The Lancashire witches

Histories and stories

Robert Poole

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847795496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This book is the first major study of England's biggest and best-known witch trial which took place in 1612, when ten witches were arraigned and hung in the village of Pendle in Lancashire. The book has equal appeal across the disciplines of both History and English Literature/Renaissance Studies, with essays by the leading experts in both fields. Includes helpful summaries to explain the key points of each essay. Brings the subject up-to-date with a study of modern Wicca and paganism, including present-day Lancashire witches. Quite simply, this is the most comprehensive study of any English witch trial.

1

Introduction: the Lancashire witches
in historical context

James Sharpe

It is probably true to say that a clearer memory remains of the Lancashire witches of 1612 than of any of the other people who were tried and executed for witchcraft in early modern England. To an extent unique for England, the Lancashire witches have been appropriated by the tourist and heritage industries. In Newchurch village, in the heart of the Pendle country, the visitor can call in at ‘Witches Galore’, a shop easily identifiable by the life-size figures of witches that are placed outside it, and buy model witches, and maps, posters, pottery, or T-shirts bearing witch motifs. The visitor might then like to travel the 45-mile ‘Pendle Witch Trail’, which begins at the Pendle Heritage Centre at Barrowford and ends, appropriately enough, at Lancaster Castle, where the witches of 1612 were incarcerated before their trials and, in the case of ten of them, executed. Those completing the trail might refresh themselves with a bottle of Moorehouse’s excellent ‘Pendle Witches Brew’ beer, and while away the evening reading either the novel about the witches written by that forgotten giant of the mid-nineteenth-century literary world, William Harrison Ainsworth, or a more recent fictional account, first published in 1951, Robert Neill’s Mist over Pendle. In 1911 Wallace Notestein, a pioneer scholar of English witchcraft history, commented of the 1612 Lancashire trials that ‘no case in the history of the superstition in England gained such wide fame’.¹ Nearly a century later, his sentiments seem to be equally valid.

The celebrated 1612 witch scare began on 21 March of that year when Alizon Device had her fateful encounter with the pedlar John Law, as a result of which, following that refusal of a favour which so often provoked the wrath of a witch, the unfortunate man went instantly into what was identified as a witchcraft-induced illness.² Law and his relatives decided to invoke the aid of officialdom, and on 30 March the local Justice of the Peace (JP) Roger Nowell examined and took statements from Alizon Device, her mother Elizabeth and her brother James, and from John Law’s son, Abraham. On 2 April Nowell, as further accounts of suspected witchcraft reached him, examined Elizabeth Device’s mother, the eighty-year-old Elizabeth Southerns (alias ‘Old Demdike’), Anne Whittle (alias ‘Chattox’), and three local witnesses. Around 4 April Nowell committed Alizon Device, Demdike, Chattox, and Chattox’s daughter Anne Redferne to prison in Lancaster Castle to await trial at the next session of the Assizes. A day or two later, over the county border in York, another woman who was to become involved in the story of the Lancashire witches, Jennet Preston, was tried and acquitted at York for the killing of a child by witchcraft. On 10 April there allegedly occurred a meeting of witches at the Demdikes’ home, the Malkin Tower, where the witches discussed their situation, plotted further acts of witchcraft, and planned to blow up Lancaster Castle with gunpowder and release their imprisoned friends. From the point of view of the investigating authorities, the real breakthrough came on 27 April, when in the course of further examinations Elizabeth Device and her children James and Jennet all told of the meeting at the Malkin Tower. This implicated a number of other local people as witches, and convinced Nowell and his fellow JPs that they were confronting a major outbreak of witchcraft. Accordingly, a number of suspects were rapidly committed to Lancaster Castle. The presence of a major witchcraft outbreak was confirmed on 19 May when Chattox and James Device (who confessed to being a witch at this point) made further statements to Thomas Covell, coroner and keeper of Lancaster Castle, William Sandes, the mayor of Lancaster, and the JP James Anderton.

