Hamond Stansfield

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

The parish clerk at Selby wrote down the death of Hamond Stansfield in 1650 with a single word that puzzled every reader afterwards, and the word was "childbed". The entry stands in the register between a shepherd's burial and a widow's, and it reads, in a hand that leans hard to the right, that Hamond Stansfield, smith, was buried of childbed. It is a strange thing to write of a man. The family's explanation, handed down in the Proctor line, is that he caught the fever that carried off a neighbour's wife while he was helping her family through her lying-in, and that the clerk, who had recorded the wife's death a week before, set the same cause against both names out of haste. The Stansfields treated it as a kindly mistake and a fitting one, for it recorded truly how he had spent his last fortnight. He was forty-six. He had been born in 1604 at Selby, in Yorkshire, a market and shipbuilding town on the Ouse at the edge of the Vale of York, dominated by its great abbey church and its wharves. His father was Wilfred Stansfield, a cooper born in 1576, and his mother was Dionisia Proctor, born in 1581, a seamstress of the White Ledger's family. His elder sister was Blanche Stansfield, born in 1600, who had been at the family's earlier home in York and who remained there. Hamond was the last child of the house and, as the family said, the one who could not be kept out of the forge. The household lived close to the river, in a lane of timber-framed houses whose upper storeys leaned across the street until the neighbours could shake hands from the windows. There were tannery smells, fish smells, the tar of the boatyards, and the ring of hammers from the slips where the shipwrights built keels for the coasting trade. His parents, seeing that the boy had strong arms and a serious temperament, apprenticed him at fourteen to a master smith, who kept a forge by the market cross and made everything that the town's trades required, from horseshoes and ploughshares to hinges, chains, ship's nails, and the iron hoops that coopers put on casks. It was a hard apprenticeship, seven years long, and for the first two Hamond did little but work the bellows, fetch the coals, and quench the tools. He learned to read the colour of iron: the dull red, the cherry, the orange, the straw-yellow that meant a weld was ready. He learned that a smith's day began before the light and ended after it, and that a man who watched the fire too long went slightly deaf and slightly blind. He learned, too, the etiquette of the forge, in which nobody speaks of a job until it is finished. The White Ledger's business reached him through his mother. Dionisia, a Proctor by birth, saw to it that her son knew what the family kept in its locked chest, and when he was of an age to be trusted with it, told him. He was not called, and did not become a slayer; there was no moment on which the ledger could hang such a claim. But he was, in the manner of the family's craftsmen, made useful. From about 1625 onward, the Yorkshire Proctors sent him work that no ordinary smith would have understood: stake-heads of hardened iron for the ends of hawthorn shafts, chain of a particular weight, fine-toothed pincers, the small hooks and rings that a hunter carried on a belt. He asked no questions. He made what was asked, marked each piece with a small stamp of an anvil under a cross, and delivered it wrapped in sacking. Blanche, when she heard about it in York, wrote that she supposed he was the only smith in the county who knew what a churchyard gate was for. His parents died within a year of each other, his mother in 1633 and his father in 1634, and Hamond, twenty-nine, found himself the head of what was left. He never married, and there were no children of his; the reason given in the family is that he was a shy man, given to long silences, and that a wife would have found the forge a formidable rival. He kept a forge of his own from the middle of the 1630s, a low stone smithy at the edge of Selby near the abbey wall, and there he made ploughs and wheel-tyres by day and, when the ledger's messengers came, other things by night. He worked with a young apprentice, and in the long winters he taught the boy that a good weld was a kind of promise. He was broad and dark, with a scorched forearm and a permanent squint, and the town's children thought him gruff and were frightened of him until he made them each an iron ring on their birthdays. The wars came to Selby in 1644, when the town was taken by Fairfax and the Parliamentary forces in a sharp assault in April, a few weeks before the siege of York began. The forge was requisitioned for a time to shoe cavalry horses and sharpen pikeheads, and Hamond worked for the garrison, since there was no alternative, for almost two months. It was the busiest and most miserable season of his working life. He heard the rumour that the northern gentry had split, that brother had turned on brother and cousin on cousin, and he noticed with private amusement that the two great families of the Ledgers, the Lancastrian Faulkners and the Yorkist Proctors, had had the sense to keep their quarrel in a book. He is reported to have said, of the war, that at least a ledger could be shut. He wrote to his sister, and she to him, with their customary brevity about the weather. His contribution to the Proctor cause is in the objects. A number of pieces survive that carry his anvil-and-cross stamp: a set of iron stake-tips, a chain, a pair of heavy tongs, the head of a spear. They are plain, honest tools, and they have the quality that hunters of a later century looked for in old gear, which is that they are made for use and not for show. One of the stake-tips, held in the Proctor collection, has a small notch filed into the socket, a private mark that no one has explained. The family believes it is a count of something, though of what they cannot say. It may be a tally kept, in his way, in metal, for a man who did not otherwise write things down. In the late winter of 1650, a neighbour's wife in the lane behind the forge went into labour in a bad frost, with the midwife snowed in at another village. Hamond, who had once assisted a farrier with a difficult foaling and had strong hands, was fetched by the frightened husband and stayed at the house for two days, boiling water, holding lamps, and doing what he was told. The child lived; the mother, in the fever that followed, did not, and within a week Hamond, who had caught it from the sickroom, was ill himself. He died in the smithy's back room, aged forty-six, with his apprentice at his side. The Proctors of the White Ledger recorded him as a craftsman of the house, one who armed the hunters and asked for no tally. In the Slayerverse his stamp, the anvil under the cross, is still used by makers of ceremonial replicas as a sign of honest metal.