Simon Armitage – one of Britain’s leading poets – was born in West Yorkshire. Like many local children, he would have been raised on stories of the Pendle Witches in nearby Lancashire.

A grimly intoxicating blend of history, crime and folklore is richly evoked in Armitage’s new BBC Four documentary, The Pendle Witch Child. Next year marks the fourth centenary of the notorious 1612 trial, the largest of its kind in England at the time.

Ten people were sentenced to death, and another to hard labour, in the County Court at Lancaster, while a connected case in York saw another prisoner hang for witchcraft. Incredibly, the suspects – mostly poor, uneducated peasants – were even accused of conspiring to burn down Lancaster Castle, which was treason.

The fate of the ‘Lancashire Witches’ had many ramifications – religious, political – but, wisely, this new film considers them from a more specific angle. Jennet Device was, allegedly, just nine years old when she testified against the accused, including her own family. Her evidence led directly to their demise.

Ironically, it seems that Jennet may have been among the accused in a second Lancashire witch-hunt, instigated by a young boy, Edmund Robinson, in 1633. By this time, attitudes towards witchcraft were becoming more sceptical and the case eventually collapsed.

However, Jennet was not acquitted – she was probably unable to pay for her board at Lancaster Castle – and her ultimate fate is unknown.

The rugged, haunting landscape – overlooked by Pendle Hill – is beautifully filmed in subtle shades of green and blue, while the more fantastical elements of the story are re-imagined by animator Phoebe Boswell.

Boswell’s witches are wraithlike, and she vividly depicts the confrontation between Jennet and her furious mother, Elizabeth Device, who whirls like a dervish.  Their pets – dogs and hares, supposedly adopted as ‘familiars’ – are also conjured.

Several historians of the early modern period, including Ronald Hutton, Malcolm Gaskill, Diane Purkiss and Patricia Fara, are interviewed, as well as a descendant of the convicted witch, Alice Nutter.

During the hour-long programme, Simon Armitage visits several linked locations: St Mary’s Newchurch in Pendle, where the suspects worshipped; the mooted site of Malkin Tower, home of the Device family; Lancaster Castle, where the witches were detained and tried; and Gallows Hill, where prisoners were hung.

Armitage also refers to several important texts: King James I’s Daemonologie (1597), which quite possibly influenced the investigation; The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, a rather biased account of the trial by court clerk, Thomas Potts, published soon after its end; and Michael Dalton’s The Country Justice (1618), which recommended the use of child witnesses in witchcraft cases, citing Potts’ text and the example of Jennet Device. (The Country Justice was still being used by US judges during the Salem witch-hunt of 1692.)

The witches’ confessions, and the ‘charms’ recited by Jennet, retain an eerie fascination for contemporary readers. ‘Fear makes demons of all of us,’ Armitage comments, raising tentative comparisons between the vilification of religious dissenters in 17^th century Lancashire and the faith-based terrorist scares of our own time.

The Pendle Witch Child was produced and directed by Ros Ereira for Wingspan Productions. It is available to view or download on BBC i-Player until next week.

If you are interested in learning more about the witch-hunts and the Pendle case, I can recommend Malcolm Gaskill’s A Very Short introduction to Witchcraft; Jonathan Lumby’s The Lancashire Witch-Craze; or, for a partly fictionalised take on the world of Jennet Device, try The Witches of Pendle by Rowena Akinyemi.

My own selection of articles on the Pendle Witches is here

Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches and Their Magic by Joyce Froome

With its 400^th anniversary approaching, the Pendle witch trial of 1612 is once again the focus of historical discussion. What was the largest investigation of its kind in England (until the Matthew Hopkins purges in East Anglia some thirty years later) is now, ironically, a mainstay of the East Lancashire tourist industry.

In 2007, John C. Clayton’s The Lancashire Witch Conspiracy brought a new focus on local history and genealogy to the now legendary case. This year, Joyce Froome, an assistant curator at the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall, has brought her own knowledge of magic to the table.

While it is probably true that, if tried in England today, the ‘Pendle witches’ would not be found guilty of any serious crime, nonetheless it seems quite likely that at least some of the accused practiced magic, or were known as witches.

Focussing mainly on the Devices and the Redfernes, the two warring families at the heart of the case, Froome builds a picture of a rural peasantry, living in reduced circumstances, and trading on their reputations as ‘cunning folk’ or ‘wise women’ with an ability to heal through herbs and magic. In a society where few could afford to pay a doctor, the cunning folk were much in demand. But it was a precarious calling at best, and failure or ill-will between neighbours could lead to accusations of witchcraft.

Previous historians have tended to portray Alizon and James Device, siblings on the cusp of adulthood, as malignant tearaways of very low intelligence. This derives from their apparent eagerness to confess and accuse others, and their wretched appearances in court. However, through careful analysis of their evidence (as recorded in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published by court clerk Thomas Potts in early 1613), Joyce Froome arrives at a rather different conclusion.

