Oliver Faulkner

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

The parish clerk of Whalley who entered Oliver Faulkner's burial in 1569 wrote that the man had died of childbed, and then, evidently seeing the oddity, added nothing to explain it. The family explained it for him. Oliver, a fletcher of Rochdale, Lancashire, aged fifty-six, had sat up three nights in a neighbour's lying-in chamber keeping the fire, because his wife Ellen, who could not be spared from the ale and the hunting, had promised the household a hand and had sent him instead; the young mother had died of the fever and so, ten days later, did he. It was not how anyone had expected a fletcher to go, and the neighbours spoke of it for years. He was born in 1513 in Rochdale, a wool-and-flannel town on the River Roch under the Pennine edge, where the parish church of St Chad stood on its hill above the roofs and the streets ran down steeply to the water. His father was Fulk Rishton, a mason's apprentice, born in 1491, and his mother was Idonea Faulkner, born in the same year, a brewster of the Faulkner blood who had brought the old name into the marriage. By the custom that let a household choose, and that ran mostly to daughters' names, he took the surname Faulkner, while his younger sister Isabel Rishton, born in 1516, kept her father's. The arrangement puzzled the parish clerks for thirty years, and Oliver used to say that he had been given his mother's name for the same reason that he had been given her nose, since he could not help either. The house at Rochdale stood on Packer Street, in a row of timber-framed dwellings with jettied upper floors. Its trades were two: the mason's, which was carried on in the yard where Fulk cut and dressed stone for the parish church and the bridges, and the brewer's, which took over the back kitchen. Fulk had never taken his freedom in the masons' craft and stayed an apprentice in the lodge's rolls until the end of his life, a fate that made him quiet and slightly bitter. Oliver's early memories were of the ringing of the chisel and the smell of malt, two things that never quite met in the house. He was a boy who preferred neither, and his mother, seeing that his fingers were neat and his eye good, arranged for him to be apprenticed to a fletcher at Bury when he was fourteen. The apprenticeship took him through seven years of glue pots and goose feathers, in a shop where the master, a sour man, insisted that every shaft be turned true on a small lathe worked by a foot treadle. Oliver was a fast and careful learner. He learned to select ash for the war arrow and to season it in a loft for eighteen months, to cut the feather from the wing of a grey goose in a curve that would spin the arrow in flight, and to bind and glue it with silk and a hot pot. He also learned that a fletcher was a valued figure in every town, since every man in the parish was liable for archery practice, and a good arrow maker was as necessary as a smith. He left the master at twenty with his tools, his freedom and a reputation for straight work, and went home to Rochdale to set up on his own. He met Ellen Wentworth at Whalley, on a market day, when he took a load of arrow shafts to a customer at the abbey and she was there selling barrels. She was three years older than he was, a brewster of some standing already, with red hands and a strong laugh, and she looked at his sheaf of arrows and told him the fletching was crooked. It was not, and he said so, and they argued for an hour. They married in 1532, when he was nineteen and she was twenty-two, and moved to a house in Rochdale with a workshop at the back and a yard where she could set up her copper. It was a small household with a single door, and a visitor could buy an arrow and a jug of ale without leaving the threshold, which suited both trades and neither of them complained. Two sons followed, Adrian Faulkner in 1534 and Fulk Faulkner in 1536, the second named for the grandfather who had died the year before Adrian was born and left the yard, the bench and the debt to his widow Idonea. Oliver was a mild father who let the older boy run wild and the younger one follow him round the workshop. He taught Fulk to turn a shaft and cut a feather, and Fulk, who was not called to the family's other trade, was happy with this. He was less easy with Adrian, who from an early age had the alert, restless manner that the Faulkners recognised, and Oliver, who was a nervous man for all his skill, watched him with a certain anxiety. His own mother Idonea died in 1540, and it was in that year that he began to notice things about his wife. The change in Ellen came in 1541, and Oliver, who was the first to know, accepted it more calmly than anyone expected. She came home from a wake in the small hours with her paddle in her hand and her apron torn, and told him in a flat voice what had happened. He heard her out, got up, and went to the workshop, where he spent the rest of the night making a bundle of hawthorn stakes on the lathe, turned smooth and hardened in the fire. It was the only response he could think of. She called him a fool and hugged him, and from that day he made the stakes she used and mended the leather of her holster and kept her matchlock pistol oiled. He never joined a hunt and never asked to. He remained the man who made the things the hunters used, and Ellen said that this was the most useful part of the trade. The years that followed were years of change and of small dangers. The Reformation came to Rochdale in the 1540s and 1550s in the form of altered services, defaced images and a series of new prayer books, and Oliver, who was a conservative man and a regular attender, adjusted with a shrug. The demand for bows was declining, but there was still work: the crown continued to require practice at the butts, and a fletcher who could also make crossbow bolts and, in time, cases for arquebus balls stayed in employment. He grew stouter and greyer, wore an apron of stained leather, and became a fixture in the Rochdale market, where he was known as a man who would let a customer look over a whole sheaf and never press a sale. In 1569, the year of the rising of the northern earls, he sat up at the neighbour's bedside and took the fever that killed him. Oliver Faulkner died in 1569 of childbed, aged fifty-six, and was buried at the parish church beside his mother. Ellen outlived him by a single year. Their elder son Adrian, a slayer, lived until 1586, and Fulk, who worked his father's shop, died in 1573. The Red Ledger has no tally under Oliver's name, but its clerks recorded him in a marginal note as the fletcher who made the Warden's stakes, and for a generation afterwards the Faulkners of Lancashire were said to use only stakes turned to his pattern. In the Slayerverse he is the Faulkner who was never called, the husband of a hunter, and the craftsman who turned the wood that others used to save lives.