A cooper's shop smells of split oak, hot iron and wet straw, and Wilfred Stansfield spent fifty years inside that smell. He was born in 1576 in Leeds, Yorkshire, and he made his living as a cooper, one of the men who raised the barrels, firkins, tubs and buckets on which the commerce of a cloth town rode. He was never a hunter and never claimed to be, but he married into the Proctor family of the White Ledger, and his shop in the Leeds streets was for several decades a place where the Yorkist house's business quietly passed hand to hand.
Leeds in the years of his boyhood was a busy market town on the river Aire, growing rich on the trade in undyed woollen cloth. Clothiers from the surrounding villages brought their pieces to the cloth market on the bridge each Tuesday and Saturday, standing at the trestles in their long coats and selling to the merchants who came from London and the Continent. The town had a parish church, a grammar school founded in the last century, tenter-fields where the cloth was stretched on frames to dry, and a river that carried fuller's earth, coal and barley. Wilfred's father, whose name has not survived in the family papers, was a tradesman of modest means, and the boy was apprenticed at fourteen to a master cooper near Kirkgate. It was a natural choice in such a place, for every stage of the cloth trade, from oil for the wool to the ale that fed the labourers, required a container.
The trade took years to learn. A cooper had to know which oak was fit for staves and which would leak, how to raise a cask over a fire so that the wood bent without splitting, how to fit the heads and the hoops, and how to test the finished vessel by filling it with water and watching the seams. The hoops were of ash or hazel split and bound, later of iron for the stronger casks, and the tools of the trade were a curved adze, a drawknife, a croze for cutting the groove that held the head, and a heavy driving hammer. Wilfred was good at it and better at the reckoning that went with it. By the end of his apprenticeship he could quote a price for a hundred firkins without a slate and was said to be able to tell by the sound of a barrel being struck whether it would carry beer or only dry goods.
The Proctors he met through his work. The White Ledger family, who traced themselves to Walter Proctor, ran a network of yeomen, herbalists and small tradespeople across the Yorkshire towns, and among them was the family of a seamstress named Dionisia Proctor, who had grown up in the county. She was five years his junior, brisk, tall, and unwilling to be told what to do, and when she came to the shop to order a tub for her dye and needle-work, she informed him that his price was too high. He lowered it, and continued to do so for the next several months. They were married in 1598, when Wilfred was twenty-two and Dionisia seventeen, and they took rooms above the shop.
Their household was one of noise, smoke and small children. Their daughter Blanche Stansfield was born in 1600 and their son Hamond Stansfield in 1604, and both grew up amid the shavings and hoops, drilling holes in scrap staves and being scolded for leaving the drawknife where a foot would find it. Dionisia sewed for the town's better households, and the family's income came half from the cooperage and half from her needle. Wilfred did not object to her independence; in fact, he seems to have been quite proud of it, and he introduced her to customers as the person who understood the business better than he did.
What Wilfred knew of the family's other side he learned slowly. The Proctors did not speak openly of the White Ledger to those outside the line, but a man who lives with a Proctor wife for a year or two is bound to notice the odd habits: the shutters closed before dusk, the stakes of hawthorn wrapped in cloth on a high shelf, the visitors who came late to the yard and left before morning. He decided, as many husbands in such houses did, that he did not need to hear everything to help. He built reinforced casks with false bottoms in which a hunter's kit could travel unnoticed on the carts to York and Ripon and Doncaster, and he kept his mouth shut. The pieces of the White Ledger's activity that passed through his shop were small, but they mattered, and he was trusted to hold them.
The old rivalry with the Lancastrians touched him only at the edges. At the supper table the talk sometimes turned to the Red Ledger of the Faulkners and to the vampire the two families called the Guest, who had slipped away at Towton in 1461 and whom each house still blamed the other for losing. Wilfred, who had grown up in a town where every family had its quarrels and long memories, found it faintly comic that a matter four generations old could still bring a Proctor's colour up. He told Dionisia once that in the trade a barrel that leaked was the fault of whoever had last touched it, and that nobody had ever found the cooper who made it. She did not laugh, but she did not answer him either, and her brother Oswald, the Whitby chandler, who came inland twice a year with tallow candles and ship's news, repeated the joke to half the family. Blanche and Hamond grew up hearing both versions of the quarrel and inherited their father's habit of refusing to take either side too seriously.
The years of the early Stuart reigns were not easy on a cooper. The plague returned to Yorkshire in the first decade of the century and again in the 1620s, and there were winters when the roads froze and the cloth trade stopped altogether. Every burial in the district was, for a time, an order for a coffin rather than a cask, and the shops of the trade were driven to adapt. Wilfred fed his apprentices from his own table when the money ran short, and he insisted on paying the wages of a journeyman whose hands had been crippled by rheumatism until the man could no longer come to work. He was not sentimental about it, and he simply regarded it as how a shop ought to be run.
His wife Dionisia died in 1633, and Wilfred outlived her by little more than a year. In these last years Hamond was a young man of about thirty and Blanche a woman in her early thirties, and both were there to see the old man out. In 1634 he was riding home from a customer at a farm in the Aire valley, on a road slick with autumn rain, when the horse went down and threw him. He was fifty-eight. The family put it down to bad luck and the season, and the parish register records the burial without comment. In the Slayerverse tradition, Wilfred Stansfield is remembered as the cooper who married a Proctor and kept faith with her house, a man who never touched a stake and whose barrels nevertheless carried the White Ledger's work from one Yorkshire town to the next.
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