Tristram Bellingham

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

Tristram Bellingham was a surveyor who spent his working life measuring land that other men were about to fight over, and it is a fair irony that he died before the fighting began in earnest. He was born in 1603 at Blackburn in Lancashire, in the year the old Queen's death brought a Scottish king south, in a market town of some three thousand souls that sat in a hollow among the Pennine foothills and lived on wool, linen, and the fairs that drew farmers down from the moors. His father is not named in the surviving papers, but the family was of the small yeoman sort: they held a farm at the edge of town, kept sheep, sent a son to the grammar school, and expected him to rise a little. Tristram rose by way of numbers. He had a talent for them that the schoolmaster noticed early and encouraged with the loan of Recorde's arithmetic and a battered copy of a treatise on land measurement. The trade he entered was, in that generation, a newly respectable one. Land surveying had grown up in the previous century out of the need of great landlords to know what they owned, and by the 1620s it had a literature, a set of instruments, and a fair number of practitioners who could make a living from it. Tristram learned the use of the chain and the plane table, the theodolite and the circumferentor, and how to reduce a day's readings to a neat parchment plat, coloured in wash, with the field-names inked in a clear round hand. He walked the moss and moor country of the county for the gentry and the manorial courts, settled boundary quarrels between tenants, drew up the terriers of parish glebe lands, and was known for the accuracy of his work and for a certain stiff honesty that made him useful in disputes. Both sides usually accepted his line. He was tall, freckled, and slightly stooped from a habit of looking at the ground, and he carried his instruments in a leather satchel that he did not like to let out of sight. He met the woman who would become his wife through the ordinary business of the trade. Florence Faulkner, born in 1604 at Padiham, was a seamstress in a family that kept the Red Ledger, and Tristram, engaged to map a stretch of land near the Faulkner holding, found himself being fed at the kitchen table by a young woman who wanted to know exactly how a plane table worked. She asked good questions. She made him explain it twice, and then corrected his sketch. What Tristram did not know at first was that she was also a vampire slayer, a member of a house that had counted its tally since the days of Hugh Faulkner, and that the accuracy which so pleased him in her questions had a purpose in another kind of work. When he learned it, some time into the courtship, it was because she asked him, with evident calm, to draw her a map of a stretch of marsh where a neighbour had been seen after his burial. They married in 1623, when he was twenty and she nineteen. The household that they set up was in the Lancashire hand-loom country, a stone cottage with a good garden and a room over the kitchen in which he kept his plans and she her needlework. There was nothing about it that would have attracted notice from the outside, except perhaps the number of visitors who came at odd hours and left their boots at the door. Tristram accepted the arrangement with a patience that surprised even Florence. He was not a fighter, and he said as much, and Florence said that she had not married him to fight; she had married him because he could see a place clearly and put it on paper, which was a rarer gift than a strong arm. From then on, in the family's account, the Bellingham cottage had the best maps in the county, and every hunt that Florence undertook in the following years began on his table. Two daughters came, both carrying their mother's family name in accordance with the custom by which the Faulkner surname passed through the daughters. Winifred Faulkner was born in 1624, within a year of the wedding, and Verena Faulkner in 1628. Tristram taught them both to read a map and to use a rule, and Winifred in particular grew up with a good head for measurement. The little household was, for its first fifteen years, a settled and busy one. Tristram's work took him around the Ribble valley and up into the Forest of Rossendale; the plague years came and went, and the harsh winters of that decade brought hunger to the moor farms; and the girls grew. He took to sleeping lightly and to listening to the sound of his wife coming home, and he adapted his own working day to hers, so that he would be awake at dawn to hear the door. His contribution to the Red Ledger was indirect but real. When Florence went out to track something that had come up out of a moss or a churchyard, he drew for her the ground she would have to cross: the drains and dikes, the causeways, the stiles, the places where the peat gave way underfoot. In one case, according to the family, a whole night's hunt was won because he had noticed that a boundary on an old map did not agree with a boundary on the ground, and had concluded that a sunken lane was missing from the survey and might lead to a barn nobody had thought about. It did. The barn housed exactly what Florence had been looking for. He never took credit, but a marginal note in the Red Ledger, in Florence's hand, reads simply that the ground was drawn true, and the family took that to be as much praise as he would have permitted. The Faulkner rivalry with the Proctors of Yorkshire was, for him, a matter of theory more than experience. He had never met a Proctor, and Florence maintained the rivalry chiefly as a form of good-natured competition in which she took pleasure. He was amused by it. On being asked once what he thought about the Guest of Towton, he answered that he had surveyed a great many boundary disputes and had found that when two parties both swore the other had moved the stone, the stone had usually simply moved. It was a remark that did not go over well in some branches of the family, though Florence laughed. The last years of his life fell in the country's darkest decade. The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, began in 1642, and Lancashire, being divided, saw skirmishes at Manchester and Bolton and a great deal of misery, with soldiers quartered on farmers and the roads cut. His clients dwindled as estates were sequestered; the gentry who had hired him to plot their lands were now fugitives or prisoners, and his instruments, which looked to a suspicious quartermaster like military tools, brought him trouble. He went about with a certificate from a magistrate. In the winter of 1645, he took a cough that would not leave him, one of those deep coughs of a cold, wet winter, and he died of it that year, at forty-two. He was buried in the churchyard at Padiham, and Florence, who had gone many nights out on the marsh with no fear at all, is said to have spent the night of his burial sitting at his table without lighting a lamp. He is remembered chiefly by his maps, of which several survive in the Faulkner papers, drawn in brown ink with the fields washed in green and the moss in a grey-blue wash. They are not in themselves famous, but they are exact, and the Faulkner archivists in the Slayerverse regard them as the earliest evidence of a practice the family later prized: that a hunt should begin with a map, and that whoever drew the map deserved a place beside whoever carried the stake.