Kit Proctor

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

Kit Proctor was the youngest of four brothers, and he spent most of his life being the one the others sent for when a job needed doing and nobody wanted to say so aloud. He was born in York in 1560, a year before his father, the fuller Kit Dewhurst, died, so that he was named for a man he never knew and carried the name Proctor from his mother's side. His mother was Joan Proctor, entered in the White Ledger as a York notary's wife who took the mantle after her husband died, and his brothers were Lawrence Proctor, born in 1554, Godfrey Proctor, born in 1557, and Blaise Proctor, born in 1558. Kit was the baby, and for the whole of his childhood he was treated as one, carried on shoulders, dressed in cast-off shirts and told to stay out from under the vats. The York of his boyhood was a city of guildhalls, wool markets and the tall minster close, where the bells rang out the hours and the council's beadles chased vagrants off the bridges. Kit did not care for it. He was a country boy in a town house, happiest on the commons beyond Bootham Bar where the cattle grazed and the larks went up, and by the time he was ten he was running errands for a farmer at Clifton, driving geese to market and learning to tell a ewe about to lamb from one that was merely fat. When his mother died in 1573 he was thirteen. Lawrence took the accounts, Godfrey went to the forge, and Kit was placed with the Clifton farmer as a servant in husbandry, a common arrangement for a boy with no father and nothing to inherit but his labour. Servants in husbandry were hired by the year at the Martinmas fair, paid in board and a small wage, and expected to do any work the farm needed: hedging, ditching, threshing, mucking out, sheep-shearing at midsummer, and the hay in July when the whole parish went into the meadows with scythes. Kit grew tall and rangy, with a plain, weathered, cheerful face and a dislike of idleness that he never lost. By sixteen he had saved a little, and he had also begun to notice a girl from the dairy at the fair, a Leeds woman named Rohese Stansfield, who was a year younger and could out-carry any man in the yard. They married in 1577, when Kit was seventeen and Rohese sixteen, which was young even by the standards of the time, and the parish had to be persuaded. They were wed at St Olave's, with Blaise and Godfrey standing up for Kit, and they took a tenancy on a small farm near Heworth with a hall, a barn, a cheese room and some twenty acres of pasture and arable. Rohese kept the dairy. Kit did everything else. Their neighbours thought them reckless, and for a while it looked as though they might be right, for the first winters were hungry and the rent was a hard reach. But the cheese sold well in York, and by the mid-1580s Kit had put together enough land and stock to call himself a yeoman, sit on the jury of the manor court, and wear a decent coat to church. Their first child, Agatha Proctor, was born in 1579, two years after the wedding, and their second, Guy Proctor, in 1583. Agatha grew up sturdy and bossy, running the dairy at twelve, and Guy grew up thoughtful and a little wary of cows. They were raised in a house where the dogs were let out at night, the shutters were barred with an iron bar and no one asked why the bar was iron. Kit had never been called, and he had no craft to speak of, but he had grown up among slayers, and he understood the country habits that kept a household safe: salt across the sills, a ring of hawthorn in the hedge, a bell on the gate. Whatever Godfrey needed, Kit could supply, and he supplied it: a place to sleep, a horse, a spare pair of hands. The summer of 1588, the Armada summer with its beacons lit along the coast, brought soldiers through the district and an unusual amount of money into the York market, and Kit sold a good deal of cheese to the trainbands. He also lent Godfrey his best cob for the coast road and spent two nights in the barn with a pitchfork while his brother worked at something he was not invited to watch. Rohese knew about it. She had no illusions on the subject, and when she found blood on the barn floor the next morning she scrubbed it up with sand and lye and made no comment. It was the way the women of that house handled such things, and no doubt of many houses. Life in Heworth was a matter of seasons and small crises. There was the dry summer of 1592, when the pasture burned brown and the cattle went thin, and the wet harvest of 1595, when the corn sprouted in the stook and the price of bread rose sharply. There was a fever that swept the parish in 1597. Through it all the couple worked and saved, and Kit's standing rose. He served as a churchwarden, as a constable for a year, and as a witness to many a neighbour's will, and it was said of him in the parish that he was the sort of man you could send with money and be sure of the change. His dealings with the Faulkners were entirely secondhand. He knew the great story, as every Proctor did: the two ledgers, the Guest at Towton, the blame passed from house to house. But he had never met a Lancashire hunter and did not expect to. When the subject came up he said only that the Lancashire lot would have to explain themselves in their own time, and that he had a herd to see to. It was not a bad summary of the family position. Rohese died in the winter of 1610 of a cough that took hold in November and did not leave, and she was forty-nine. Kit was fifty. He buried her at Heworth and went on working, though the neighbours noted that he had stopped whistling. In 1614 the plague came back to York, as it had come in 1604, and this time it reached the farm; Kit died of it that summer, aged fifty-four. Guy inherited the lease and the stock, and Agatha, by then married and settled elsewhere, came to the funeral. The Slayerverse does not list Kit Proctor as a hunter, and he would have been the first to say so. But the White Ledger carries his name among the households that held the door, and the family still tells the story of the year he was seventeen, married, and already a yeoman in everything but the title.