Jocosa Faulkner

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

Clitheroe sits under its small, blunt limestone castle like a hen beneath a stone, and it was there, in 1535, that Jocosa Faulkner was born. The keep on its crag was already ancient, and the borough below it was a modest market town of a few hundred souls, set between the Ribble valley and the dark hump of Pendle Hill. The name Jocosa was an old one, a Latin girl's name that had drifted into English use through the Middle Ages, and she was called Joyce by most of the neighbours and Josie by her sister. Her father, Harry Faulkner, was a fletcher who had moved his shop about the county chasing trade, and her mother, Alice Bulcock, had been a household servant before she married him. Jocosa was the second daughter, three years younger than Olive Faulkner, and she grew up in that sister's shadow with no resentment and a good deal of affection. The house was a place of feathers and cloth, of fletching-benches and spinning-wheels, and the girl learned early that there was hardly a hand in Clitheroe that did not touch wool. The Ribble valley sent its fleeces to market by cart and pack-horse, and every cottage seemed to have a wheel turning in the corner. Jocosa was drawn to it. Where her elder sister took to the copper and the malt, she watched the women who worked at looms and understood something in the way the warp and weft came together. By the age of twelve she was spinning for a neighbour, and by sixteen she had persuaded her father to buy a second-hand loom, a narrow, heavy frame that took up half the loft and which she learned to work with the wooden shuttle flying under her palm. It was slow work at first, and her earliest cloth was uneven. But her hands learned quickly, and by twenty she was turning out a plain woollen web that sold at market without an apology. The years of her girlhood were years of anxious transition. The old faith was dismantled when she was a child and restored while she was a young woman, and the Ribble valley, with its tough independent gentry and its stubborn attachment to the old ways, lived through it with a wary shrug. Under Queen Mary she was taken, like all the parish girls, to the Latin Mass, and under Elizabeth she was made to sit and hear the English prayers. The changes bewildered her father, who spent a season muttering about the price of candles. Jocosa took them more calmly. A weaver, she said, was concerned with threads rather than with creeds, and a good cloth was a good cloth in either reign. Her mother died in 1559, and her sister in 1566, and these two losses shaped the rest of her life. After Alice Bulcock's death, Jocosa took over much of the running of the household, as Olive had, and she cared for her father Harry through his declining years. When Olive died on the fells in 1566, Jocosa was thirty-one and unmarried, and she made a decision that the neighbours found surprising: she would stay unmarried, and she would stay in the house. She had a small inheritance, a loom, a reputation for fine work, and a father who needed her. She took no husband, and the family ledger notes that she was content with the arrangement. In any case she had, in a way that few women of her time could claim, a settled independence. Her weaving grew more ambitious. She moved on from plain broadcloth to kerseys, to a fine, pale, twilled cloth that took dye well, and she began to sell to a merchant from Whalley who carried her goods across the moors to the larger markets. It was not lucrative, but it was steady. She paid her rent, bought her thread, and set a little aside every quarter in a stoneware jar under the floor. The work required a peculiar patience, the throw of the shuttle repeated a thousand times to make a single yard, and she took pleasure in the rhythm of it. Neighbours passing her shuttered window at night could often hear the loom knocking softly, long after the town had gone to bed. She was not a vampire slayer, and she took no part in the hunts, but she was very much a member of the household that kept the Red Ledger. In Clitheroe as in Bolton, a family of the craft relied on the women of the house to see what the men did not, and Jocosa's window on the market street was a good place to see. Strangers who came to town were noticed by her within the day. She could tell a wool buyer from a wanderer at a glance, and she noted who was too pale, who never took a meal, who came in only at dusk. She passed these observations to the cousins who came through on the hunt, and more than one entry in the ledger for the 1570s and 1580s begins with the words that a weaver of Clitheroe had remarked on a stranger. Her method was not scientific, but it was reliable. In 1569, when she was thirty-four, the rising of the northern earls set the whole region in an uproar. The rebel earls had raised the old banners in Durham and Yorkshire, and the news of soldiers on the roads reached Clitheroe within a week. The town, with its old castle and its old loyalties, was uneasy, and the authorities were nervous. Jocosa kept her loom going and her shutters closed and her father at home. She watched the riders go by on the far road, and the ledger records that she counted them for the family, noting the colours and the numbers, as though she were tallying cloth. It was the sort of stubborn, practical courage that never makes it into the ballads. The rising failed, and the reprisals that followed were harsh, and she lived through the aftermath as she lived through everything, at her loom. Her father Harry died in 1571, at the age of sixty, and after that she lived alone. She kept the house on Market Street, took in a girl to help with the spinning, and grew slowly frailer. From about 1583 she began to lose flesh, and by the next year she was weak and pale, unable to sit at the loom for more than an hour together. The physicians of the district called it a wasting illness, as they called everything they could not explain, and could do nothing. She died in 1586, at the age of fifty-one, and was buried beside her parents. Her last cloth, a length of undyed white twill, was found still on the loom and was used to line her coffin. In the wider memory of the Slayerverse she is the weaver of Clitheroe, a woman who never took up a stake but who watched the town as closely as any hunter, and whose eyes were as much part of the Red Ledger's craft as any blade.