Olive Crabtree

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

Olive Crabtree was born in 1482 at Haslingden in the Rossendale country of Lancashire, in a house with a brewhouse behind it, and she could have told you the state of the malt by the smell of the yard before she could tell you her letters. Haslingden stood high on the edge of the moors, a village of stone cottages and scattered farms whose people kept sheep on the tops and oats in the sheltered fields, and whose evenings were spent in the alehouse. The house of her childhood was one of the trade's steadier households, and the women of it did the brewing. In that part of England, and in that century, the brewster was a familiar figure: a woman who made ale for the parish, sold it at her door, and kept a small and precarious business afloat on the strength of a good reputation and a leaky copper. The brewing she learned was the old English method, unhopped and short-lived. Barley was steeped, spread on the floor of the malting room to sprout, and dried over a low fire; then it was ground and mashed in hot water, the sweet wort drawn off and boiled, cooled and set to work with a scoop of barm from the last batch. The result was a thick, sweet, cloudy ale that went off within a week, so that brewing had to be done constantly and sold quickly. In Olive's girlhood a new drink was beginning to appear in the southern towns, beer flavoured with hops, brought over by Flemish immigrants, but in the north the older ale held on. The parish ale-tasters, officers of the manor court, visited every brewster in turn to test the quality and the measure, and a dishonest or careless woman could be fined. Olive was never fined. She earned a reputation for fair measure and clean vessels, and her ale was preferred in three villages. She was a small, brisk, dark-haired young woman with strong forearms and a habit of tilting her head when she listened, and she was known for a dry and unhurried wit. She was not pious in any showy way, but she attended church, kept the fasts, and gave alms to the anchoress at Whalley. She took on the work of the brewhouse when her family's fortunes tightened and worked it as her own trade. By her early twenties she had a business of her own, a customer list, and a small reputation for knowing everything that was said in the parish, since people talk freely in front of the person who is pouring. It was through the brewhouse that she met Tristram Proctor. He came to buy ale for a gathering of the bowyers and fletchers of the district, a tall, quiet man with ink-stained fingers and the calm manner of someone accustomed to careful work, and he lingered at the door after the barrels were loaded. He was a fletcher, a maker of arrows, and he came from Padiham, only a day's walk away. Olive later told her daughters that she noticed two things at once: that he tested the feathers of a goose quill with his lip, and that he asked her, without any pretence, how much of what she knew she was willing to say. The question surprised her. The two were married in 1506, in the parish church at Haslingden, in a small ceremony attended by both families, and they set up house in a cottage with a workshop at the back and a brewhouse beside it. What she gradually discovered was the meaning of the White Ledger. Tristram belonged to the Proctor line, which kept the tally of vampires taken on the Yorkist side, and through his mother's blood he was tied to the whole history of the Wars of the Roses, of Towton and of the Guest, the vampire that had escaped in 1461 and that each of the two families blamed the other for losing. He told her all of this in the first winter of their marriage, plainly, after the customers had gone, and she listened with the same head-tilted attention that she gave to a drunk man's story. She did not disbelieve him. She had, she said, heard enough tales in the ale-room to know that the parish was not as ordinary as it looked. She asked only that he promise not to lie to her about where he was going. Her part in the work was the part of the household. She provisioned it: she baked bread and packed it in oilcloth, brewed the small ale that a hunter could carry without spoiling, mended coats and boots, sat up on the nights when he was out and kept the lamp in the window. She also listened. The brewhouse remained the best source of news in the parish, and Olive became, without ever being asked, an informant for the White Ledger, passing on every odd remark and every rumour of a neighbour who had grown pale or stopped coming to church. When a husband complained that his wife walked in her sleep, or a carter mentioned that his horses would not pass a certain farm, she noted it and told Tristram. More than one entry in the ledger began with a jug of Olive's ale. Their daughters were Olive Proctor, born in 1508, and Amice Proctor, born in 1511. She raised them in a house of quiet order and open doors, and she taught them to brew, to bake, to read a bill, and to listen. Neither became a slayer, and neither was pressed to. The year of Amice's birth was one of several bad summers, and the year after brought the Flodden campaign, in which men from every northern parish were drawn away. Olive kept the brewhouse working through it, selling to the levy and to the women left behind, and it was said that her ale was among the last things the men of Haslingden tasted before they marched north. In 1519 Tristram was called. It happened after a neighbour, buried a week earlier, returned to his own door at night and would not come indoors when invited, and Olive, who had been at the window, saw the whole of it. She said afterwards that it was a hard night, and that she never regretted a word she had said to him in the first winter of their marriage. He took the alias of the Steady Heron, and she gave him her small ale and her dry advice until 1525, when he was thrown from a horse and killed at thirty-eight. She was forty-three and a widow. She kept the business going for twenty years. She lived through the years of the dissolution of the monasteries and the northern risings that followed, when the abbeys that had bought her ale for two centuries were emptied, and she saw the countryside change around her without complaint. She watched her daughters marry and raise their own households, and she outlived the elder, Olive, by only a short time in her own reckoning, though the elder did not in fact die until 1558. She herself died in 1545, at sixty-three, of the sweating sickness, which had come back through the parish that summer in a sharp local outbreak and killed in a day. She was buried at Haslingden. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the brewster who married into the White Ledger and never once let the ale run out.