Ivo Faulkner

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

Ivo Faulkner farmed the same forty acres in the Calder country for most of his life, and it is a mark of how quietly he lived that the Red Ledger's account of him is written almost entirely in the language of weather, rents and harvests. Born in 1621 at Padiham in Lancashire, the youngest son of Nicholas Faulkner and Gunnora Hoyle, he became a yeoman, a husband, a father of two daughters and a steady supporter of the hunting house that he was born into, though he never took the stake himself. Padiham in his boyhood was a small cloth town on the Calder, its stone cottages crowding down the hill toward the river and its lanes loud with the clatter of hand-looms. The people made worsted and fustian, kept a few cows, and went to a church whose tower could be seen from three parishes. Pendle Hill lay to the north, blue on clear days, and most of the local families kept an ear cocked for what the hill might send down. Ivo's father, Nicholas Faulkner, born in 1583, was the man the Red Ledger calls the Pendle Watcher, a slayer who had made himself the family's eyes on the hill, and he died in 1631 when Ivo was ten. Ivo remembered him as a tall man who smelled of peat and tallow, who gave his children pieces of rock candy and made them promise not to open certain doors. His mother, Gunnora Hoyle, born in 1588, was a seamstress who kept the family together on her needle. He had three sisters, Millicent, born in 1612, Anne, born in 1615, and Gunnora, born in 1619, all of whom were fond of him and bossed him unmercifully. From them he learned that the safest place in a family of strong women was the middle of the yard with a task in his hands. He grew up quick with animals and slow with words, with big hands, a freckled face and reddish hair that gave the family nickname to his own children. He had a little schooling, taught by a curate in a room above the market, enough to sign his name and read a lease. At sixteen he married. In 1637 Ivo Faulkner and Jane Nowell, a Garstang shopkeeper's daughter four years older than himself, walked out of the church at Padiham, and the neighbours were charitable enough to say that the bride had married up in years if not in land. Jane was quick, dry and organised, and Ivo, who had been given a small holding on his father's will, found that she had made a farm out of it before the first harvest was in. They lived in a low farmhouse with a stone-flagged kitchen, a barn, a cowshed and a well in the yard. Their daughter Jane Faulkner was born in 1640 and Mercy Faulkner in 1641, and the household filled with the ordinary noise of small girls. A yeoman's year in that country followed the calendar of the fells. Lambing in the early spring, when he would go out at all hours with a lantern; peat cutting in May; hay in July, if the rain allowed; the long back-end of the year, with the sheep coming down from the moor and the oats coming in, and the winter spent mending walls and tools. He grew oats, barley and a little wheat, kept a few cattle, and sold butter and cheese at the market. Money was tight and paid mostly in kind. He was a careful farmer, not an ambitious one, and it was said that he could tell the weather by his knee. The family's other work touched him closely without ever fully claiming him. He knew what his father had been, and he knew what his cousins were, and he saw to it that the barn had a good bar on the door and that the hawthorn hedges round his fields were never cut short. When the Red Ledger's slayers needed a night's shelter, a fresh horse or a meal, they came to Ivo's kitchen, and he never asked for more than a nod in exchange. Once, in the winter of 1646, he helped carry a wounded cousin three miles across the snow, and he never spoke of it again. He kept the family accounts in his head, the tally of who owed what to whom, and the Faulkners considered him the most reliable man in the district. The civil wars came through his fields more than once. Troops were quartered in the parish in 1643 and 1644, and again in 1648; horses were taken, hay was requisitioned, and once a party of Parliamentary soldiers stripped the barn of oats and left a receipt written on the back of a hymn sheet. Ivo, who kept the receipt, framed it for a joke, and it hung in the kitchen for thirty years. He was neither Roundhead nor Cavalier, and told anyone who asked that he was on the side of the harvest. His wife Jane died in 1659 of a winter cough, at forty-two, and Ivo never remarried. He raised the girls on his own with the help of his sisters, and when the eldest, Jane Faulkner, married and moved to a neighbouring parish, and Mercy went into service and then into a household of her own, he kept the farm going with a hired hand and a dog. The great plague year, 1665, passed him by, with the parish shut off from the outside world and neighbours leaving food at the gate. He lived a little apart from then on, a big, silent widower in a farmhouse gone slightly untidy, who attended church on Sundays, joined in the singing with a rough bass, and could be found at the market on Thursdays, telling a story about a bull. He died in 1684, aged sixty-three, of the sweating sickness, as the local people called the violent fever that still came round in a wet summer, though the doctors said it was something else. It took him in four days. His daughters were with him, and Jane Faulkner, who lived until 1692, and Mercy Faulkner, who lived until 1693, both remembered him as a man who smelled of hay and said little and was never once unkind. The Red Ledger gives Ivo Faulkner no tally, and he would have been surprised to be listed at all. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kind of man on whom a hunting family depends: the farmer who feeds them, hides them, keeps his counsel and asks no reward. His farm passed through his daughters' line, in the family's usual way, and a hawthorn hedge that he planted along the lane is said still to be standing.