Maurice Faulkner

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

Clitheroe in 1518 was a small grey town huddled under a Norman keep, with a limestone knoll for a castle, a market street that ran downhill toward the Ribble valley and a smell, on wet days, of peat smoke and river mud. In a mill on the edge of it, that year, Maurice Faulkner was born, a miller's son and the third child of a household that was already large and already unusual. His father was Edmund Faulkner, the elder son of the Tudor marriage of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, raised a Faulkner on the Lancashire lands and known among hunters as The Flodden Archer. His mother was Grace Pickering, a weaver, who had married into the mill and brought the sound of a loom into a house that already rang with the grinding of stones. His brother Harry Faulkner had been born in 1511, and his sister Margery Faulkner followed him in 1519. The mill was the axis of the family's life. Water was drawn from a leat cut from the river, and the wheel turned all through the working year except in hard frost and drought, when the miller sat by the fire and mended sacks. Farmers from the hills came with oats and barley on packhorses and left with meal, each paying the toll of a portion of the grain. Edmund, a broad, unhurried man who had drawn a bow in the north in his youth, ran the mill with authority, and the boys grew up shouldering sacks before they could shave. Yet the household had another life. Edmund's absences, at odd seasons and often at night, were never remarked on by the children, who knew only that their father went out with a longbow and came back late, and that when he did, their mother had a pot warm and asked nothing. Grace died in 1524, when Maurice was six. It was a common loss in that country and that century, where childbed, fevers and the sweating sickness took women in their thirties, and the household closed round the gap as it could. Harry, then thirteen, took over much of the mothering, and a neighbouring weaver's widow kept the girl. Maurice remembered his mother chiefly by the warp on the loom, left unfinished in a corner for years, and by a habit he adopted without deciding to: whenever he came into a room he looked first to see who was sitting by the fire. It shaped his character. He grew into a watchful, mild-mannered boy, more comfortable among the animals in the mill yard than among people, and at the grammar school at Clitheroe, where he learned Latin and his letters, he was chiefly remembered for writing out the figures neatly. He did not become a slayer. Nobody in the Faulkner papers ever writes of a calling in his case, and it seems to have been a plain fact of his nature that he was not made for the work. The lore is honest about this: not everyone in the house of the Red Ledger held a stake. Some held the mill. Maurice took the mill on, working beside his father from his teens and inheriting the running of it as Edmund's hunting drew him further afield. The years of his young manhood were the years of the Reformation in the north, and Clitheroe felt each turn of it: the Henrician break with Rome, the dissolution of the monastic houses whose grain had ground at the Faulkner wheel, the rising of the autumn of 1536, which drew men from the hill farms to gather on the moors in their thousands. Maurice, eighteen, stood in the mill yard as they went by in ragged files, banners bearing the five wounds of Christ, and his brother Harry, older and more hot-headed, went with them as far as Whalley and came home a fortnight later, silent. In 1537, at nineteen, Maurice married Meg Thorne, who was twenty-five, and here the family history takes a warmer and stranger turn. Meg, born in 1512, was a dairymaid, a border woman of the House of Thorne, one of the Northumbrian reiving families who had drifted south, and she was a vampire slayer of some reputation in the parishes around Clitheroe. She came to the mill to work in the dairy attached to it and stayed because Maurice, who had never in his life looked at a woman for longer than politeness required, looked at her for the length of a Sunday sermon. The courtship was silent on both sides. She was tall, tanned and ironical; he was slight, sandy and gentle. His father Edmund approved, on the grounds that a Thorne daughter would be a better shot than most sons. They were married in the parish church in 1537, with a feast of oatcake, mutton and the mill's own ale, and Meg's Thorne cousins rode down from the border to attend, taking up an entire side of the church and keeping their hands near their belts. It was a marriage that suited them because each asked so little of the other. Meg hunted at night and milked at dawn; Maurice kept the mill by day and the house by evening, and waited up with a lantern. He learned, without ever being told, what her absences meant, and what his father's had, and to keep the door unbarred and the fire high. The family called him, half in affection and half in jest, the Miller of the Lamp. Their sons came quickly: Sampson Faulkner in 1539, Humphrey Faulkner in 1541. Both were sturdy, loud boys who spent their infancy underfoot in the meal-loft and neither, in due course, showed any sign of a calling. Meg cut the boys' first stakes as toys. The house on the river was full of sound: the mill, the children, the dairy, the loom in the corner that Maurice's sister Margery had inherited from their mother and finally begun to use. The blow came in 1541 and 1542 together. Edmund Faulkner died in 1541, at fifty-three, and Maurice became master of the mill in his own right, with the accounts, the tolls and the lease all his. A year later, in 1542, Meg Thorne died, aged thirty, in the course of a hunt, and Maurice was left with a mill, two small sons and an empty side of the bed. He did not marry again. The Faulkner papers say only that he closed the dairy for a year, kept a lamp burning in the window for a season after the funeral, and went on grinding corn. His sister Margery, unmarried, moved into the mill to keep the household, and his brother Harry, older and softened by his own losses, came by on Sundays with a hare. In the years that followed Maurice raised his sons carefully. He taught Sampson to keep the mill's tally and Humphrey to read the weather, and both learned the family's trade without learning its ledger. He was known in Clitheroe as a fair miller, one who did not weigh the toll heavy, and who gave grain to the poor in the bad harvests of the late 1540s. The turns of the crown, the boy king's reforms, Mary's restoration and the early years of Elizabeth's reign, he met with an ability to bend without breaking that the town appreciated. He attended whatever service was lawful, and prayed, according to his sister, mostly in the mill. Maurice Faulkner died in 1566, aged forty-eight, from a fall from a horse, on the road to Whalley in wet weather, the mare slipping on stones on a slope near the ford. He was buried at Clitheroe beside the sister who would outlive him. His sons Sampson, who died in 1593, and Humphrey, who lived until 1607, carried on the mill for another generation. In the Slayerverse Maurice stands as the Faulkner who never took up a stake and who yet, for three decades, kept the light burning for two who did.