Gunnora Hoyle

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

Gunnora Hoyle was born in 1588 in Whalley, Lancashire, in the shadow of the ruined abbey. Whalley lay in the valley of the Calder, where the great Cistercian house had been dissolved fifty years earlier and its stones carried off to build barns and walls, so that a child could play among traceried windows that had no roof. The village was small and prosperous, with a market cross, a fine old church with carved choir stalls that had come from the abbey, and a scatter of farms and hand-loom cottages in the surrounding fields. The records tell little of her parents or of any siblings, and she seems to have been raised, in the way of many girls of the district, by a mixture of her household, her church and the customs of the neighbourhood. What emerges is a girl who was good with her hands. She learned to sew as a matter of course, and then as a matter of trade. In Lancashire at the end of the sixteenth century a needlewoman could make a living in several ways: by working within a great household as a sewing maid, by taking in piecework from a tailor, or by setting up on her own account and serving the farmers' wives and the yeomen's daughters of a parish. Gunnora did the last. She had a light, quick stitch, a good sense of proportion and a memory for measurements, and by her early twenties she had a small clientele who came to her for shirts, shifts, caps, aprons and the occasional wedding gown. She worked in a room over a byre, warmed by the animals below, with a window that faced east for the morning light and a table she had scrubbed white. She was not tall, and her eyes were said to be the colour of the Calder in October. She married in 1609, at twenty-one, a man five years her senior named Nicholas Faulkner, born in 1583, a yeoman's son with a taste for other people's secrets. The Red Ledger's family accounts record him with a certain wry affection: he had the easy manner of a natural gossip, a talent for being in the right place, and a way of finding out what a person did not want known before they had finished speaking. He was also a vampire slayer, and it was this gift for hearing and connecting that made him effective, a listener who followed rumour to its source. Gunnora, who knew of his calling from the start, was drawn to him as much by his curiosity as by his good looks. She used to say that Nicholas could not walk through a village without learning three things and forgetting to mention two, and that she had married him to learn which two. Their household was the sort that made the Faulkner cause work. Nicholas was often away, following a report across the moors to Pendle Forest or down to the Ribble, and Gunnora managed the house, the garden and the sewing trade, and quietly managed his correspondence. She had the seamstress's advantage of being trusted by women and admitted into their houses, and she heard much that never reached her husband's drinking companions. A farmer's wife who could not say aloud what she had seen in the barn would say it to the woman kneeling with a mouthful of pins to fit her sleeve. Gunnora carried what she heard home, wrote it in a small book bound in scrap linen, and passed it to Nicholas, who acted on it. Between them the couple built a network of informants that was, by the reckoning of the Red Ledger's keepers, one of the most reliable of its decade. Children came steadily. Millicent Faulkner was born in 1612, the eldest, and Anne Faulkner in 1615. A gap of four years followed, during which Gunnora nursed the household through a series of small illnesses, and then Gunnora Faulkner, named for her mother, arrived in 1619, and Ivo Faulkner, the youngest and the only boy, in 1621. None of the four became a slayer, and Gunnora did not push them toward it. She raised them in the ordinary discipline of a Lancashire home, with morning prayers, a chore for each hand and an early bedtime, and taught the girls her own trade. Millicent and Anne could both cut and fit a gown by the time they were twelve. Ivo, the youngest, was allowed to sit under the table and listen to the adults talk, and when he grew up he was known for his memory of what he had heard. The years were difficult. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns fell on Lancashire as on everywhere else. The winter of 1616 was long and the price of oatmeal rose; the outbreak of 1625 emptied whole streets in Whalley and forced Gunnora to move the children to a cousin's farm on the hill while she stayed to nurse the sick. Her sewing paid the household's bills more often than her husband's hunting paid anything at all, since a slayer's returns were entered in the ledger and not the purse. She kept a strict account of household expenses, and it survives in fragments: so much for candles, so much for thread, and, in one year, a substantial sum for a new coat for Nicholas that he had ruined within a fortnight. Nicholas Faulkner died in 1631, aged forty-eight, and the ledger records his end plainly, without the flourishes that are sometimes given to fallen slayers; his wife took charge of the burial and the tidying of his papers. Gunnora was forty-three and had four children under twenty. She did not remarry. She continued to sew, taking more work than before, and for a time she let out the room above the byre to a journeyman weaver. She also kept up the network of informants, on a smaller scale and with a kind of stubbornness that surprised the family's cousins. She sat at the parish church in the same pew for the rest of her life, and the parish clerk noted that she had never been late. The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, reached Lancashire in 1642, and she lived to see the first of them. Whalley was on the road between Blackburn and Clitheroe, and troops on both sides passed through it, requisitioning hay and horses. She kept her daughters indoors and her account book close. She died in 1643 of old age, at fifty-five, in her own house, and was buried in the churchyard beneath the abbey's old walls. Her children lived on: Millicent until 1663, Anne until 1690, Gunnora until 1675 and Ivo until 1684. Within the Faulkner family she is remembered as the one who listened while her husband hunted, and in the annals of the Slayerverse she is credited with much of the quiet intelligence that kept the Red Ledger accurate: a seamstress who measured a whole parish by the fit of its clothes.