Given more space, it would be possible to trace in detail how the statements of the alleged witches changed as their interrogations proceeded, and how initial denials or guarded statements changed into confessions as official pressure and questioning continued. The evidence of the children Jennet and James Device was vital in initiating the wider allegations of witchcraft, and a reading of the examinations published by Thomas Potts in his account of the trials shows that by this stage suspects were clearly beginning to panic and accuse each other. The investigations had reached critical mass, and neighbours came forward in large numbers to tell the authorities of acts of witchcraft which had occurred sometimes many years before, their statements sometimes revealing how witchcraft suspicions were enmeshed in local feuds and rivalries. Various local JPs were involved in gathering evidence over a period of several months.

On 27 July Jennet Preston was again tried at York Assizes, this time for witchcraft against the Listers, a locally important gentry family, and was found guilty and executed. Evidence against Preston was sent to York, and the two judges who presided there, Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham, were also those in charge of the subsequent Lancaster Assizes. By this point the Lancashire authorities were clearly in close contact with the Assize judges about the forthcoming trials, and the Preston case prepared Bromley and Altham for what they were to find when they came to Lancaster. The trials of the Lancashire witches, presided over by Bromley, were held on 18–19 August. Old Demdike had died in gaol before her case came to court. Chattox, Elizabeth Device, James Device and Anne Redferne were all tried on the first day, and all but Redferne were found guilty. Redferne was tried again on the following day, as were Alizon Device, Alice Nutter, John and Jane Bulcock, Katherine Hewit, Isabel Roby and Margaret Pearson. All of them were found guilty, and in a markedly prompt exercise of justice ten of them were executed on Lancaster Moor on Thursday 20 August. Margaret Pearson, convicted for non-capital witchcraft, was sentenced to stand on the pillory in Lancaster, Clitheroe, Whalley and Padiham on four market days, where she was to make public confession of her offence, followed by a year’s imprisonment. Five other individuals, of whom we learn little, were acquitted.

The Lancashire trials, so well remembered subsequently, did, in fact, constitute a remarkable episode in the history of English witchcraft.³ There was, perhaps, little that was really novel in the matters related to the court, and most of the witnesses’ and alleged witches’ depositions were formed by standard accounts of witchcraft, with, of course, some interesting variations. What was unusual, apart from Potts’s lengthy and apparently officially requested account of the trials, was that so many witches were hanged together, eleven if we count Jennet Preston’s execution in York. Current estimates suggest that the witch persecutions in Europe between the early fifteenth and the mid eighteenth centuries resulted in about 40,000 executions, and it is probable that executions in England contributed fewer than 500 to this total.⁴ There was, as far as we know, only one really mass witch-craze in England, that associated with the witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins which broke out in East Anglia in 1645 and claimed over a hundred lives.⁵ But, in general, England was one of those parts of Europe where witchcraft was an endemic rather than an epidemic problem, where witch trials were sporadic and few, where accusations were usually levelled against individuals or groups of three or four suspects, and where the acquittal rate was high in witchcraft cases. The hanging of ten or eleven witches at one go was, therefore, very unusual: certainly, nothing in the experience of witch trials in England before 1612 had prepared either the population of Lancashire or those sections of the literate public who were to read Potts’s Discoverie for the Pendle trials.

