Norman Faulkner

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

Most of what the Faulkner house knew about its own land, it learned from Norman Faulkner. He was born in 1572 at Preston in Lancashire, trained as a surveyor, and spent forty years walking boundaries, measuring fields and drawing maps of the parishes between the Ribble and the Lune. He was not a vampire slayer, though his brother was one, and the Red Ledger's keepers came to rely on his plans, in the way that a general relies on a good map, for finding the places in which the Lancastrian hunters could and could not go. He was the younger son of Sampson Faulkner, a drover born in 1539, and Dionisia Tempest, a miller's daughter born in 1542. The family kept its home at Garstang, but Dionisia went down to her own people at Preston for the birth, and the Tempest mill house there, with the cattle trade from the north passing through the larger town, became his second home and later his headquarters. Preston then was a busy, slightly self-important borough on the north bank of the Ribble, with a market place, a parish church of St John, a grammar school and a handsome guild hall. It was one of the few places in Lancashire where the old customs of the medieval merchant guild had survived the Reformation. Every twenty years, in a great festival that the whole county attended, the burgesses of Preston held their Guild Merchant, with processions, pageants, feasts and the renewal of the town's rolls. The Guild of 1582 was the first that the ten-year-old Norman saw, and he remembered the banners and the ranks of tradesmen in their liveries for the rest of his life. His elder brother, Toby Faulkner, born in 1568, was four years ahead of him and would become a saddler. Norman idolised him in the way of a younger boy, but the two were unalike. Toby was restless and physical, Norman contemplative, inclined to measure things, to count paces along the street and to note the height of a tower by the length of its shadow. In their father's absences the two were looked after by a series of aunts, and it was a great-uncle on the Tempest side who first put a pair of dividers into Norman's hands, and who taught him that a straight line was the most honest thing in the world. He was sent to Preston grammar school, where he learned enough Latin to satisfy the master and rather more arithmetic than he was supposed to, and at sixteen he was apprenticed to a land surveyor in the town. The trade was new. English landowners had begun to demand proper plans of their estates, a habit that spread quickly after the dissolution of the monasteries had thrown so much land on the market, and a whole generation of practical men had taught themselves to draw. Norman learned the use of the plane table and the theodolite's simpler ancestors, the cross-staff and the circumferentor, and he learned to measure with rods and cords of knotted hemp, keeping a tally on a slate. He walked the bounds of manors with chainmen and boys, noted every stile and hedge, every ditch and the corners of every field, and afterwards spent the winter evenings inking the results in a fair hand on parchment, colouring the meadows green and the ploughlands brown and the water blue. In 1588, the year of the Armada, he was sixteen and newly bound. The beacons that were lit along the coast and on the fell tops made an impression on a boy who spent his days considering the geography of Lancashire: he understood at once that the beacon chain worked because each fire could be seen from the next, and he spent much of the summer with his master tracing the lines of sight across the country. He later said that this was the moment he understood what a map was really for, which was not to show where things were but to show who could see whom. The family was shaken by his brother's calling that autumn, though Norman did not learn the whole truth for some years. Toby came home strained, took to working late, and was often absent. Norman, in the next room, heard the sounds of a man laying out tools in the dark. It was Toby himself who eventually told him, at their father's funeral in 1593. Sampson Faulkner had died that year, aged fifty-four, on the road to Yorkshire, and after the burial the brothers sat up in the mill house of their mother's family and Toby laid the ledger on the table. Norman read it without a word. Then he asked whether the places where the vampires had been taken were marked on a plan, and when Toby said they were not, Norman said that they should be. That was the beginning of the great map of the Red Ledger. Over thirty years Norman drew, and redrew, a plan of the country between the Ribble, the Wyre and the Lune, on which the hunts of the Faulkner slayers were marked with small red points. The map showed which roads were haunted and which had been cleared, where the old abbey lands had sheltered the creatures and where the enclosed fields ran in lines that protected the villages. It became a working tool for every Faulkner hunter of the next generation, and the copy that Toby carried on his saddler's rounds was worn to threads. The Red Ledger's later editors described the plan as the map on which the Lancastrian tally was first made visible. Norman himself was a person of quiet, dry habits, tall and stooped, with ink on his cuffs. He walked, everywhere, with a staff notched in feet and inches, and he was known in the market towns for his exactness. He surveyed the estates of gentry families, settled boundary disputes between parishes, and gave evidence in two land cases before the county magistrates, in one of which his plan of a disputed moor settled a quarrel that had run for sixty years. He was a plain-dealing, unromantic man who trusted figures more than people, and yet he was unusually kind to boys who wanted to learn his trade, of whom he trained four. The ledger does not give a wife, and he had no children. He lived in a house on Church Street with a housekeeper, and his drawing table stood in the front window to catch the light. His mother Dionisia lived to see him established, dying in 1605 at sixty-three, and Norman surveyed and marked her grave himself. The Guild of 1602 he attended as a burgess, and the festival of 1622 saw him, at fifty, in the ranks of the town's professional men. In the years between he lived through what the records call the plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, when sickness ran through the Lancashire towns and the frost held the Ribble for weeks. He kept working through the cold, sometimes on frozen fields, and it was during one of those long winters that he began to develop the cough that would eventually kill him. He had no direct concern with the Proctors, but he was fascinated by the problem of the Guest. The Towton battlefield was in Yorkshire, and he had, over the years, collected every account of it he could find and drawn the ground from what the chroniclers said. His plan of the field, made in the last decade of his life, put the Faulkner and Proctor lines on the same page, and in a note he observed that at Towton in 1461 the two forces had stood on ground that neither could truthfully claim to have controlled. It was a mild remark, and it caused a great deal of discussion in the Red Ledger's next edition. His brother Toby died in 1626, and Norman, then fifty-four, held the ledger for the last six years of his own life. He died in 1632, aged sixty, of a winter cough, at home in Preston, with his instruments still laid out on the table. His plans passed to the Faulkner house, and copies of them survived into the later Slayerverse, where he is remembered as the surveyor who drew the shape of the Red Ledger and made the hunts of Lancashire visible on a page.