The Pendle Witch Trials

The Pendle case begins with a beggar, a pedlar and a curse. In March 1612 a young woman named Alizon Device asked a pedlar for pins, was refused, and he collapsed shortly afterwards, probably with a stroke. She believed she had caused it, and said so. Questioned by a local magistrate, she also implicated her grandmother, and then members of a second local family with whom hers had a long quarrel.

The two households at the centre of it, headed by two elderly women known as Demdike and Chattox, seem to have made part of their living from charming and cursing, which was an ordinary if disreputable rural trade. Each accused the other. The magistrate, working in a county the government regarded as dangerously Catholic and disorderly, sent them to the assizes.

The prosecution's most effective witness was Jennet Device, aged about nine, who gave evidence against her mother, her brother and her sister, and identified defendants in court. English law did not normally accept the testimony of a child that young; witchcraft was treated as an exception, on the reasoning that the crime was too secret for ordinary proof. That exception, and what it did to the Device family, is the case in miniature.

Ten were hanged at Lancaster. Demdike died in gaol before trial.

Pendle is the best documented English witch trial, and the reason is a single book. Thomas Potts, clerk of the court, published a long account of the proceedings the year after, at the direction of the judges. It reproduces examinations, evidence and the shape of the trial in unusual detail, and without it almost nothing would be known.

That is a mixed inheritance, and it is a general problem in this subject. The record is full because a participant wanted the verdicts to look sound. Potts was writing to demonstrate that the court had acted properly, in a county the crown considered troublesome, in the reign of a king who had written a book on witchcraft. Everything he includes was chosen with that in mind, and what he leaves out cannot be recovered. Historians therefore use the account as the fullest available source and as a piece of advocacy at the same time, which is the same double reading the Hopkins pamphlet requires.

The afterlife has been strange. Pendle Hill is now a heritage attraction, with trails, sculptures and an annual trade in tourism, and the executed have become characters. Some of that is affectionate and some of it is not.

Jennet Device's own end is the detail that stays. A woman of that name appears in a Lancashire witch trial some twenty years later, accused, this time, on the evidence of another child.