Theobald Proctor

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

Otley in 1542 was a small market town under the great hump of the Chevin, hemmed in by the river Wharfe on one side and the Yorkshire moors on the other, with a stone bridge, a market cross and an archbishop's manor that gave the place a certain air of consequence. Theobald Proctor was born there that year, the second child of Guy Tempest, a mason's apprentice, and Parnel Proctor, a brewster, and his elder sister Anne Proctor had arrived the year before. The family kept the Proctor name on the mother's side by custom, and Theobald grew up understanding that he belonged to the White Ledger without anyone ever quite having to say so. Stone was the trade of the household. Guy Tempest was working under a master on the churches and manor houses of the Wharfe valley, dressing gritstone with chisels and mallets and learning the geometry of arch, buttress and squared corner, and Theobald grew up among the offcuts. He played with stone chips in the yard, learned early to tell sandstone that would weather from stone that would crumble, and could set a level with a plumb-line before he could write. Then his father died in 1552, when Theobald was ten, and the household fell on his mother's brewing. Parnel took her children to Leeds, where ale sold faster and the cloth trade offered work to anyone with fingers. Theobald never forgot Otley, however, and he later said the Wharfe stone was the best he ever handled. In 1556, at fourteen, he was bound apprentice to a mason, following his father's trade. Apprenticeship in that age was a formal thing, bound by indenture for seven years, in which the master provided board, lodging and instruction, and the boy provided labour and obedience. He learned to rough out ashlar, to carve mouldings, to lay a course true, to hoist stone by windlass and to mix lime mortar that would outlast the master. It was a hard life, with the lodge cold in winter and the dust in the lungs. He remained a mason's apprentice in the family record for the rest of his life; whether the indenture stretched on because of the master's slow patronage, or because Theobald was needed elsewhere, the ledger does not say. In effect he was a working craftsman who never rose formally to master, and he never minded. His character showed itself in the way he built. He was a slow, meticulous, humorous man with a big, square face and forearms like tree limbs, who checked every joint twice and could be heard whistling in the yard at the end of a day. He was slower to make friends than his sister but held them longer. When the religious changes of the Tudor crown meant that masons were suddenly employed in defacing the carvings they had once made, Theobald went quiet, and then he went on with his work, since a mason who lost a job over a sculpture would be replaced by a man who cared less. In 1569 the northern earls rose against the queen, and Yorkshire was full of armed bands. Theobald, twenty-seven, was ordered to work on emergency repairs to a bridge, and for a month he lived in a tent, chipping stone in the rain while soldiers marched over the planks. In 1563, at twenty-one, he married Tiffany Wentworth, a York dairymaid who had come to the Leeds markets with cheese and butter and stayed to argue about the weight of his mallet. The two were wed with little ceremony and set up in rented rooms near the minster close, where the huge bulk of York Minster's masons' lodge ran a constant workshop. Theobald found work there on the repairing of the great church, and the family lived in the shadow of the cathedral for the rest of his short life. Their first daughter, Alianore Proctor, was born in 1564, and their second, Tiffany Proctor, in 1568. He carried both to be baptised with stone dust still in his hair. The White Ledger of the Proctors was part of Theobald's life in a way he found faintly comic. The ledger's keepers came out of York and Leeds, and they were a mixed bunch of clerks, hunters and merchants, and Theobald, as a mason, was often asked to do practical things. He built hidden cupboards in cellars, set iron staples into stone lintels, and cut a sequence of small symbols into the undersides of certain stones, known to the family as a mason's mark and used to signal which houses were safe. The vampire slayers of his family valued a mason who knew how to make a wall keep something out, or in. He himself never hunted and said so cheerfully. He kept the family's stone accounts, his brother-in-law Dennis Nowell called them, and both men liked the joke. He was also the family's arbiter of rivalry. The old feud with the Faulkners of Lancashire, the accusation over the Guest at Towton in the Wars of the Roses, had by his time settled into a contest of tallies and entries, and Theobald took a mason's view of it: that the ledger's line was only as straight as its builder. When Faulkner kin came through York, he was known to walk them round the minster and show them the stonework, which the Yorkists regarded as an exquisite piece of one-upmanship. The fever that killed him came in 1579. There had been a wet summer, damp in the lodge, and half the workmen on the minster repairs took sick. Theobald, thirty-seven, caught the sweat and cough and was dead within nine days, leaving his wife Tiffany with two daughters aged fifteen and eleven. He was buried in York, and the masons of the minster lodge, who had no great funds, passed the hat and paid for a modest stone that he had cut himself, in a spare hour, years before. His sister Anne outlived him by three years and his mother Parnel likewise. His widow Tiffany lived on until 1604, and his daughters carried on: Alianore until 1634, aged seventy, and Tiffany Proctor until 1621. The ledger records for Theobald a note that reads, in a later hand, "he built the walls that kept the house." Within the wider Slayerverse he stands as an example of a craftsman whose skills protected as much as any blade could, and of a man who was content to be a mason's apprentice in title and a builder of safe rooms in fact.