Parnel Proctor

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

Parnel Proctor was born in 1512 at Otley, a small market town on the River Wharfe in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and she died seventy years later at the other end of the great changes of the Tudor century, having spent almost all her life within a day's walk of the same water. She was the eldest of three daughters of Robert Proctor, the younger son of the Tudor marriage, who had taken his mother Isabel's name and the Yorkshire lands, and who was known to the hunters of his time as The Tadcaster Assessor. Her mother, Parnel Kershaw, whose name she bore, was a fishwife who sold pike and eels from the Wharfe on the market cross. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and she carried the White Ledger's name into the middle of the sixteenth century. Otley stood in a fold of the hills below the moors of Rombalds, in country where the stone was millstone grit and the winters were long, and the town belonged to the Archbishop of York, whose manor house stood near the church. It was a place of weavers and tanners, with a good ale trade, a Thursday market and a bridge over the river that flooded in most winters. The Proctor house stood on a lane near the market, with a brewing yard behind. Parnel's mother sold fish and her father worked for the archbishop's officers at Tadcaster, the county's tax town, where he assessed rents and dues from the surrounding villages, a genteel and unloved occupation that gave him his alias and a reason to ride the countryside at odd hours. Nobody thought it strange that he was often out after dark, since assessors were unpopular and worked in secret. The younger Parnel took to brewing early. The Proctors' neighbours, the widow of a maltster and her two sons, gave her odd jobs from the age of nine, carrying grain from the malting floor to the mash tun, and by fourteen she was skilled at judging the heat of the wort by dipping her elbow, as the older women did. Brewing in the Yorkshire of the 1520s was undergoing a change. The old ale, brewed with malt alone and drunk within days before it soured, was giving way to beer, a stronger and more durable liquor made with hops that had been brought into England from the Low Countries, and the brewsters of the towns argued fiercely over which was better. Parnel became a partisan of hops, and made a reputation for a strong, clear, bitter beer that would keep for a month in a cool cellar and be better for it. Her sisters were Joan Proctor, born in 1521, who became a vampire slayer and passes from this account except as a fond and slightly frightening younger sister, and Jane Proctor, born in 1527, the youngest, who did not. Their father died in 1546 and their mother two years before, in 1544. In her early years Parnel served as the second mother to both girls, and it was she who sat up with Joan on the night in her teens when the girl came home shaking from her calling and could not explain what she had seen. Parnel, who had no calling and never would, understood in that moment the pattern of her family's life. She was to be its keeper, not its hunter, and she accepted the role with little resentment. In 1538 she married Guy Tempest, a mason's apprentice, at Otley, when she was twenty-six and he was twenty-one. Tempest was a quiet, industrious young man in the building trade, and the lodge he served, which worked on the stone of the great church at York and on the parish churches of the Wharfe dale, sent him around the county to cut and set dressed stone. Parnel liked him, and she liked his prospects. Masons were among the best-paid tradesmen of the age, and a mason who reached journeyman status could earn eight pence a day. The couple set up in a house in the guild quarter of York close to the minster close, where Guy could work in the lodge, and Parnel, who would not give up her trade, took a lease on a small brewhouse behind the minster wall. The York of those years was a city of guildhalls, wool markets and religious upheaval, a place where every street ran into the shadow of the minster. The city had been a great one, the second in the kingdom, and was in decline, but it was still a place where the Merchant Adventurers met, the craft guilds paraded on the feast of Corpus Christi with their pageants, and the Council of the North sat. The dissolution of the monasteries had emptied the friaries and abbeys, and the great abbey of St Mary was becoming a ruin. Parnel's house was full of rumours: of the Pilgrimage of Grace, which had come within sight of York a year before her marriage, of the judgments of the archbishop's court, of the alterations in the minster. She sold beer to the masons and glaziers, to pilgrims and soldiers, and later to the clerks of the Council. Her children were born there. Anne Proctor came in 1541 and Theobald Proctor in 1542, and by the custom of the White Ledger they were christened with the Proctor name instead of Tempest, since the surname passed through daughters and Parnel had no brother to carry it. It was a matter that she pressed with the parish priest and won. She raised them in the house by the minster wall, taught them their letters, and took them to church and to the guild processions. Anne learned the brewing and Theobald was put to a stonecutter, as his father's son. Guy died in 1552 at the age of thirty-five, killed by a fall of stone in the minster lodge, according to the family, though the record says only that a young mason had died, and Parnel was a widow with two small children and a brewhouse. She ran the brewhouse for thirty years. She paid the fines for the assize of ale, kept the servants, bought barley at the market and hops at the fair, and defended her trade against several complaints about the strength of her beer. Her hand appears in the White Ledger's Yorkshire pages, where she is entered as Parnel Proctor of York, brewster, and where the clerks noted that hunters passing through the city ate and slept at her house and left with provisions. In the winter of 1569 the northern earls of Northumberland and Westmorland rose against Queen Elizabeth and marched south as far as Selby and the Ouse, and York was in a state of panic. Parnel, who was fifty-seven, kept her door open and her copper hot and fed both the city's garrison and the frightened country people who came in through the gates. Theobald died in 1579, aged thirty-seven, and it was a hard loss. In 1582 Anne died, aged forty-one, and in the same year Parnel herself died at seventy, of what the parish register records as childbed, a fever caught at a lying-in she was attending for a neighbour's daughter, since she had never been able to stay out of a house where a woman was in trouble. She was buried in the parish churchyard near the minster. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the Proctor who kept the house while the others hunted, and the White Ledger's clerk, closing her page, added a line that a good brewster was as scarce as a good slayer.