Rohese Barlow

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

Rohese Barlow left a lantern in the window every night that her husband was out, and the whole of Padiham knew what it meant. She was born there in 1493, in the Lancashire mill village on the River Calder below Pendle Hill, in a low house of grey stone where the road from Burnley met the road to Whalley. Padiham was a modest place of the kind that flourished on the trade of others: a market cross, a parish church with a squat tower, a bridge, a handful of cottages of stone and thatch where the weavers' looms clacked from dawn. Rohese's family, in the words of a later Whalley clerk, were people without land and without complaint, who lived by what could be carried. The only thing they seem to have owned outright was a wooden barrow, and that barrow was the start of her life's work. She became a fishwife at fourteen, though nowhere within forty miles of the sea. Fish in the Calder valley came from three places: the Ribble, with its salmon, trout and eels; the coast at Lancaster and the mouth of the Wyre, from where salted herring and cod came inland in barrels on packhorses; and the ponds of the abbeys and manor houses, where carp and tench were kept for the table. The trade was steady because the Church made it so. Every Friday and every day of Lent was a fish day, and a parish that could not afford meat still needed something for the pot. Rohese wheeled her barrow to Padiham and Burnley on market days, and to Whalley in the summer, with a knife, a set of scales, a tub of brine and a voice that could be heard across the churchyard. She could tell a Ribble salmon from a Lune salmon by the gloss on the scale, and a fresh eel from a tired one by how it twisted in the pail. By all accounts she was a small, dark, sharp-featured woman with big hands and a quick temper that cooled as fast as it flared. She was known in three parishes for her honesty about her stock. A cod that had been too long in the barrel would be sold cheap, with a warning; a pike that was fine was sold at a fine price and defended to the last farthing. Buyers came to her because she would tell them what not to buy, which no other seller did. She kept her accounts in her head, and also, rather surprisingly for her station, in a neat hand on a wax tablet, having learned her letters from a curate to whom she had once given a good eel on credit. She had no interest in gossip, and no fear of anybody, and both qualities were to prove useful. She met Rafe Proctor in 1513, the year of the Flodden campaign, when the men of every northern parish were called up and the villages emptied. Rafe was nineteen, apprenticed to a mason at Whalley, and marched north with the Whalley men in the late summer. When he returned in October he stopped at Padiham on his way home, dirty and worn, and bought a pair of herring from a barrow at the market cross because he had not eaten in two days. She sold him three for the price of two and asked where he had been. He told her, and she told him that men who went to wars should not be allowed to come back thin. It was, on the whole, a courtship of the more practical sort. They were married in 1514, when she was twenty-one and he twenty, at Padiham church, and went to live in a house by the Calder with a barn at the back and a flagged kitchen. What Rafe told her, after the wedding, she took in silence. His mother, Isabel Proctor, and his father, Thomas Faulkner, had been slayers, and so, since 1517, was he. The ledgers, the stakes, the nights of absence, all of it was explained in a single evening, and Rohese's reply, as recorded in the Proctor family tradition, was that a man who spent his nights out ought at least to tell her when he would be back. That became the arrangement. She hung a lantern, a horn-paned lanthorn with a tallow candle, in the front window on every night that he was away. She trimmed it herself, and kept it lit until he was home, and Rafe, who was a patient man, came to think of that light as the anchor of his working life. Among the hunters of the district it was said that a man who could see Rohese's lantern from the ridge was never lost. It was this lantern that gave Rafe the alias by which the ledgers remember him. Her sons were born within a year and a half of each other: Edward Proctor in 1517 and Thomas Proctor in 1518. She raised them as she had been raised, on the barrow and in the market, and taught them to weigh fish, count change and tell a liar by his eyes. They grew up in a house where their father was often absent and their mother never was, and both, when they came of age, took up the slayer's work, one after the other, as their father had. Rohese, who knew what that meant, sharpened their knives for them and packed their bread without comment. She kept the barrow going through all of it. Her trade supported the household through the seasons when Rafe's work brought in nothing, and in the leaner years of the 1520s it was her earnings that bought the family's flour. The northern risings came late in her life and she did not live to see them, though she saw their causes. In the years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown the fish days, the very basis of her trade, came under attack. A rumour ran through the market that the king's men would abolish Lent, and that Rome's fasts would end with Rome's authority; the fishwives of the valley were, for a season, among the more anxious of his subjects. The dissolution of the monasteries loomed over the Ribble valley, and with the abbey ponds at Whalley destined for the Crown's disposal, half her freshwater supply was in doubt. She spent a good deal of 1533 talking to fish merchants at Lancaster about alternatives, and laid in a large stock of salted cod against a lean year. She had not counted on the winter itself. In the hard weather of 1534 the Calder froze from bank to bank, the roads were shut with snow for weeks, and the market cross stood empty. Rohese, forty-one, went out on the barrow on a bitter morning against her husband's advice, to sell what stock she had to families with nothing else, and took a chill that settled on her chest. She died within ten days, in the flagged kitchen, with her sons beside the fire and the lantern in the window, which Rafe would not let anyone put out. He outlived her by two years. The lantern, which was kept alight until his own death, is the thing the family recalls first. The White Ledger lists her simply as the wife of Rafe Proctor, and the family adds that she kept the light. In the Slayerverse she is the fishwife who could not fight and who nevertheless made sure the hunters came home.