Jocosa Ferrand

Spouse of Humphrey Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Jocosa Ferrand was a weaver, born in 1533 at Bingley, in Yorkshire, and for the better part of seventy years she sat at a loom in the Aire valley and listened to the beat of it as other women listen to a clock. She married into the Proctor line in 1558, joining a slayer family who kept the White Ledger, and she outlived her husband by nearly thirty years. Her name is not among the tallies, but a good many things written there would have gone differently without her. Bingley lay on the Aire in a fold of wooded hills, a small market town with a handsome church above the river and, upstream and down, a scatter of cloth-making hamlets whose people lived by the wool. Jocosa's father kept a few sheep and a loom in the downstairs room of a stone house, and her mother carded and spun in the evenings. Her name was an old one, a little unusual even then, given to her after a grandmother, and she was teased about it as a child until she grew into it. By seven she was winding bobbins. By ten she was sitting on the bench beside the loom and throwing the shuttle while her father adjusted the warp. At fourteen she was weaving cloth of her own, a close grey worsted that sold at the Bradford market, and her father was heard to remark that he had never seen a girl keep so straight an edge. It was a world of rhythms, and she took her habits of mind from it. The loom teaches that nothing is done well in a hurry and that a single broken thread, if ignored, will ruin a whole length. She was a watchful, orderly person, impatient of slovenly work and slow to praise. She was also a reader, which was unusual in a weaver's daughter. A curate at Bingley, in the years when the church services changed and changed back, had taught a handful of the village girls their letters from a primer, and Jocosa had kept the habit long after the curate had moved on. She could read a bill, a lease, and, in time, a manor-court roll, and it was this last accomplishment that brought her a husband. Humphrey Proctor was a clerk of the manor court, a scrivener who rode between the courts of the district and sat at the long table taking down the pleas, the fines, the surrenders of copyhold and the small disputes about straying cattle and blocked ditches that made up the business of village law. He was a Proctor of the Jeremy branch, a family that had kept to Wetherby, Tadcaster and Knaresborough, and he carried the family's old gift for records. He was also a vampire slayer, though he spoke of it to nobody he did not trust. He came to Bingley in the year of the great court there to enrol a lease for her father's neighbour, and found the cloth he was supposed to be admiring less interesting than the woman who had made it. She corrected his reading of a clause in the lease. He asked her to marry him four months later. They were married in 1558. The wedding took place in a country still reeling from the religious upheaval of the previous decade, and the bride, for want of any better custom, went to church in a gown of her own weaving, in a pale blue that she had dyed herself. She moved with her loom to a tall narrow house in Tadcaster, near the bridge over the Wharfe, with her loom set up in the room above the tannery and where Humphrey kept his papers in a chest and his stakes under the bed. It took her a year to learn why he went out at night. It took her a further year to say aloud what she thought of it, which was that a man who was gone from the house at midnight with a bag of hawthorn ought at the least to have his accounts in order. She told him so over supper. He laughed until he coughed, and then, for the first time, he opened the chest and showed her the White Ledger. It was a large, flat book bound in pale calf, and it held an account of vampires taken by a Yorkist hand since the first night at St Albans in 1455. She read it through in three evenings. She read the account of the White Clerk at Towton and the passage about the Guest, who had slipped through the lines that day, and she read the long cold list of entries in which one family said that the other had let it go. She said that it was the most carefully kept record she had ever seen, and the least conclusive. Humphrey said that this was rather the point. She spent a winter making a fair copy of the index in her own neat hand, for his convenience, and from that time on she was the household's keeper of references. When he came home with a name and a date, it was Jocosa who found the earlier entry that bore on it. Her skill at the loom served the work in ways that nobody had planned. A weaver understands pattern: she sees a repeat, a drift, a fault that recurs every ten yards. Reading the records, she saw that a certain kind of death in the cloth villages of the Aire, small, quiet and always in the same month, came round in a ten-year rhythm, and she told her husband so. It was the first time anyone in the family had noticed the interval. He rode out to the places she listed and found, in two of them, exactly what she predicted. The ledger records a plain note in his hand: "found by the loom-wife's reckoning". It was her only acknowledgment, and she kept it pinned inside the lid of her work-box until she died. The marriage was childless, and they spoke of it little. The house in Tadcaster was full enough of other things, of the loom's clatter, the clerk's papers, and the stream of cousins, slayers and neighbours who came to the door. She wove for her living, and for the family: shirts and blankets, the grey coats the slayers wore on the road, and a good heavy cloth for covering the ledger case when it travelled. She taught two neighbour girls the trade in the back room, and one of them became a master weaver in her own right. Humphrey died in 1572, two years after the rising of the northern earls had passed through the district. The rising had been an anxious business for a manor clerk, who held the rolls of a lord whose loyalties were suspect, and Jocosa had spent the long winter of 1569 and 1570 hiding court records in the thatch and answering the doors of soldiers with a bland and stubborn face. Humphrey never quite recovered his health after it. She was thirty-nine when she buried him, and she did not marry again. She kept the loom going for thirty years, and the household's papers with it. In the summer of 1588, when the beacons were lit on the hills above the Wharfe against the Spanish fleet, she stood in the yard and counted the fires, one for each hill, and said that she hoped somebody in the south had kept an accurate account of the ships. Her own account was kept to the end. She died in 1601, in a hard winter, in her sixty-eighth year, at her loom or very near it, and was buried at Tadcaster. A fair copy of the ledger's index in her hand was still in use in the family a century and more afterwards. Jocosa Ferrand is remembered in the Proctor family as the weaver who read the pattern, a woman of Bingley who married into a slayer family and proved that a keen eye at a loom is as good as a keen eye on a hunt. In the Slayerverse she stands for the careful reader of the record, the one who sees the repeat in the cloth and the interval in the tally, and who is always, quietly, right.