Olive Proctor

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

Olive Proctor was born in 1508 at Padiham, Lancashire, a mill-and-weaving town on the River Calder, where the hills close in and the wind off Pendle Hill comes down the streets with a smell of wet sheep. She was the elder daughter of Tristram Proctor, a fletcher, and his wife Olive Crabtree, a brewster, and she was named for her mother in the plain way of the district, so that for most of her childhood the household answered to two Olives and told them apart by calling one of them "the little" and later "the fishwife's Olive". She belonged to the Proctor line, the Yorkist White Ledger stock that descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, though her own family lived far west of the Yorkshire lands, in the Lancashire valleys where such a name was noticed and sometimes muttered over. The house of her infancy stood behind the chapel yard, one room below and a loft above, with a bench along the wall where her father sat cutting goose feathers into fletchings and gluing them to ash and birch shafts with a pot of hide glue kept warm on the hearth. Tristram Proctor was known to a narrow circle as The Steady Heron, a vampire slayer of the White Ledger who stood motionless for hours at the edge of a mere or a mill-race and then struck once. To the parish he was only the man who made good arrows and never lost his temper. Olive learned early that the two men were the same one, and that the second was a courtesy paid for the first. Her mother brewed ale in the back kitchen for the alehouse trade, hanging the ale-stake over the door when a batch was ready, and it was the brewing that paid for the rent while the arrows paid for the flour. Her father died in 1525, when Olive was seventeen and her sister Amice was fourteen. Amice had been born in Preston in 1511, after the family had spent some years in the market town on the Ribble, and the two girls had grown up between the two places, the cloth country and the river port. The death left the household with a single trade and a single pair of strong hands, and Olive's mother did what a brewster in that position generally did: she took the girls into the business. Olive was set to carry water, to scour the mash tuns and to mind the fire under the copper, but she disliked the heat and the sour steam, and it was her mother's cousin, a fish-carrier who came up the valley with baskets slung across a pony, who first took her along to the markets. She found that she liked the walking, the early hours and the argument of the stalls. Selling fish in inland Lancashire in the years after 1525 was a steadier trade than it sounds. The Church still enforced its meatless days, Fridays and Saturdays and the long weeks of Lent, and every hall, priory and alehouse wanted salt herring, dried cod, pike from the millponds, lampreys from the Ribble and salmon in season. Olive bought from the boats at Preston and the pond-keepers of the abbey lands, carried her baskets up the valley on her back and by pack-pony, and set up her board by the cross in Padiham on market day. She learned to gut a herring in three cuts, to judge a salmon by its gills, and to raise her voice against the tallow-chandlers on either side of her. She grew broad in the shoulder and rough in the hand, with a red weathered face, a low steady laugh, and a name in the market for weighing honestly and never selling a fish she would not eat herself. The trade also served the ledgers, as her family understood without saying so. A fishwife walked the roads at dawn, before the carters and after the watchmen, and she saw and heard what no priest or constable did. Olive noticed the empty cottage where the door was barred from outside, the shepherd who had stopped coming down from the hill, the widow who bought no fish on Fridays for a month and then bought a great deal. She was not a slayer, and there was no calling in her life, and she never held a stake or a bow with any intention of use. But she carried word, and in the White Ledger of her line the small notes that came from the market, in a hand that was not always her own, were entered against places and dates, and here and there the clerks marked a tally as taken on her information. The wider world pressed on Lancashire hard in these years. The monasteries were dissolved from 1536, and the abbey lands that had bought her fish for a century were suddenly the property of the Crown and then of purchasers who cared nothing for the tenants. The northern risings that followed, first the Lincolnshire rebellion and then the great host of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the autumn of that year, drew men out of every hamlet along the Ribble and the Calder, and at Whalley the Cistercian abbot was arrested and later hanged. Olive was twenty-eight and watched her neighbours go north with pitchforks and old bows. The rising was broken by the spring, promises were broken with it, and the ringleaders were executed. She saw fewer buyers for a year, because a household that had lost its men could not afford salmon, and she learned to sell cheaper, smaller and more often. She never married, and the reasons the family gave for it varied with the teller. Her aunts said she had been too proud and her cousins said she had been too busy, and one unkind entry in a neighbour's memory book put it down to the smell of fish. The likelier truth is that she had a household to keep. Her mother lived on until 1545, working the copper long after her hands stiffened, and Olive supported her through the last years, sharing the loft and paying the rent from the market takings. Amice, meanwhile, had gone into the midwife's trade as an apprentice, and the two sisters formed the kind of partnership that a widowed household relied on, one bringing in fish and the other bringing in the small silver and hens that grateful mothers paid. They quarrelled about the price of a candle and the state of the bed linen, but they never spoke to each other with any real anger. The Tudor years of religious change ran through her later life like weather. She had been christened into the old Church and married no one, but she heard the English Bible read aloud after 1538, saw the images stripped from the chapel, and lived through the short Protestant reign of Edward VI, whose new fish laws ran alongside a Prayer Book that many of her customers resented. When Mary came to the throne in 1553 the old rites returned, the rood was hauled back up in Padiham church, and Olive lit a candle for her father in the way she had done as a girl. She kept her opinions off the market board, and her known views were that fish was fish and a bad priest did not spoil a good herring. Her only recorded quarrel with an official was over a fine imposed on her for selling on a feast day, and she paid it in fish. Her health began to give out in the middle 1550s. The lifelong lifting of baskets had wrecked her back and knees, and she took to sitting rather than standing at her board, watched over by Amice or by a neighbour's boy. She died in 1558, aged fifty, and the record says of old age, the phrase that people of her class used for anyone who had outlasted their strength; in the sense of the time she was old, a woman who had worked for forty years at hard, cold, wet labour. She was buried in the chapel yard at Padiham near her father, and her sister Amice paid for the grave from the last of the money in the tin. The White Ledger records her in a single line as a Proctor of Padiham who carried word, and the family remembered her chiefly for the market stall and the honest scale. Olive Proctor left no children and no house, but she left something in the ledgers that the later Proctors valued: the model of a woman who served the White Ledger without ever taking up a weapon, using nothing but a sharp eye and a good reputation. Her nieces and cousins were taught to treat the market women of a town as the Proctors' quietest allies, and the habit lasted for generations of the Faulkner and Proctor rivalry, which was fought by tallies and gossip and never by blood. In the Slayerverse she stands as one of the plainest members of her line, a fishwife of Padiham who sold herring on fast days and, in doing so, kept half a county's secrets.