Ian Thorne

Member of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

Ian Thorne was born in 1599 at Bellingham in Northumberland, in the North Tyne valley, in the last years of the old Queen and the first years of what would prove a very long peace on the Border. He was born a Thorne in a country that had spent three centuries deciding whether that name was an honour or a warning. His people were border reivers of the marches, riders who had lived by cattle, kinship and the blackmail of neighbours until the union of the crowns in 1603 took the March laws away from them and replaced them with the assize judges and the hangman. The House of Thorne, as the slayer families afterwards styled it, kept its own older business alongside the raiding: the hunting of what walked at night on the moors. That business survived the change of monarch much better than the raiding did. The child grew up in the aftermath. Bellingham then was a village of stone and turf houses under the fell, with a church whose roof had been made in the old Border manner of heavy stone slabs to defy fire, and with peel towers standing in the fields as reminders of what the country had been. Ian's father held a small tenement and, in the hard years after the King's commissioners came north to hang or transport the worst of the riders, gave up the saddle for the plough with more grace than most. What he passed to his son was a kind of stubborn practicality and a stock of stories which the boy was told never to repeat in front of strangers. The Thornes of that generation were learning to live as respectable subjects while keeping in a locked cupboard the old knowledge of the marches, and Ian, from a young age, was expected to know what belonged in the cupboard and what belonged on the table. He did not follow the family's hunting trade with much appetite. Where his brothers and cousins took up the long spears and the border pistols, Ian was drawn by a quieter inclination toward what was made and sold. He was apprenticed at about fifteen, probably to a chandler in Hexham, a market town where the abbey stood in ruins and the shops clustered under it, and there he learned to render tallow, to dip and mould candles, to boil soap, to weigh out wick and to keep a shop's book. It was smelly, greasy, patient work. A chandler's year turned on the killing season, when the butchers sent in their fat, and on the long dark of winter, when candles were the commodity everyone needed and few could afford to burn as freely as they liked. Ian took to it. He had a sound head for weights and prices and a habit, unusual in a Thorne, of saying exactly what he meant and no more. His move into Lancashire is the part of his story the family remembered least clearly, and the surviving accounts are contradictory as to why. One held that a master chandler at Burnley wanted a journeyman with a good hand and offered him wages and a bed; another, that a Thorne cousin who had already settled in the hill country over the Pennines wrote to say that a chandler could do well among the hand-loom villages, which used a great many candles and had almost no one to make them. Both accounts agree on the result. By the late 1620s Ian was settled in the market towns and loom-villages of east Lancashire, keeping a shop with a rendering-house behind, selling rushlights, mould candles and soap to weavers, farmers, and publicans, and taking in payment whatever a weaver's household had, including yarn, oatmeal, and, once, according to the family, a half-share in a pig. He was respected as an honest dealer and was once fined at the manor court for the smoke of his boiling-house, which he paid without complaint. His only child, Shona Thorne, was born in 1633, in the shop's back room, in a year that the parish remembered for its wet harvest. Her mother is not named in the surviving records of the Thorne house; the family's own accounts do not preserve a name for her, and the space in the record has been left honestly empty. What they preserve is the child. Shona grew up smelling of tallow and thyme, sitting on the shop counter while her father weighed out the week's orders, and learning at his elbow the two arts he cared most about, which were arithmetic and discretion. He taught her to count change into a stranger's hand without looking at it, and to look at the stranger instead. He taught her, too, from the locked cupboard of his own boyhood, that there were things on the moors and in the mosses which a sensible person did not go looking for, and which a Thorne might yet be called upon to meet. Whether she ever heard him say it in so many words is doubtful. But she grew up ready. The great affairs of his middle years came from outside the shop. The plague years of the early Stuart reigns crossed east Lancashire more than once, and every outbreak had its effect on a chandler's books: the well-to-do burned candles through nights of watching, the poor were buried by torchlight, and the parish paid for tallow it could not afford. Ian gave short credit and long patience, and kept a private list of debts he did not intend to collect. Then came the civil wars, which cut Lancashire in two, with Royalist gentry in their halls and Parliament's men in Manchester and Bolton, and which made the roads unsafe for a carrier and the shops unsafe for a man with the wrong opinions. He had come from a country whose first law was to keep quiet about who you were with, and he practised it again here. He sold candles to the garrison on one side and to the townsmen on the other, and it was said that he could tell which was which from the way they asked the price. Shona was twenty-five when the King's return was still an unlooked-for thing and the country was in the hands of the Protector's major-generals; she was already keeping her father's accounts and dealing with the tallow merchants on her own account. Ian did not live to see what became of her. He died in 1658, of old age, at fifty-nine, in the room above the shop, in a cold October when the rendering-house fires were lit early and the whole of the lane smelled of mutton fat. He had been failing for a season, growing stout and short of breath, and had spent that season teaching his daughter every trick of the trade he had never written down: which drover cheated on weight, which brewer paid at Martinmas and which at Candlemas, how to tell rancid tallow by the colour of the cake. The funeral was plain, with a Thorne cousin from over the fell standing beside the coffin, and the candles at the graveside were, as the neighbours noted, the best that the shop had ever made. Two years later, in 1660, in the year the King came home, Shona married Stuart Faulkner, of the Lancashire Faulkners who kept the Red Ledger. It was, from the Thorne side, an old kind of union, a border house joined to a Lancastrian house, neither wealthy, each holding something the other lacked. Ian had no part in the making of the match, and the family has always remarked on that fact with a certain wry affection. The Thorne cousins who came to the wedding said that he would have approved of the bridegroom and disapproved of the fuss, and that he would have wanted the marriage settlement entered in the shop's day-book before anyone signed a word of it. Shona took her father's ledger of accounts with her to the Faulkner house, a fat, greasy volume bound in sheepskin, and kept it beside the Red Ledger on the shelf, where the two books, one of debts and one of vampires, sat together for generations. What Ian left behind was small and practical. He left a shop, a rendering-house, a good name among the loom-villages, and a daughter who understood weights and measures as well as she understood the older knowledge of the marches. The Thorne inheritance that came into the Faulkner line by way of Shona was not chiefly one of border fighting; it was quieter than that, a habit of accounting for everything, of speaking exactly, and of not mistaking noise for danger. Shona lived until 1682, and in her household those habits were called, with some affection, the chandler's way. The Faulkners' archivists in the Slayerverse still consult the sheepskin day-book when they want to know what things cost in the Lancashire of the 1650s, and they cite the man who kept it, Ian Thorne of Bellingham, as an ancestor of the House of Thorne who never carried a spear and did as much as any who did.