Sibyl Birtwistle

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

Sibyl Birtwistle was born in 1553 at Richmond, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, where the Norman castle of the old earls stood over the River Swale and the cobbled market place held a sharp wind even in June. She was the daughter of dairying people, and she was born in the last year of Edward VI's short reign, in a farmhouse on the slopes above the river where the pastures ran up toward the moor. Swaledale and the neighbouring dales were cheese country, and the trade had come down from the Cistercian monks of Jervaulx, who had made a soft crumbly cheese from ewes' and cows' milk before the abbey was pulled down. The dairy skills survived the dissolution in the hands of farm wives, and Sibyl grew up among the churns, the wooden presses and the cool stone shelves where the cheeses turned slowly from white to pale gold. Her childhood was governed by the cows. She was up before light to help with the milking, carrying wooden pails across a wet yard, and she learned to judge from the sound of the milk striking the bucket whether an animal was well. The family made butter for the market, cheese for the winter and whey for the pigs, and every step needed clean hands, cold water and exact timing. Her mother taught her how to scald the churns with boiling water, how to scrape and salt the curd, and how to tell by the smell of a cheese room whether anything had gone wrong. It was a life of stone floors and chapped knuckles, but it also gave her a sense of small hard-won competence. By fifteen she could run a dairy by herself, and by twenty she was hired out to bigger farms in the spring when the flush of milk overwhelmed a household's hands. Richmond was a Protestant town in name and a doubtful one in heart. The old faith was still strong in the dales in her childhood, and after the queen's excommunication in 1570 and the harrying of the North that followed the rising of the northern earls, families who held to the Roman rite became a target of the law. Sibyl's own family attended the parish church as the law demanded, and she was baptised into the reformed faith. Yet she saw neighbours who kept a crucifix behind a loose stone or who said the old prayers in a barn on winter nights. She was not zealous. She was observant, and she remembered the whispered lessons of the dales more clearly than any sermon. Many years later, when she married into a family whose head was a known recusant, she understood the situation better than most brides would have. Lawrence Proctor, a wool factor born in 1554, came through Richmond on the market days that brought dalesmen down with their fleeces. He bought wool from the farms of Swaledale and Wensleydale and sold it on to cloth-makers at Halifax and Leeds, and he had a reputation for straight weights and a good memory. He was a Proctor of the Yorkist line, though his branch had sunk far from the great days, and he was also a recusant, one who refused to attend the Anglican service and paid for it. Under the statutes of the 1580s the fine was twelve pence for every Sunday missed, and after 1581 the penalty could rise to twenty pounds a month, a sum that ruined families. Lawrence paid, borrowed, hid goods with friends and kept ledgers in double form, one for the assessors and one that was true. He noticed the dairywoman at the Richmond stalls in the winter of 1583, saw her measure out a pound of butter to the ounce and asked her name. They were married in 1584, when Sibyl was thirty-one and Lawrence thirty, later than most couples of their standing, because his affairs had been uncertain and she had been reluctant to leave a trade that suited her. The ceremony was performed quietly, according to the forms the law required, with a private blessing said afterwards in a back room by a priest whose name she never learned. The couple took a house near the wool market at Richmond, and she brought her churns with her. She continued to make butter and cheese for sale, and her income was useful when fines fell due. It was Sibyl who kept the household's face presentable to the authorities, while Lawrence kept its papers hidden, sorted and safe: wool accounts, letters from correspondents in York and Kendal, and a set of older documents belonging to the White Ledger's cadet branches, which were entrusted to him because he was reliable and unsuspected. Their children came quickly. Katherine Proctor was born in 1585, Richard Proctor in 1588, in the summer of the Armada, when the beacons lit along the coast sent a red glow down the dale, Christiana Proctor in 1592 and Abraham Proctor in 1594. Katherine and Richard were called to the hunt, each in their own time, and became vampire slayers of the Yorkist house. Christiana and Abraham were not, and Sibyl treated them as no less useful. She was a firm and practical mother. She had grown up in a dairy where everything depended on routine, and she ran her household on the same principle: work at dawn, dinner at noon, prayers at dusk. But she was also a listener, and the children brought her their troubles. When the elder two began to disappear in the evenings with their father's approval, she stayed up with a lamp and a pot of broth, and she asked nothing until they chose to tell her. The family's hardest years were the early Stuart ones. James I promised relief to Catholics and then withdrew it after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, when suspicion swept the North and searchers came to houses like theirs with warrants. Sibyl hid papers in the cheese room, under a false floor beneath the presses, and taught her younger children to answer questions with bland stupidity. The plague visited Richmond in the same period, killing neighbours and closing the market for weeks, and she kept her household away from the town and lived on stored cheese, oatmeal and salt beef. Through it all she remained cheerful in a dry way. She said that a dairywoman learned early that most things curdle in the end and that the only choice was whether to make something useful of them. Christiana married Alastair Thorne in 1615, a match that brought a northern border house into the Proctor family, and Sibyl arranged the wedding feast with the same efficiency she brought to a dairy: cheeses in a pyramid, a spit of mutton and casks of small beer. She watched her husband weaken over the next few years, and when Lawrence died in 1621 she took charge of his papers and read them all before deciding where they should go. She never became a hunter and never wished to. By then she was known in Richmond as the old mistress of the market place, a strong-armed widow in a black hood who knew everyone's business and told none of it. Sibyl died in 1623, aged seventy, of childbed, having gone to attend a lying-in in a neighbouring household and catching the fever that follows a hard birth. It was an unusual end for a woman of her years, and the neighbours said she had spent her life delivering calves and children and had died at the work she knew best. The Proctors remembered her in the family's papers as the wife who kept the house steady while its records were hidden in its walls. In the Slayerverse she is one of the figures who show how the White Ledger survived persecution: not through heroics, but through a dairywoman's patience and a cellar full of cheese.