Guy Tempest

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

Among the men who laid the stones of York Minster's close in the years after the old king broke with Rome, few left less trace than Guy Tempest, and yet the Proctor household in Yorkshire would have been a poorer thing without him. He was born in 1517 at Richmond, in the North Riding, a town of steep cobbled streets, a great Norman castle on a rock above the Swale and a market place that smelled in October of wet fleece and tallow. His parents are not named in the family papers, and his siblings, if he had any, are not recorded. What is known is that by the time he was fourteen he had been bound as a mason's apprentice, and that the trade took him, as it took many young men of the northern shires, to the one city in Yorkshire that never stopped building. York in the 1530s was a walled city of perhaps eight thousand souls, crowded round its Minster and the ruins of monastic houses that were dissolved under the king's authority. The guilds ran the streets: the Merchant Adventurers, the mercers, the weavers, the glovers, the brewers, and each held a hall, a patron saint and a corner of the market. The Minster close was a small city in itself, with the chapter house, the Bedern, the great south transept and workyards full of limestone and timber. In the shadow of it, a young mason could learn the whole grammar of English stone: how to lay a course, how to cut a moulding to a template, how to read a master's drawing scratched on a plaster floor. Guy learned quickly. He had a steady hand, a good eye for a line and a disposition that the masters called tractable, which in the language of the lodge meant that he did not argue. The world outside was less steady. The years of his youth were years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, and every few seasons the fabric of the church was rearranged. Shrines were stripped, images pulled down, priests replaced. The rising that swept the north in 1536, which the country came to call the Pilgrimage of Grace, brought armed men to the gates of York, and the streets filled with bearded farmers and banner-carrying priests. Guy, nineteen, kept his head down and his chisel moving, and when the dust of it settled and the executions began, he was one of the many craftsmen who found that new work followed old destruction: walls to be mended, windows to be reglazed, stone to be quarried and cut for a city that had been frightened into piety. It was through the brewers' guild that he met Parnel Proctor. She was a brewster, one of the York women who made ale in copper vats in the backs of their houses and sold it by the gallon, a trade that lay largely in female hands until the malt and hops of a later age pushed it into the breweries. Parnel was five years older than Guy, brisk, broad-shouldered and possessed of a formidable head for figures. Her house in the parish of St Michael-le-Belfrey stood in the shadow of the Minster, and the mason's gang drank her ale on Saturday evenings. Guy drank his slowly. The ledgers of the Proctors record that she was of the White Ledger line, a Yorkist house whose fathers had walked out with the founder Walter Proctor into the wars of the roses, though the Proctors in that generation kept their ledger in a sober private way, and no one in the alehouse knew it. They were married in 1538, when Guy was twenty-one and Parnel twenty-six. It was an unequal-looking match: an apprentice, not yet a journeyman, marrying a woman with a trade, a house and a name. But the household worked. Guy moved his tools into the yard behind the brewhouse, took work on the Minster close by day and helped in the brewing at night, hauling water and stirring the mash. Parnel taught him to keep an account. In return he taught her the mason's trick of testing a wall with a plumb-bob, and it was said in the street that her ale-room was the only one in York in which every bench sat level. They kept a small garden, a pig and a cat, and in the front window a lamp that was lit at dusk. The lamp was not for the customers. Parnel's kin, the Proctors of the White Ledger, passed through York regularly, and it was Guy, the outsider, who eventually came to understand what they were doing. He never became a slayer and was never called; the papers are quite clear on the point. But he was a mason, and a mason understands a structure. He saw how his wife's cousins arrived late and left before dawn, how they always asked for the cellar, and how a certain kind of night visitor would not cross the threshold until asked. From this he drew his own conclusions. He built, unasked, a second stair to the cellar, a door with a stone lintel cut with a cross, and a strongroom behind the brewhouse where the family ledger could be kept dry and hidden. Parnel found it finished one morning and said nothing, which he understood as thanks. Their son and daughter came quickly. Anne Proctor was born in 1541 and Theobald Proctor in 1542, and both took their mother's name, following the family custom under which the surname passed through daughters when the house required it. Guy was a gentle, absent-minded father who carried the children on his shoulders through the close, named the saints on the Minster's glass for them and cut each a small wooden figure to carry. The household grew loud and warm. In these years the country slid toward a new reign: the old king died in 1547, the boy Edward reformed the liturgy, the Minster's chantries were closed, and the guilds lost their religious endowments. Guy watched the carved saints go from the choir and shook his head, though he was careful to shake it in private. Around 1549 his health began to fail. Masons in the sixteenth century paid dearly for their trade: dust in the lungs, a stiffened back, hands twisted by the cold. Guy, working in unheated sheds through the north-country winters, aged faster than his years. By thirty-two he could no longer climb a scaffold, and he moved like an old man, and the physicians and neighbours agreed that he was worn to the bone. Parnel took over the whole of the brewhouse and put him to the accounts. He sat by the window with a slate and kept them, patiently, until the end. Guy Tempest died in 1552, aged thirty-five. The parish clerk entered the cause as old age, a verdict on a life used up early in stone, and he was buried in the churchyard within sight of the Minster on which he had worked. His wife survived him thirty years, dying in 1582, and his children lived on, Theobald dying in 1579 and Anne in 1582. Guy left no ledger entry and no hunts, only a strongroom, a stair and a lintel that the Proctor cousins used for generations. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the mason who married into the White Ledger and built its house without ever being asked what it was for.