John Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Meek Wren. Craft: Witness Reading.

John Proctor was born in 1491 at Wetherby in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a coaching town on the Great North Road where the river Wharfe ran under a stone bridge and the inns were always full of travellers on their way to somewhere else. His father, Jeremy Proctor, was a shepherd on the fells who took the family flock up to the high pasture each spring and brought it down each autumn, and his mother, Agnes Barlow, was a spinner, whose wheel turned in the corner of the kitchen through the long evenings. The family were of the Proctor cadet branch, descended from Walter Proctor, founder of the White Ledger in 1455, but they were poor cousins, living in a small stone house at the edge of the town, and the great York branch of the family did not send them Christmas gifts. The Yorkshire of his boyhood was a country that lived by wool and by the roads. The market at Wetherby drew farmers from a dozen villages, the great York fairs drew merchants from across the Channel, and the guildhalls of the cathedral city, forty minutes' ride to the east, controlled prices, wages and the quality of every piece of cloth that went out through Hull. John grew up eating oatcake and broth, drinking small ale and, on feast days, eating pork and pease. He learned to read at the parish church from a curate who liked to be paid in eggs, and he learned to count from his father, who tallied the flock on a notched stick. The shepherd's tally, one notch for every ten sheep, was the first ledger he ever saw. His sister Heloise Proctor was born in 1492, a year after him, and the two children were close. She was quick-tongued, he was quiet, and the household, which had little else, was made lively by the disagreement. Neither of them was told, as children, of their mother's other work. Agnes Barlow was a vampire slayer, and she went by the alias The Wary Bell, from the small brass bell she tied to her wheel and rang, in an old spinner's habit, when a thing was wrong. She hunted at night, on foot, in the lanes and fields around Wetherby, and she left her spindle running so that anyone looking in through the window would see a woman at her work. It was a very ingenious deception, and it took John twenty-nine years to discover it. He was apprenticed as a fuller. The fuller's trade was one of the dirtiest and most necessary in the cloth country: woven cloth came from the loom greasy and loose, and it was the fuller who scoured it in a trough with fuller's earth and stale urine, trampled or beat it under water-driven hammers until the fibres felted, then stretched it on tenter frames in the open to dry. The tenter grounds outside every Yorkshire cloth town were a fixture of the landscape, long fields of cloth on wooden frames, hooked at the edges, whence comes the phrase about being on tenterhooks. John worked at a fulling mill on the Wharfe, standing in the sour water with his sleeves rolled, hauling and stretching wet cloth, and he became a sound and careful craftsman. He was slight and grey-eyed, with a mild manner and a soft voice, and his workmates thought him meek. It was a name he was later given in the ledger: The Meek Wren. The years of his manhood were years of upheaval. In 1513 the Flodden campaign took men from every northern parish, and he watched the levy leave Wetherby, and heard afterwards of the casualties. The Reformation came slowly to the north, first as a rumour of the king's quarrel with Rome, then as the visitation of the monasteries and the stripping of the shrines. In 1536 the northern risings that followed the dissolution of the monasteries swept Yorkshire in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and John, at forty-five, watched his neighbours divide, some marching under the banner of the Five Wounds, others staying at home. He kept his head down, worked, and paid his rents. He lived through the changes of religion under Henry, Edward and Mary, and he learned to attend whichever church was required, a skill that men of his trade acquired early. His calling came in 1520, when he was twenty-nine, and it came in the worst possible way, at the death of his mother. Agnes Barlow died that year, and John went to her house to sit with her body. In the room where she lay he found, to his surprise, that every candle had been burned to the socket, though the household had lit only two. The sleeper, as the ledger puts it, had been found with every candle in the room burned down, and the smell of scorched tallow hung in the air. He looked at the wheel, at the small brass bell on it, and at the old bloodless mark on her neck, and understood, in a moment, both what she had been and what she had died of. The calling took hold of him there. He kept vigil that night, and in the morning he took the bell. She had been his mentor, though she had never said so, and the training he had received was the training of a child in a household where certain things were not discussed. He took her instruction from the memories of a hundred small lessons: how to sit so that a person would talk, how to listen for a change in a story, how to tell the difference between someone who is afraid and someone who is lying. From this he built his craft, Witness Reading, which was a method of interviewing the people of a parish and reading, in their gaps and hesitations, the position of the creature that troubled them. He was a Detective by archetype, and he was better at it than his mother, because he had a fuller's patience and a fuller's habit of stretching a thing slowly until the flaw showed. His gear was a matchlock pistol, a supply of hawthorn stakes and a sealed ledger. The ledger was closed with a wax seal, and each entry in it was signed and dated. Over the next thirty-nine years he added a small but exact tally to the White Ledger, and his methods were much admired. He never married and had no children, and the ledger's hand passed, in the end, to the York branch. His sister Heloise kept the household, and his father Jeremy lived until 1534, dying at sixty-nine, on the hills he had walked all his life. John was at his bedside. In his last years the rivalry with the Faulkners was a source of good humour rather than heat. He exchanged entries with the Lancashire keepers and wrote, in a margin, that the Guest would come to whichever house was polite enough to ask. He died in 1559 of the sweating sickness, at the age of sixty-eight, in the first year of Elizabeth's reign. In the Slayerverse the Meek Wren is remembered as the fuller who read witnesses, and who kept a small brass bell on his desk until the end.