Hugh Thwaites was born in 1557 at Padiham, Lancashire, a small cloth and tanning town on the River Calder a few miles from Burnley, where the moors above Pendle lean down on the rooftops. He was the youngest of three children of John Thwaites, a tanner, and Margery Faulkner, a cloth merchant's wife who, by the family's custom, kept her maiden name in the household's private tally and passed the Faulkner line to her children through the ledger, if not through the parish register. His sister Nesta Faulkner had been born in 1543, and his brother Ralph Faulkner in 1551, so Hugh, coming fourteen years after the first child, was almost a second generation in the house. Queen Mary was dying that year, the Church of England was about to be settled once more under Elizabeth, and Padiham, like the rest of Lancashire, was quietly unsettled about all of it.
The Thwaites household stank of bark. John Thwaites ran a pit yard on the bank of the Calder, where hides were steeped in tanning liquor of crushed oak bark for months, then scraped, dried and pressed into leather. The smell was thick, sour and unforgettable, and Hugh carried a trace of it for the rest of his life. It was hard, cold, wet work, and John, a big taciturn man, came home every evening with his hands stained the colour of tea. He died in 1560, when Hugh was three, of a lung sickness that the town's surgeon attributed to the damp, and the child kept only a single memory of him: being lifted onto a wall to watch the water run over the pit stones. After that the household depended on Margery, who was left with the tanning yard, a debt to the bark merchant and three children to feed.
Margery Faulkner was, in the family's records, a formidable woman, and her strength shaped Hugh more than any lesson. She was of the Lancastrian line and had grown up knowing the Red Ledger's stories, and though she was not a hunter herself, she ran the household with the discipline of one. She sold the tanning pits to a neighbour, paid the debts and took in cloth to finish, and she saw that her sons and daughter learned their letters. Her elder son Ralph, a quiet, watchful boy, showed the signs of the family calling early and was soon a forester in the woods at the edge of Pendle, and later a slayer. Hugh was different. He was sociable, talkative and impatient of solitude, and he gave no sign at all of being called. His mother accepted this with a sigh and a shrug, and told him that a family needed people who could be found in daylight.
At fourteen Hugh was apprenticed to an innkeeper in Burnley, where he learned to draw ale, keep a cellar, tally a reckoning and manage a room full of drovers, clothiers and pedlars. Elizabethan taverns were the hub of the district, places where news, rumour and business moved in the same breath, and a good keeper heard everything. He grew into the trade, tall, red-faced and broad in the shoulder, with a big laugh and a memory for names. By his late twenties he had saved enough to take a lease on a tavern of his own at Padiham, near the market cross, a long low building of stone with a slate roof, a taproom with a great fireplace, and a cellar dug into the hillside. He called it by an old sign that his customers shortened to the Shears, after the cloth workers' tool. It was the sort of house that every travelling hunter in Lancashire knew he could rely on.
The tavern became the unofficial information exchange of the Red Ledger. Hugh had no craft, no gear and no stake, but he had an ear that missed nothing. A stranger who stayed in the upper room and did not eat, a carter who said his horses would not pass a certain crossroads at night, a girl who came in at dusk asking for a place to sleep because there was something behind her in the lane: all these things were reported to his brother Ralph, and later to Ralph's family, by a system of small signals that Hugh had invented himself. A cloth hung out of a window meant that a hunter should call. A lantern on a particular hook meant he should keep away. The men and women of the Red Ledger passed through the Shears at all hours, took a meal and a bed and departed with a warning or a rumour, and Hugh never asked for payment beyond the usual reckoning.
In 1584 he married Martha Greenhalgh, a herbalist, born in 1562, who grew simples in a walled garden and sold remedies at the Burnley and Padiham markets. She was small, brisk and freckled, with strong opinions about the humours, and she was more skilled than the local apothecary at poultices, tinctures and syrups. Her family were Lancashire Catholics of the quiet sort, and her knowledge of plants was mixed with a good deal of old lore, including the uses of hawthorn, rowan, garlic and wild rue. The marriage was a sound one, built on shared work and a sense of humour. She moved her herbs into the tavern's back garden, and the taproom began to smell of rosemary and hops. It is said that a party of hunters once left the Shears with a satchel of dried mugwort and a promise from Martha that it would settle the stomach after a long night, and it did.
Their daughters came in swift succession: Margery Thwaites in 1585, named for Hugh's mother, and Avice Thwaites in 1586. They grew up in the taproom's warmth, sitting under the tables and learning to count coins before they could read. Hugh doted on them. He taught them to carry a tray, to pour without spilling and to greet a stranger with a smile while noting his boots. Martha taught them the names of herbs and where to find them. Neither girl was called to the hunt, and Hugh, who had feared the loss of them as he feared the loss of his brother, quietly gave thanks. His mother Margery, by then an old woman, lived with them for her last years and told the girls stories of the Red Ledger's founder and the Guest at Towton, in which the Faulkners were always brave and the Proctors always sly.
The years around the Armada found him in the thick of a nervous county. In the summer of 1588 the beacons were built on Pendle Hill and on Longridge Fell, and Hugh's taproom was crowded with men who talked of Spanish galleons and Catholic plots. He kept the peace with a cudgel behind the bar and a joke on his lips, and he tolerated no cruelty to Catholics, though it cost him a few customers. His sister-in-law Iona Thorne, who married his brother Ralph, became one of his closest allies, and it was at his table that she is said to have first described her craft of Mist Walking to a doubting Lancashire hunter. His mother died in 1591. Ralph died in 1597, and Iona and her children began to move around the county, using the Shears as a base.
Hugh died in 1603, aged forty-six, of a fever that swept through Padiham that spring, a few weeks after the news that Queen Elizabeth had died and King James was on his way south. He was buried in the churchyard with a large gathering of neighbours, cloth workers and travelling men. Martha lived on until 1616, running the tavern and the garden alike, and both daughters outlived her by decades. The Faulkner ledgers record Hugh as a man who kept no tally of his own but who stood behind every one, and in the Slayerverse the Shears at Padiham remains a byword for the ordinary hospitality on which the hunters of the Red Ledger depended.
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