an ambush in 1587 and she attended his burial, and afterwards helped his widow, Marion Hodgson, to set the household in order, since Marion had never been much at home with grief. She remained single throughout, though she was not without offers. A widowed cooper at Boroughbridge asked for her more than once, and she declined him on each occasion with a cheerful and plain firmness. She said that she had too many babies to deliver to take on a husband, and that a woman who had caught the whole of a parish into the world was owed a bit of quiet. In the summer of 1588, when the beacons blazed on the hills against the Armada, she was on the fells attending a birth in a farmstead, and she watched the fire on the next ridge through the open door while the child came. She died in 1600, aged sixty-six, in an accident on the fells. She had gone out in late autumn to a croft above the river, a long way, in the dusk, and the grey pony, an old animal by then, slipped on the wet scree at a bend in the track. A shepherd found her the next morning with the lantern still beside her. The parish turned out to bury her at Wetherby. It is said that more than a hundred of the children she had delivered stood in the churchyard, and that some of them were grey-headed. Grizel Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the member of the slayer family who stayed with the living, a Wetherby midwife whose lantern burned in every croft of the dales and whose messages arrived when they were needed. In the Slayerverse she stands for the work that goes on beside the hunt and makes it worth doing: the watcher at the bedside, the keeper of the first breath, and the one who knew the signs.