Harry Faulkner

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

Harry Faulkner made arrows in Clitheroe for nearly fifty years, and in that time he never once carried a weapon on the Red Ledger's business, which made him something of an oddity in the household he was born into. He was born in 1511 in the shadow of Clitheroe Castle, the small Norman keep on its limestone knoll above the River Ribble, and he was the eldest child of Edmund Faulkner, the elder son of the Tudor marriage who had been raised a Faulkner on the Lancashire lands and who was known in the hunters' circles as The Flodden Archer. His mother was Grace Pickering, a weaver. He grew up between the noise of the loom and the quieter noise of a father who came home at odd hours, and he learned to hold his tongue before he learned to read. Clitheroe was a small borough of a few hundred people, but it had a market charter, a castle, a grammar school and a good deal of cloth traffic, being the gateway between the Ribble valley and the Pendle uplands. The town lay in wool country. The hills around it were open pasture with drystone walls, and the fleeces were carried down on packhorses to the fulling mills and the weavers' houses. The Faulkner house stood on a lane running down toward the river, with a workshop on the ground floor and a loom-room above. Harry's mother worked at her loom most of the day, and the sound of the shuttle was the background of his childhood. She died in 1524, when he was thirteen, and afterward the house was oddly quiet, with his father in his workshop, his younger brother Maurice, born in 1518, and his younger sister Margery, born in 1519, both too small to be of use. His father was a hunter and Harry was not. The Faulkner household had a standing rule that the calling came, if it came, of its own accord, and could not be forced or coaxed. It had not come to Harry, and by the time he was seventeen it was plain that it would not. He was steady, watchful and neat, a boy who could fix a wagon wheel or thread a needle, but he had no sudden inner alarm and no trance of attention, and his father saw this without disappointment. Edmund put him to the workbench and taught him to make arrows, so that if he could not join the work he might at least supply it. It turned out to be the right decision. Harry had a gift for the trade that his father lacked, an exactness of eye that could look down a shaft and see a hair's breadth of warp. A fletcher in the 1520s and 1530s had a more secure living than the age of powder might suggest. The Tudor crown required every able-bodied man under sixty to own a longbow and to practise at the butts on Sundays and holidays, and successive statutes, culminating in the act of 1541, forbade the playing of unlawful games in favour of archery. The butts stood at the edge of most parishes, and the fletcher who supplied them prospered. Harry bought his goose feathers in bulk from the fen country, his ash and birch from woodmen on the Bowland fells, and his hide glue from the tanner. He cut the feathers, bound them with silk thread, glued them with a tin pot kept over a low fire, and sold sheaves of a dozen at a shilling or so. He acquired a reputation for straight, matched arrows that did not shed their fletching in wet weather. In 1530, at nineteen, he married Alice Bulcock, a household servant from Whalley whom he had known since his mother's death, and the two of them moved into the front room of the Faulkner house. The match surprised nobody who knew them, and it delighted Harry's father, who liked a practical woman. They had two daughters, Olive Faulkner in 1532 and Jocosa Faulkner in 1535. Harry was a devoted, awkward and undemonstrative father, the sort who showed affection by mending a doll's arm and making a small bow for a girl who wanted one. He taught both daughters to shoot at the butts, which was not the custom, and Jocosa, in particular, grew into a sharp shot who beat her cousins at the parish games and was said to have been the best archer of the women of Clitheroe. The years of his early manhood were also the years of the great upheaval in the north. In 1536 the monasteries began to be dissolved, and the northern risings that followed, the Lincolnshire rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace, pulled hundreds of men out of the Ribble valley. Harry, a fletcher with a young wife and a baby, did not go, but he made arrows for those who did, and he saw many of them come back with nothing. When the pilgrims were broken in the spring of 1537 and their leaders executed, including the last abbot of Whalley at Lancaster, the whole district lived for a year in a silence he found more frightening than the fighting. His brother Maurice married in that year, bringing a Thorne wife down from the Northumbrian border. Harry kept a diplomatic distance from the Thorne connection, having no love of border quarrels, but he liked Meg, who let him make her a stout small crossbow. His father died in 1541, of what the family recorded only as the end of a long life of hard nights, at the age of fifty-three, and Harry became the head of the house. He inherited the workshop, the lane frontage, and something he had not asked for, which was custody of the Red Ledger's Clitheroe pages. He could not write an entry in his own name, for he had no tally, but the ledger was kept in the house, and it was he who kept the ink and the dry cupboard and who saw that a hunting kinsman had a bed when he passed through. He performed this quiet stewardship for thirty years, and the ledger for those decades shows a steady stream of entries made in his kitchen. The relationship with the Proctors was one that he handled with a tradesman's courtesy, exchanging a cordial word with the Proctor fletchers of Padiham and Preston, whom he knew as competitors in the arrow trade more than as rivals in the ledger. Harry's private grief was that the family he built came apart in front of him. Alice died in 1559 of a winter cough, at forty-nine, and he was left alone in the house at forty-eight. Olive died in 1566, aged thirty-four, and though he had lived through her mother's death, he found this harder to bear. In the last years of his life the bow itself was fading in importance, as the harquebus and the matchlock came into use, and though the butts were still kept up he found that the boys who came to his shop were buying fewer sheaves. In the winter of 1569 the northern earls rose in rebellion against the Queen, and the district filled with soldiers and rumours, and he closed his shutters and made arrows for whoever asked. He was sixty when the rising failed. He died in 1571, aged sixty, of a winter cough, the same complaint that had taken his wife, and was buried beside her in the churchyard at Clitheroe. Jocosa, who survived him until 1586, took over the account books and sold the workshop's stock. The Red Ledger's clerk, entering his death, wrote only that a good fletcher had gone, which was the best thing that the ledger said of anyone who did not take a tally. In the Slayerverse Harry Faulkner is remembered as the Faulkner who was never called and never minded, and whose steady hand kept the ledgers, the arrows and the house in order through the worst years of the Tudor reign.