But concentration on the main series of trials has tended to divert our attention away from the associated trial of 1612, that involving the Samlesbury witches.⁶ This resulted not in a clutch of executions, but rather in the acquittal of the three accused women (and it should, of course, be remembered that five of those tried in the main set of 1612 trials were also acquitted). The Samlesbury affair demonstrated just how diverse witchcraft beliefs were becoming in England by the early seventeenth century, and also how officialdom manifested a diversity of reactions to those beliefs. In the main series of trials, those which led to the conviction of Demdike, Chattox, and the rest, the root problem was maleficium, that doing of harm by witchcraft which lay at the heart of peasant concern over witches throughout Europe. In the Samlesbury case, we encounter in a very overt form the interface between learned views of witchcraft and those of the peasantry. Young Grace Sowerbutts accused four women (one of whom was not tried) of subjecting her to various physical abuses, of tempting her to commit suicide, of killing a young child and then exhuming and eating its body, and of transporting her over the River Ribble to what was in effect a sabbat, where she and the women danced with ‘foure black things’, and after the dancing had sexual intercourse with them. The court simply threw these accusations out, and Potts in his account was able both to enhance Judge Bromley’s image by relating how he exposed the fraudulent nature of Sowerbutts’s accusations, and to score important points against the Catholics by insisting that her accusations had been framed according to the instructions of a Catholic priest named Christopher Southworth, alias Thompson. Again, Sowerbutts’s evidence deserves deeper analysis than can be devoted to it here. The incident does, however, remind us that the handling of witchcraft, demonic possession and exorcism was a contested issue between Protestants and Catholics in the decades around 1600, and it also raises the possibility that one way in which learned demonology entered the English popular consciousness was through the input of Catholic priests in cases of demonic possession and witchcraft.⁷

The 1612 trials therefore demonstrated something of the complexities of English witchcraft history. These complexities were illustrated further by the Lancashire scare of 1633–34, an incident which is maddeningly badly documented, but which, as I have contended elsewhere, marked something of a watershed in the history of English witchcraft.⁸ By the early 1630s one has a sense that witchcraft, both as an offence tried by the courts and as a matter of intellectual and theological interest, had become something of a dead issue in England. In the five counties covered by the Home Circuit of the Assizes, the only Assize circuit which enjoys anything like a full survival of indictments for the relevant period, surviving documentation furnishes only nineteen accusations of malefic witchcraft, none of which resulted in execution.⁹ There had been no pamphlets describing witch trials since that published in 1621 which recounted the story of Elizabeth Sawyer, of Edmonton in Middlesex, who was tried and executed for witchcraft in that year.¹⁰ No major work of demonology had followed that written by the Puritan minister Richard Bernard, first published in 1627 and reprinted in 1629.¹¹ Among the population at large fear of witches was as strong as ever, as is shown by John Webster’s later account of how young Edmund Robinson, the boy whose accusations prompted the 1634 craze, and his father and their associates were able to go out witch-finding.¹² But by this stage officialdom, and perhaps more accurately those Arminian senior churchmen who were flourishing during the reign of Charles I, were happy to discountenance witchcraft, at least as it was understood by the population at large.

The Lancashire scare of 1633–34 could have developed into a major outbreak of witch persecution: one contemporary account refers to sixty persons being suspected of witchcraft, and in August 1636 there were still ten suspected witches held in Lancaster gaol. Yet the reactions of central government in dampening this outbreak down were firm and decisive: the Assize judge confronting the initial prosecutions was worried and invoked central government assistance; the Bishop of Chester, John Bridgeman, was instructed to intervene and examine the suspects; the boy Edmund Robinson and his father were hauled down to London for interrogation; and five of the suspected witches were brought to the capital for examination by a medical team headed by the eminent physician William Harvey. If the 1612 executions can be adduced as a symbol of the more extreme aspects of English witch persecution, the government handling of the 1633–34 accusations demonstrates just how sceptical central authority, the upper reaches of the Church, and possibly educated opinion in general had become about malefic witchcraft by that date.¹³

Giving an outline of what happened in 1612 and 1633–34 is easy enough. Explaining why the witch trials occurred, and in particular providing an explanation for the trials and executions of 1612, is more difficult. There now exists a vast witchcraft historiography, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the Lancashire witches in historical context
• Part I The Trials of 1612
• Part II Contexts: Society, Economy, Religion and Magic
• Part III Rewriting the Lancashire Witches
• Bibliography
• Index