Idonea Faulkner

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

The ale that Idonea Faulkner brewed was remembered in Whalley longer than most of the sermons preached there. She was born in 1491 in that Ribble valley village, within hearing of the Cistercian abbey bell, the fourth child and only daughter of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor. Her father, the vampire slayer known as The Mended Rose, was Hugh Faulkner's son, raised on the Red Ledger and the longbow. Her mother, called The White Bride, was Walter Proctor's daughter, schooled in law and in the harder arts. Their marriage at York in January 1486 had joined two houses that had spent thirty years and more counting each other's failures, and the children of that marriage were divided between the two ledgers by a custom that made the household faintly comic to its neighbours. Tristram Proctor, born in 1487, and Robert Proctor, born in 1490, went by their mother's name; Edmund Faulkner, born in 1488, kept his father's. Idonea, who came after Robert, stayed a Faulkner, and the youngest of the brood, Rafe Proctor, born in 1494, was a Proctor again. Visitors learned early not to ask which side of the table anyone belonged to. Whalley in her childhood was a place of wet stone and wool. The valley below Pendle Hill grew barley on its better ground and kept sheep on the rest, and the abbey, the largest landlord for miles, ran granges, fishponds, a mill and a brewhouse of its own. The churchyard held three old carved crosses that nobody could explain, and the children played hide-and-seek among them. Oatcake baked on a bakestone was the daily bread, pottage of peas and leeks the daily dish, and meat came at Christmas and at the killing of the pig in November. It rained for weeks together. Idonea learned her letters from her mother at the kitchen table, and with them the arithmetic of the ledger: how a tally is set down, how an entry is witnessed, how to tell a true count from a flattering one. She learned, at about the age of twelve, that the calling was not going to come to her. Her brothers went out to the yard behind the barn with staves and stakes, and she was handed the keys to the cold cellar. She took them without complaint, and her mother noticed that she kept them more carefully than anyone else in the house. At fourteen she was bound to a widow who kept the best alehouse on the Whalley road, and there she learned the trade that would feed her for the rest of her life. Brewing was women's work in the north. Barley was steeped, spread on the malting floor until it sprouted, dried over a slow fire, ground, and mashed in hot liquor; the sweet wort was run off into a cooling vat and set working with barm from the last batch. Ale of that age was unhopped and turned sour within a week or so, which meant that a brewster worked in small batches and sold them quickly. The hopped beer the Flemings had brought into the southern towns was still a curiosity up the Ribble, and Whalley men called it a Dutchman's physic. A bush or an ale-stake over the door told the road that a brew was ready. The ale-conner came round to taste and to check the measures against the assize, and it was said that he stayed longer at the widow's door than the law required. When the widow's knees gave out, Idonea took over the copper and the counter both. She married in 1510, when she was nineteen, and she chose her own husband, which surprised nobody who knew her. Fulk Rishton was a mason's apprentice from Rochdale, sent over the moor with his master to mend a stretch of precinct wall for the abbey. He lodged near the alehouse and bought his ale by the quart, marking the score in chalk on the lintel. Idonea checked the score against her own tally stick, found it to the farthing, and said so. That was, by both their accounts, the beginning. They were married at Whalley church with her mother present and her father, Thomas, standing at the back with the air of a man watching the terms of a truce being drawn up in his own kitchen. Fulk brought a mason's tools and a good name; Idonea brought a copper, a cellar and a licence to sell. They set up house beside the brewhouse, and within a year Fulk had built a stone-lined cupboard into the chimney breast, where the Red Ledger's Whalley copies were kept out of the damp. Thomas Faulkner died in 1512, and the parish counted itself lucky that the funeral was quiet. In 1513 the levies went north. The Flodden campaign drew men from every northern parish, and Fulk marched with the Rochdale and Whalley companies in the late summer, carrying a bill and a bag of oatmeal, while Idonea kept the brewhouse going for the families left behind and ran a slate for wives whose men had gone with the army. Her first child, Oliver Faulkner, was that year a few months old. The news of the battle came in ragged pieces through September, and the alehouse became the place where it was sorted out, the names chalked on the wall as they were confirmed. Fulk walked in one evening in October, thinner and unwilling to talk. She poured him a quart and did not ask, and he said afterwards that it was the best she ever brewed. Oliver kept the Faulkner name, by the custom that let surnames follow the daughters of the house, and Fulk agreed with a shrug, saying that a man with a chisel had no great need of a surname. Her second child, Isabel Rishton, was born in 1516, named for the White Bride and given her father's name. The years that followed were crowded with Faulkner and Proctor business, most of it conducted over her counter. Rafe, her youngest brother, came into his own calling in 1517 and began to bring odd questions to the alehouse, since a brewster hears what a hunter needs to know: which farms had lost stock, who was drinking after dark and eating nothing. Idonea listened, sorted rumour from report with the exactness her mother had taught her, and passed it on by the safest means, which was in the bottom of a firkin delivered to the right door. She never handled a stake and never claimed a place in the ledger, but the brothers understood that the Whalley cellar was a working part of the family's machinery. Her mother Isabel died in 1518, and Idonea nursed her through the last winter, hearing at the bedside a good deal of what a White Bride had kept to herself. The middle years were steady. She brewed twice weekly, trained two servant girls, and appeared before the manor court only twice, once for a short measure that turned out to be a cooper's fault and once for a quarrel with a neighbour over a ditch. Fulk took on work across the valley, at Clitheroe and Slaidburn, and was often away for weeks. Both children learned to read the tally stick before they could write, and neither was called; the family regarded that as a sort of mercy and never said so aloud. Then in 1535 Fulk was taken by a fever that ran through the parish after a wet spring, and he died aged forty-four. Idonea had him buried in the churchyard among the old crosses and went back to the copper the day after, on the ground that the ale would not wait. Oliver, twenty-two, took over the buying of barley. She was a widow, and the abbey she had supplied for a quarter of a century was about to come down. The dissolution reached Whalley in 1537, and the northern risings that followed it swept up the valley in the months before. The abbot was taken and hanged at Lancaster, the brewhouse that had rivalled hers was stripped, and for a season her customers were monks turned out and rebels on their way to muster, each side wanting credit. She fed both and told neither anything. She was fifty at the outside of it, broad in the shoulder from years of lifting mash, her hair gone the colour of pale malt, and remembered by the parish as tart, exact and fair. When the sweating sickness, which had not touched the Ribble valley in twelve years, came back in the late summer of 1540, she nursed her neighbours through the first house of it and then took it herself. She died within three days, aged forty-nine, and was buried beside Fulk. Oliver Faulkner and Isabel Rishton lived on to see the Elizabethan settlement begin. The Red Ledger records her only as a name in a margin, with a note that the Whalley cellar was kept safe and its accounts true. The family remembers something larger. In a house full of people who kept score of the dead, Idonea kept the score of the living, and got it right. In the Slayerverse she stands as the proof that a household holds together by the ones who never went hunting.