Norman Lister

Spouse of Susannah Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Norman Lister made barrels, and he crossed an ocean because his wife would not stay where she could not sit quiet in meeting. He was born in 1644 at Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a grey stone market town on a bend of the swift river Swale, under a Norman castle whose keep still rose above the roofs. The market place was the largest cobbled square in the county, and the whole town smelled of coal smoke, ale and wet wool. Richmond stood at the mouth of Swaledale, and the dale sent down its lead ore from the mines of Arkengarthdale and its knitted stockings from the cottages of Reeth, and both had to be packed and carried. His father, whose name the family papers do not give, was a cooper at the foot of Frenchgate, and Norman was the boy who swept the shavings and sorted the staves. Cooperage was a serious craft in a town like that. A cooper built things that had to hold, and he built them without a nail, from oak and ash staves cut, shaved and heated over an open fire until they bent into a bulging belly, then drawn together with hoops of iron or split hazel. Norman learned to raise a cask, to fit a head, to test a joint by filling it with hot water and watching for the weep, and to tell good oak from bad by the ring. He made ale barrels and butter firkins, herring kegs and lead-ore tubs, buckets and piggins and churns for the farms. By the time the great plague year of 1665 frightened the whole kingdom, he was twenty-one and had his freedom of the trade. Richmond suffered nothing worse than a fear of southern travellers, but he remembered the summer for the shortage of hoops and the scarcity of work when every carter would rather stay home. He was a broad, red-faced, easygoing man with a deep laugh and a pipe, and he was liked in the Richmond taverns without ever being much of a drinker. He was a man who thought that most disputes could be settled by leaving the room and coming back later. That easy temper met its match in 1671, when a Quaker weaver named Susannah Proctor came to Richmond from her family's home near Knaresborough to fetch a loom from a cousin and stopped at the cooper's yard to order a set of tubs for dyeing. She was twenty-one, tall, straight, and entirely unimpressed by him, and she spoke to him in the plain speech, calling him thou, which no one in Richmond had ever done. He asked her afterwards what the tubs were really for. Susannah said that they were for what she had said, and that if he wished to know the rest he could ask her again in a year. They were married in 1672 at the Friends' meeting, which meant no priest, no ring and no bells, only a room of quiet people and a couple who stood and spoke their promises to each other before witnesses. It was not a safe thing to do. The laws against Nonconformists had put Quakers in the Richmond gaol more than once in the 1660s, and Norman, who was not a Friend and did not want to be, had to decide whether he would follow his wife into a faith that cost its members fines and distraints of goods. He stayed with her, and said afterwards that he did not need a creed to know that the best man in Richmond was the one who kept his word. Their first son, Joseph Proctor Lister, was born in 1673, and the family took the mother's name as the middle name, the Proctor way of carrying the blood. Susannah was a Proctor of the Yorkist line that kept the White Ledger, and she was a slayer. Norman learned it in the second year of the marriage, when she came in after midnight with her shawl torn and a bruise on her jaw and told him, in the same tone she used for the price of wool, that a thing had come at her in the lane behind the Frenchgate tenter-field. He had watched her for the whole of a winter and had guessed at half of it. What he did then defined the marriage. He went to his yard, chose a length of seasoned ash, and made her a case for her stakes that would keep them dry, and a small lock for it, and then asked if she would let him carry something for her in the dark. She said, with what he described as the first look of warmth he had had from her since the tubs, that he could carry a lantern. The years afterwards were busy. Amos Proctor Lister, called Amos Proctor in the ledgers, was born in 1680, and grew into the sort of thoughtful, watchful boy who would become a slayer, and the family lived in a crowded house in Richmond with a loom in the front room and a cooperage behind. Susannah's Quaker conscience was in tension with her craft, since the Friends renounced violence, and she resolved it in her own way, using the stake against the dead rather than the living. Persecution of the Friends was growing worse in Yorkshire in the early 1680s, and there was talk of a new colony across the ocean, offered by a friend of the Society, William Penn, as a place where they might worship freely. In the early 1680s Susannah decided to go, and she told Norman that she would go with the children whether he came or not. He sold the yard, packed his tools and his hoops in a chest, and sailed with her, with Joseph, Amos and their household goods, from the port of Liverpool. Pennsylvania offered land, and it also offered a market for a good cooper. He built a house and a shop on the edge of the Delaware settlements, made flour barrels and tobacco hogsheads for the merchants of Philadelphia, cider casks for the Chester County farmers, and butter tubs for the Quaker matrons, and he did well. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 reached them as news, a season late, of a king exiled and a Protestant prince crowned, and it made Friends everywhere slightly more secure in the law. Their youngest son, Norman Proctor Lister, was born in 1689, the first of the family to be born in the colony. Both Amos and the younger Norman were slayers in time, while Joseph, the eldest, was not called and became a miller. Norman, the father, taught the boys to make barrels as well as they made stakes, saying that a man should be able to hold something together before he set about taking things apart. Susannah died in 1704, and Norman, who was sixty, mourned her quietly for a decade. He was a familiar figure in the Friends' meeting house though never a member, sitting on the back bench in his good coat, and he never missed a First Day. He died in 1714, aged seventy. The meeting's clerk, writing up several deaths on the same evening in a hurry, entered the cause as childbed, a plain slip of the pen for a man of his age, and the family never troubled to correct it, since it was well known that he had caught his last illness sitting up two nights carrying water and wood for a neighbour's lying-in, and had never got warm afterwards. He was buried in the Friends' ground beside his wife. In the Slayerverse he is remembered by the Proctors as the cooper who held a hunter's household together across an ocean, and the White Ledger's Pennsylvania pages note his craftsmanship as carefully as any tally.