Philippa Rishworth

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

Philippa Rishworth was born in 1553 at Halifax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and she died in 1619 at Wetherby of a wasting illness, having spent sixty-six years selling cloth, doing sums and reading the small print in other people's lives. She was a cloth-seller by trade and, by marriage in 1576, a member of the Proctor slayer family: the wife of Lancelot Proctor, the notary's clerk who was the vampire slayer called The Cold Lantern, and the mother of Gervase Proctor and Prudence Proctor. She never carried a stake or a pistol. She is nonetheless one of the half-dozen people without whom the White Ledger of her generation could not have been kept. Halifax in her childhood was a town built on a steep hillside and on the proposition that a woollen cloth is worth more than the sheep that grew it. Kersey and say came down from the weavers of the moorland hamlets in packhorse strings, and the Piece Hall of the old market, where the clothiers laid out their pieces on stone ledges, was the most argumentative square in the north. Philippa's people sold cloth there. She learned the business the way other girls learned a psalm: the feel of a close weave between thumb and finger, the weight of a good kersey, the way to hold a length to the light and find the thin place, the vocabulary of faults that a buyer uses and a seller denies. By twelve she could measure a bolt by eye to within a half-ell and tell, from the smell, whether it had been fulled in clean water. She could also read, which was unusual, and she could reckon on her fingers faster than the clerks could on paper. The town taught her one other thing, which was that everyone is lying about something small, and that the way to deal with it is to know exactly how small. In the years of the northern earls' rising she was sixteen, and she remembered it chiefly as a winter in which the cloth trade stopped. The roads were blocked with soldiers and rumours, buyers did not come, and her family sold what it could from the back room. She learned how a woman with a head for figures can keep a household afloat when the town's money has gone to ground: she traded cloth for flour and flour for tallow and tallow for coin, writing every swap in a small book. It was the beginning of a habit of keeping a second reckoning, the one that records not what was paid but what was meant, and it was exactly the habit that later made her so useful to a family that kept a ledger of its own. She came to Wetherby on business in 1575, when she was twenty-two, with a set of contracts for a supply of broadcloth to a Wetherby draper, and the contracts went to a notary's office to be checked. A clerk there with a narrow hand and a shuttered manner read them and found them sound. Philippa, who had read them first, had found two clauses that the draper's lawyers had slipped in about carriage charges and late payment, and she told the clerk so, politely, over the top of the paper. Lancelot Proctor looked at her, then at the clauses, then at her again, and agreed that they were there. By his own later account, that was the moment he decided to marry her, though he took several months to say so. They were wed in 1576, and she moved to Wetherby with her cloth, her moulded-wax seal and a firm intention of keeping her own trade. The stone house near the bridge that Lancelot's family owned became a place of two businesses. Philippa kept a stall in the market place, where she sold kersey, say, fustian and the occasional length of finer stuff, and she kept a back kitchen that smelled in autumn of drying herbs, because she had a gift for simples learned from a Halifax grandmother and sold more cough syrup than cloth in a bad winter. She had a way of listening to a customer's trouble with her head slightly on one side and her hands going on folding cloth that made people tell her more than they meant to. Lancelot found this out early and valued it. Some of the entries in the White Ledger from the 1580s rest on things a woman told a cloth-seller while pretending to choose a length of blue. She learned of the calling soon after the wedding. Lancelot had been called the previous year, on a road at dusk, and he was a poor liar; he came home one night with mud to the knees and a bundle of hawthorn stakes, and she, who was folding linen, did not ask a single question until he had washed. Then she asked three, in order, and he answered them. She said afterward that it was like discovering that the man she had married kept a second set of accounts, and that she thought the better of him for it. She did not fear the work in the way people fear things they cannot picture; she pictured it quite clearly, and she took what steps she could. She made him a long dark coat with an inner pocket lined in oiled linen for the stakes, she kept a shuttered lantern filled and trimmed by the door, and she never let him leave on a hunt without knowing which road he would take home. Two children came: Gervase in 1578 and Prudence in 1581. Philippa raised them in the knowledge that the family had a second business, which they were to speak of only inside the house, and that the book on the high shelf was not an account of rents. She taught Gervase the names of plants and the uses of them, so that he grew up understanding the apothecary's art before he understood the Ledger, and she taught Prudence to read a balance sheet and a face. When the Armada summer of 1588 came, with beacons ready along the coast and the whole north listening for bells, she kept the household calm by the simple method of keeping the shop open. Customers who saw the cloth-seller at her stall at eight in the morning concluded that the invasion had not yet happened. She also baked, that week, in the neighbour's oven with her sister-in-law's help. Lancelot stayed up with his pistol, and she stayed up with the accounts, and the two of them judged, in the grey of the third morning, that the dark had not used the occasion. It was a minor victory and the kind that the family counted. She had views about the Guest and the Faulkners, and she kept them mostly to herself. She had grown up in a cloth town, where every feud was ultimately a dispute over weights and measures, and she thought that the quarrel between the Proctor and Faulkner ledgers over Towton and the Wars of the Roses was exactly such a dispute: two honest books that disagreed about a single entry, and each family too proud to send a clerk across the Pennines with a candle and a ruler. She said so once, at table, and Lancelot, to her surprise, did not laugh. He said that he had thought the same for years and had never been able to find a way for a clerk to do it. The rivalry in her lifetime went on as it always had, an unresolved, non-violent contest of tallies and reputations, and she accepted, in the end, that some accounts are never audited. Lancelot died in the hard winter of 1611, and Philippa laid him out herself and sat up with the Ledger while Prudence finished his last unfinished entry in the next room. She did not weep in front of the neighbours. She went back to the stall the following Thursday, in a black coat, and sold two ells of kersey. The early Stuart years that followed brought plague scares and bitter winters, and her cough syrup was in demand again; she made it in the back kitchen by the dozen and refused to take payment from the poorest households. She and Prudence ran the house between them in those years: the cloth-selling downstairs, the school Prudence kept in the front room, the Ledger on its high shelf above. She grew thin in her last year and then thinner, a wasting that no simple of hers could mend, and she died in 1619, in the bed where she had been married, with her accounts in order and her last sale written up. Philippa Rishworth is remembered in the Proctor family as the Halifax cloth-seller who read the small print in everything, and who lent the White Ledger a second kind of attention: that of the market-place, which listens to what people say when they think they are only buying. In the Slayerverse she stands for the marriage-in strength of the Proctor line, the person from outside the slayer family who made it sturdier by seeing it clearly, and for the quiet courage of a household in which everyone knew what the lantern by the door was for.