Roger Marsden

Spouse of Amice Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

A tanner's trade announces itself a quarter of a mile before the man arrives, and Roger Marsden was never able to enter a room in Lancashire without someone wrinkling a nose and then, having noticed his face, apologising with their eyes. He did not mind. He was born in Bolton in 1456, the son of a family that had worked hides for as long as anyone in the parish could remember, and he regarded the smell of oak bark and lime as the honest odour of a useful life. His father's yard lay on the edge of the town beside a stream, where the pits were dug in rows like graves for cattle, and it was there that Roger learned what the trade demanded of a boy: patience above all, because a good hide took a year or more in the pit, and the tanner who hurried it sold leather that cracked. Bolton in his youth was a small, hard-working town on the road between Manchester and the moorland farms, a place of weavers and cobblers and of butchers who supplied the raw material for men like the Marsdens. The moors rose behind it, brown and treeless, and a great many sheep and a good many cattle came off them each autumn. Cattle meant hides, hides meant work, and work meant that the tanners were among the people who knew everyone, since every household needed shoes, harness, bucket-leather and belts. Roger grew up with the rhythms of it: the winter scraping of hair from limed skins with a curved knife on a beam, the summer spreading of oak bark, and the Sunday visit to the parish church in a clean shirt that still somehow smelled of the yard. He was tall, heavy in the arm, quiet, with a slow smile that took his whole face and a voice so soft that customers leaned in to hear it. He was not a man who went looking for adventure, and adventure, in the form of a woman with a midwife's basket, came to him anyway. Amice Faulkner, the daughter of a falconer's son and a weaver, born on the flank of Pendle in 1456, the same year as himself, came to Bolton to attend a difficult birth in the winter of 1474. Roger's sister was the mother, and it was Amice who brought both baby and mother through. Roger, who had spent three days hovering in the yard unable to help, found the young woman afterwards in the kitchen, so tired she was nearly asleep on her feet, and gave her the only thing he had to offer, which was a pair of new leather gloves. She wore them, he was told, for years. He asked her father for her hand in the following months, with some fear, for Hugh Faulkner had a reputation as a hard man, but Hugh looked at the gloves on his daughter's hands and consented. They were married in 1475. It was a marriage of two hard-working people with quite different rhythms. She was called out at night to the labouring; he was up before dawn to see to the pits. They met in the middle, over supper, and talked of the day. She told him what she could of her family's other life, which was not much at first, and he listened, and asked the sort of practical questions a tanner asks, about what she needed and whether it could be made of leather. In time he made her a quiver strap and a set of stake-holders. He never asked to go hunting with her and never pretended to understand the ledgers, but he was the one who oiled her bow-string and repaired her boots, and he learned to sleep lightly and to keep supper warm in a covered pot at any hour. Their sons came in 1478 and 1480: Edward Faulkner, who took his mother's name in the manner of the houses, and Denys Marsden, who took his own. Roger's world was largely a domestic one, but it was not sheltered. Lancashire had its wars in those years, even if they were mostly wars of rumour. The Wars of the Roses had ended in blood at Bosworth in 1485, the year Roger turned twenty-nine, and in its aftermath, when the two roses were joined and neither house forgave the other, he watched his wife's family reconciled by marriage in Yorkshire and no less suspicious of each other for it. He heard it all at the kitchen table. When Thomas Faulkner visited from York, married that January to Isabel Proctor, the talk was of ledgers and tallies and of a vampire nobody would name, and Roger would refill the cups, say nothing, and afterwards remark to Amice that the Faulkners would argue over a stray farthing at the gates of heaven. She laughed and agreed. He grew more solitary after 1489, the year Amice was called. To his neighbours he was a tanner whose wife was gone half the night on unspecified business; to his family he was the man who made sure she came home. He built the shutters that could be barred from the inside. He learned the moor tracks after dark and, on several occasions, walked out with a lantern to meet her on the road. It was said in the family that he never once, in thirteen years, failed to be at the door when she returned. He also kept the accounts of the yard with the precision of a man who knew that his wife's other ledger was much less forgiving, and he never allowed a debt to lie past Michaelmas. Denys and Edward grew up watching him work, and each learned the yard and the hunt both. The worst day of his life fell in 1502, when his wife was killed beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt. He dug her out himself, in the grey before dawn, and carried her home on a hurdle. The parish priest, a kindly, slightly frightened man, said the funeral mass, and Roger stood through it in his best coat with his enormous hands clenched, saying nothing. He did not speak of her for months. He wore her gloves, the ones he had given her, tucked in his belt like a talisman. Both sons stayed near him; Edward had by then begun to hunt, and Denys after him, and between them and the yard the household continued. He lived another eleven years. He gave up most of the pits to a journeyman, kept the small one by the stream for his own use, and in his last decade took to walking the fells above Bolton in the evenings, to look at the light on the tops. In 1513, the year of the Flodden campaign, when the muster rolls drew men from every northern parish and Lancashire archers marched north under the Stanley banner, he was too old and too unwarlike to be called, but the summer felt hollow with departures and dispatches, and he was alone with his thoughts more than he liked. That year he died of an accident on the fells, aged fifty-seven, having slipped on wet rock in the dusk while checking a stray beast. His sons found him at first light. The gloves were still at his belt. Denys followed him to the grave two years later, in 1515, and Edward lived on into 1548, carrying the Faulkner name. The Red Ledger records Roger with a mark of respect unusual for a man who never took a tally: a note in Edward's hand that the tanner kept the lamp lit. In the Slayerverse, where the old hunters are remembered for their kills, Roger Marsden is remembered for the door he kept open.