The loom in the upper room of a Bolton house was the first thing Margery Thwaites remembered and, in the end, the thing she left most of. She was born in 1585 in Bolton, Lancashire, a market town in the hills where the Croal ran down through the town and where nearly every household in the surrounding villages kept a hand-loom in a chamber, a garden of teasels, and a tally of yarn owed and yarn delivered. She belonged to the House of Faulkner, the Lancastrian family who kept the Red Ledger, and she descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. But her own household was a tavern, and the first sounds she knew were the shouts of carters and drovers, not the rhythm of the shuttle.
Her father, Hugh Thwaites, born in 1557, kept a tavern on the road that climbed out of town toward the moors. It was a low, smoke-blackened building with a settle by the fire and a yard for packhorses, and it drew the men who moved goods across the Pennines: chapmen carrying cloth, drovers with black cattle, and journeymen looking for work. Hugh was a big, bald, good-humoured man with a reputation for never forgetting a face, which served a tavern keeper well, since faces and debts were the same coin. Her mother, Martha Greenhalgh, born in 1562, was a herbalist, and while Hugh drew ale in the front, Martha worked in the back, drying bundles of feverfew, comfrey and horehound from the rafters and mixing salves, cough syrups and poultices for neighbours who could not afford a physician. A younger sister, Avice Thwaites, arrived in 1586, and the two girls grew up in a house that smelled equally of hops and of crushed herbs.
The world outside was busy. Lancashire in the 1590s was cotton only in name; the real trade was in fustian, a cloth with linen warp and cotton weft, along with linens and woollen kerseys, and the hand-loom villages sent their pieces to Bolton's market to be measured and stamped. Margery learned to card, to spin and, by her early teens, to weave. Most weavers worked at home, buying yarn on credit from a putter-out and returning the finished cloth for wages, and it was an existence of tight margins and long hours, lit by rushlight in winter. She was quick and precise, with a good eye for evenness of thread, and by her late teens she was earning enough to buy her own shuttle and, eventually, a second-hand loom of her own. Her mother let her use a corner of the herb room.
The tavern kept her in touch with the family's other work. The Faulkners of the county used inns such as her father's as places of exchange, where news of odd deaths or unexplained absences arrived at the bar from farms in the hills. Hugh was not a slayer and did not hunt, but he was the sort of man who listened, and Margery's cousins on the Red Ledger side, the men and women who went out at night, sometimes sat in the corner of the tavern to compare notes over a small ale. Margery watched them the way she watched a warp, noting where the tension lay. She herself never took a calling, and she said plainly, later, that she preferred cloth to steel. But she understood more than most weavers of what the ledger was for.
In 1603 her father died, and the tavern passed to a cousin of the family, which left the sisters to make their own way. Margery moved into a small house near the fulling mill with her loom and her mother. Two years later, in 1605, at the age of twenty, she married Edward Stansfield, a smith from Pendle, near Burnley, a year younger than she was. He had come to Bolton to work at a forge that shod the packhorses on the moor road and had begun to call at the tavern's back door with an excuse involving a hinge. The Pendle country had a wild reputation, and the courts would later make it notorious, but Edward was mild and level in temper. Margery wrote, in the plain hand she had learned from her mother's receipts, that he was the only man she had met who could stay silent in company without making anyone uneasy.
The couple settled in a cottage with a forge shed beside it, and children followed. Mary Faulkner was born in 1608 and Abraham Faulkner in 1611, and by the custom of the Faulkner line, which allowed the surname to pass through the mother's side, both took the family name rather than their father's. Margery raised them among the noise of the hammer and the beat of the loom, and both grew up with a distinctive steadiness. Each of them was called to slay vampires in due course, and neither would have gone out into the dark without the tuition of a mother who taught them to watch, to count and to write things down. She herself would not have described it as training. She called it seeing to the children.
Their family was touched, as every family in the county was, by the events of 1612, when the Pendle trials sent a dozen local people to Lancaster Castle, and the neighbours of Edward's birthplace became the subject of gossip across the county. Margery listened with a face that gave nothing away. The Faulkners knew better than most what real darkness looked like, and they did not confuse it with old widows and cunning-women; she said as much to Martha, in the herb room, and they left the matter there. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns pressed harder. In 1625 the pestilence reached the Lancashire hills, and Edward died of the plague that year, aged thirty-nine. Margery was left a widow at forty, with two children in their teens and a forge she could not work. She sold his tools to a journeyman, kept the cottage and went back to full-time weaving, taking in yarn from the putters-out and training two village girls at a second loom.
She was a widow for twenty-six years, and she did not marry again. Her mother Martha died in 1616, before the widowhood, and Margery kept her recipes. Her sister Avice, who had become a herbalist in Blackburn, remained a close companion, and the two of them exchanged letters and bundles of cloth and dried herbs across the moor road. Margery's own loom became a small local institution, known for a herringbone twill so even that a draper in Manchester once returned a length because he suspected it was machine-made, when no such machine existed. She watched from a distance as Mary and Abraham entered the Red Ledger's business, and when Mary rode to a hunt in the Rossendale hills, Margery stayed up with a lamp in the window and a length of cloth on the beam, and did not sleep until she heard the horse.
The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, came to Bolton in the 1640s. The town was a Puritan stronghold for Parliament and was stormed by Prince Rupert's forces in May of 1644, a bloody assault that left many townspeople dead, and Margery, then fifty-nine, saw the aftermath from her doorstep. Her family, quiet in their allegiances, hid a wounded man in the loft for a week and asked him nothing. Peace, when it came, left the cloth trade shaken but alive. In her last years a wasting illness took the flesh from her hands, and she wove less, then not at all, and she died in 1651, aged sixty-six, with the loom still strung. Mary and Abraham buried her at Bolton, and her granddaughters and their descendants kept one of her twills as a keepsake. In the tradition of the Slayerverse she is remembered as the weaver-mother of two slayers, and the Red Ledger's margin holds a single line in her honour: she kept the thread.
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