John Thwaites

Spouse of Margery Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

The tanyards of Lancaster stood downwind of everything else, and it was among their pits and lime-vats that John Thwaites was born in 1524. His father worked hides for a living and so did his grandfather, and the boy grew up knowing the town chiefly by its smell: oak bark steeping in tan-liquor, wet lime, scraped flesh, and the sour tang of the dung and urine that curriers and tanners used to bate a skin until it turned supple. Lancaster in those years was a small county town of narrow lanes climbing from the River Lune toward the grey castle and the priory church. Its quay took in Irish cattle and sent out hides, and its market was busy on the days when the wool farms and the abbey granges of the surrounding country sent their carts in over the fells. John was born to the trade in the plainest sense. The Thwaites family had no house name and no ledger, and nothing marked them out except a good tannery lease and a reputation for honest weight. His childhood was crossed early by the great upheaval of the Tudor crown. When he was a boy of twelve the northern counties rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Lancashire men argued in every ale-house about whether the king could shut the monasteries that had fed and employed their families for centuries. The religious houses near Lancaster were dissolved over the next few years, and the abbey lands passed to new owners who wanted rents rather than prayers. Tanners felt the change directly, because the monks had been steady buyers of leather for service books, shoes and harness, and because the sale of church property flooded the district with speculators who were loud about their debts. John learned his trade through this uncertainty. He was apprenticed at about fourteen, first to his own father and then, for a year, to a master at Preston who taught him the finer work of dressing calfskin. He came home with a small, exact hand for measuring a hide and a habit of running his thumb along the grain before he spoke a price. He was sixteen when he married, which was young even for a tanner, and the match was the talk of his street. In 1540 he took as his wife Margery Faulkner, then twenty-one, the daughter of a cloth merchant who sold Lancashire wool and coarse broadcloth to buyers as far off as Chester and York. Margery kept the name of her own house by long custom, and the neighbours were not surprised, because the Faulkner women had done it for generations. The marriage appeared to be one of trade rather than romance, a tanner's yard joined to a merchant's warehouse, and the wedding feast was mostly a matter of cured mutton and thin ale. Yet it lasted. Margery was quick, watchful and unsentimental, and John was patient and dry, and they discovered that they could sit for an hour by the fire without either of them needing to speak. It was Margery who brought into the house the quiet oddities of her family: the locked press in the upper room, the ledger with a red cover that no one was to touch, and the odd hours at which relatives from the wool farms arrived with dirt on their boots and refused supper. John never wore the craft of his wife's people and never claimed it. He was not a vampire slayer, nor did he ever pretend to be one, and he was clear about that when Margery's cousins first spoke to him of the Red Ledger in his second year of marriage. What he offered them was something they had not thought to ask for. A tannery is a place of night watches, because a careless boy can spoil a pit of hides by letting the liquor go cold, and a tanner with several yards to mind keeps a lantern lit at odd hours. John made his yard a place where a hunter could shelter, wash, and leave a wet coat to dry without a question asked. He kept lime, which he had in quantity, and he learned what it did to a wound. He kept strong leather, and stitched for the Faulkners belts, scabbards and a stake-sheath for a cousin who complained that his own kept catching. Nobody wrote his name in the Red Ledger, but Margery said afterwards that half the entries in those years were made from a table in a tannery kitchen. Their children came in a steady run. Nesta Faulkner was born in 1543, and she took her mother's name without argument. Ralph Faulkner followed in 1551, and he took it too, which the Thwaites relations grumbled about and John did not. Hugh Thwaites arrived in 1557, the last of the three, and it was Hugh who carried his father's name and, in time, the tanyard. John let each child follow the line that seemed natural, and he cheerfully stood as the fixed point in the household while the Faulkner side of it came and went. Ralph would become a vampire slayer in his own generation, and the family recalled that his father cut his first hunting boots for him. But the boy was still small in the 1550s, and John's memory of him was chiefly of a child who liked to sit on a stretched hide and pretend it was a ship. The middle years of his life were hard on the whole town. The reign of Edward VI brought the English prayer book in 1549, and then the return of the old rites under Queen Mary in 1553, and a tanner who was a churchwarden found himself having to whitewash a wall, paint over the whitewash, and later whitewash it again. John was careful and cautious in these matters. He attended his parish church, kept his opinions to his own hearth, and lent money at fair terms to neighbours on either side of the quarrel. Coinage had been debased under the old king, and prices rose sharply, so that a hide which had cost a few shillings in his youth fetched double by the time he was thirty. He responded by buying his bark early, holding his stock and diversifying into fine calf-leather for gloves. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 and the settlement of religion was made once more, he was relieved chiefly because it meant the church would stop asking for new furnishings. What no one could plan for was sickness. The sweating sickness had visited English towns in violent seasons since the reign of the first Tudor, striking fast and with little mercy, and in the summer of 1560 it returned to the Lune valley. It killed men in the prime of their strength, often in a single day, after a night of chills and a drenching sweat. John Thwaites took ill on a warm evening after a day at the pits and was dead within a day. He was thirty-six. Margery closed the yard for a month, which shocked the other tanners, and then reopened it under her own eye with an old journeyman who had loved her husband. Hugh was three years old. Nesta was seventeen and Ralph nine, and it fell to Margery to tell them that their father had died with the smell of oak bark still on his hands. Margery lived on until 1591, three decades longer than John, and in that time she never remarried. The tannery passed in time to Hugh Thwaites, who died in 1603, and the family's ledger notes record that the yard remained a friendly door for Faulkner hunters as long as anyone kept the lease. In the Red Ledger itself John Thwaites is remembered in a single line in Margery's hand, which says only that he was a good husband and that he never asked the price of what he was given. It is a small entry, but it has been quoted often by later Faulkners as a model of how the family should regard those who marry into it without sharing the craft. In the wider story now called the Slayerverse, John stands as one of the quiet supporters whose lives made the great hunts possible: a Lancaster tanner, a man of lime and leather, who kept a lantern lit.