Neil Thorne

Member of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

Neil Thorne was born in 1477 at Haltwhistle in Northumberland, in the country of the border reivers, and he carried the marks of that country for the whole of his long life: a habit of sleeping with one ear open, a dislike of strangers on the road, and a quiet respect for the price of a good horse. The House of Thorne were border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, cattle-lifters and hill-hunters who had lived by their wits between two kingdoms for longer than anyone could count, and Haltwhistle sat on the Tyne with the Roman Wall running along the ridge above it and the Scottish frontier a day's hard ride to the north. It was a town of pele towers and bastle houses, stone buildings with the byre below and the family above, built so that a household could pull its cattle in at night and its ladder up behind them. Neil was raised in one of these, and the smell of it, wet stone and smoke and animals, stayed with him. His boyhood fell in the years just after the Wars of the Roses, when the Percy earls kept the north and the Crown kept very little of it. The border was a place where law was a matter of who arrived first, and a Thorne child learned early to tell a raid from a rumour and a friend from a man who had not yet asked for anything. The family were said, among their neighbours, to have a second trade beyond the one they admitted to, and the old people spoke of it only in the lowered voice reserved for such matters. It was hunting of a kind that was not for deer. Neil was not the one chosen for it. He was a quiet boy with clever hands, and the family, with the practicality of people who had lost too many sons to the hill, decided that one of them should have a trade that could be practised indoors. He was set to wool. The wool-comber's craft was a demanding one: the raw fleece was picked and oiled, then drawn through heated iron combs to separate the long fibres from the short, and the long fibres, the worsted, were laid straight for spinning. It was hot, greasy, monotonous work, done at a comber's post in a workshop that stank of sheep oil, and it required both strength and a fine touch. A good comber could turn a fleece into a sliver as even as a rope of silk. Neil was good at it. He left Haltwhistle in his early twenties, apparently with his family's blessing and a small purse, and made his way south over the Pennines to the wool country of Lancashire, where the abbeys held the pastures, the fulling mills stood on the streams, and a competent comber was always wanted. Lancashire in the first decades of the sixteenth century was a country of wool farms, abbey lands and stone-walled moors. The great houses of Whalley and Sawley and Furness owned the grazing and bought the fleeces, the monks were the largest landlords in the county, and the whole life of a village turned around the abbey's calendar of feasts and rents. Neil found work with a clothier who put out fleece to a dozen households, and he lodged above the shop and ate what the clothier's wife put on the table: oat bread, pease pottage, mutton on Sundays, herring on the fasting days. He learned to speak with the flat vowels of the place, though in his old age the Northumbrian burr came back, and his neighbours said they could tell what kind of weather was in his head by how he said the word water. He was thirty-six when the Flodden campaign came, in 1513, and the levy took men from every northern parish. Neil did not go to the field. The Thornes had a long memory of what the Scots did to the border and what the English did in return, and the story in the family was that he considered the whole business a folly gotten up by kings. He watched the neighbours' sons march out under the parish banner and he watched some of them fail to come back. He never spoke of it directly. He kept his combs oiled and his accounts straight, and in the years after the battle, when the north was short of men, he took on apprentices and became a person of some standing in the trade. His only child, Meg Thorne, was born in 1512, in the year before Flodden, and she was the centre of his life. Neil said very little about her mother in later years, and the record does not name her. It was Neil who raised the girl, in the rooms above the workshop, and it was Neil who taught her to sit quietly through the long evenings while the combs cooled. He was not a demonstrative man. He showed his affection by making things: a small stool of ash wood, a set of miniature combs for her to play with, a bow sized for a child, which he cut himself from a length of hazel and which he never explained. Meg turned out to have the family's other gift. She was called, in the manner of the Thorne line, while still young, and the House of Thorne, learning of it, drew her back to the hunter's life that her father had carefully stepped away from. Neil accepted it with a shrug that his neighbours mistook for indifference. The 1530s tested him. The dissolution of the monasteries began in 1536, and the northern risings that followed, the Pilgrimage of Grace, put the whole of Lancashire in turmoil. The abbeys were the source of the county's employment and its charity, and their suppression left the villages angry and frightened. Whalley's abbot was hanged in 1537. Neil, at sixty, was too old to march and too experienced to be surprised, and he sheltered two of his apprentices at his house until the trouble had passed. In 1537, in the middle of all this, Meg married Maurice Faulkner, a match that brought the House of Thorne into the orbit of the Faulkners of the Red Ledger. Neil gave her away himself, in his good coat, and it was observed that the groom was noticeably more nervous than the father of the bride. The marriage was short. Meg died in 1542, aged thirty, and the old man buried his daughter with his own hands, as the border custom demanded. He lived on for another sixteen years, growing quieter and more upright, working at the comb until his eyes failed and then sitting in the doorway of the workshop and telling the apprentices which fleece was which by the feel of it. He was known in the village as the Northumbrian, and children were sent to him with questions about the road north. He never told them that he had been born into a house of hunters. Some of them worked it out. Neil Thorne died in 1558 of the plague, at the age of eighty-one, in a year when a fever swept through the northern counties and killed more of the old than the young. He was buried in the churchyard, in a plot the clothier's family had given him. His tools were sold, and the small hazel bow was found in the chest under the bed, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. Among the Thornes he is remembered as the man who chose the comb and stayed alive to be old. In the Slayerverse he is one of the minor names, mentioned in the ledgers of the Faulkners only as the father of Meg, and that is how he would have preferred it.