Potts’ account was written for a very specific purpose; to justify the actions of the court, and the defendants’ convictions. Therefore it cannot merely be taken at face value, and modern readers must consider how the facts were presented, and what evidence may have been omitted. Pamphlets of this kind, retelling sensational news stories, were sold nationwide at markets and fairs as popular literacy began to spread.

With a sharp eye for detail, Froome points out anomalies in the text. For example, the most heinous charge against James Device was the ‘bewitching to death’ of Anne Townley after an argument. Though her husband, Henry Townley, was interviewed by Roger Nowell, the local magistrate who oversaw the investigation, his deposition is not included. Townley, a landowner, also attended the trial. It’s possible that while he may have suspected James of some wrongdoing, his belief that James had committed an act of ‘maleficia’ (ie black magic) was not damning enough to serve the prosecution.

The incident which triggered Nowell’s witch-hunt occurred in March of 1612, when Alizon asked a travelling pedlar, John Law, to give her some pins. When he refused, Alizon grew angry and ‘cursed’ him. A black dog appeared, and gave chase to John Law. After running about a hundred yards, Law collapsed. He was taken to an inn where he was visited by his son, Abraham Law, who then informed Nowell. Reading between the lines, Froome speculates on why Alizon may have wanted the pins, then an expensive commodity. Using historic examples, Froome shows the widespread use of pins in healing, protective, and especially love magic – the very purpose that a teenage girl like Alizon might have sought them for.

Thomas Potts referred to a Nicholas Baldwyn, ‘a late schoolmaster at Colne’, who was approached by Thomas Redferne during the 1590s to mediate between his mother-in-law, Anne Whittle, and Robert Nutter, a landowner’s son. Interestingly, Froome suggests that Baldwyn might have been a magician – and as a schoolmaster, he would have been literate and possibly fluent in Latin. The ‘charms’ used by the Devices contained fragments of old Latin prayers, probably adapted from memory by Elizabeth Southerns. Significantly, they contained no references to devil worship, just as the alleged ‘curses’ against neighbours may have simply been outbursts of bad temper, and did not appear to have any ritual basis.

Alizon was later arrested and charged with ‘laming’ John Law (who had recovered enough to testify against her in court that summer.) With medical science being still in a rudimentary state, a natural cause of Law’s collapse, like a stroke or heart attack (he was described as stout) seems never to have been considered. In the course of her interrogation, Alizon admitted that her aged grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, was a healer of some renown.  Believing another elderly widow, Anne Whittle, to be responsible for her father’s death more than a decade earlier, Alizon also named her as a witch.

One can hardly begin to guess how intimidated the poor, uneducated Alizon was as she confessed her ‘crimes’ to Nowell at his grand house in Read. Turning once again to James, Froome speculates that he may have been badly beaten, if not tortured while on remand in Lancaster Gaol, where conditions were appalling (and indeed, his grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, would perish there before her trial). In his initial statements, James comes across as a shrewd, if impulsive young man. But by the time he came to court, James could barely stand and his reactions were described by Potts as ‘insensible’.

Casting doubt on Potts’ description of a pitiful scene where Alizon begged John Laws’ forgiveness, Froome suggests that would have been out of character for the feisty young woman and may have been invented to imply that she confessed in court. In fact, it’s possible that Alizon did not speak at all, except to confirm that the written statement read aloud by the judge represented her previous confession to Nowell.

Conversely, some of the more outlandish stories told by the witches may not have been mere inventions, forced upon them by the authorities, but manifestations of a personal fantasy that they may have sincerely believed. Drawing on Emma Wilby’s pioneering 2005 study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, Froome shows that visionary experiences were not unusual in early modern Britain, and the living conditions of many people – working long hours in darkness, enduring hunger, living close to nature and animals, and religious indoctrination  – meant that their conception of reality was radically different to what we now take for granted. And ‘cunning folk’ like the Devices would have been skilled at inducing these ‘altered states’, for example using dreams to identify a thief, or ‘scrying’ in a mirror.

Over three hundred pages (plus another hundred of footnotes), Froome skilfully unravels what might really have happened in Pendle during 1612. She uses examples of charms, spells and amulets, and includes photos of related artefacts from the Museum of Witchcraft collection, and conducts volunteer re-enactments of the Devices’ personalised rituals. This breathes new life into this tragic clash between early modern values (the Protestant Reformation coincided with the emergence of capitalism), and a much older English folk culture, drawn from Catholicism and generations of ordinary people whose relationship to nature was far more instinctive than we can now imagine.

While putting the trials of the Lancashire witches under the microscope, Froome also places them in a wider context of magic and persecution. On the continent, most witch-hunts were instigated by zealous Roman Catholic priests, and torture was openly practiced. English trials were mostly recorded in pamphlets similar to Potts’ treatise, and Froome notes some striking similarities between his text and that of Essex magistrate Brian Darcey’s account of the St Osyth witch trial of 1582 (the largest English outbreak to date before the Pendle case began.)

The nearest comparable scare, however, began in 1594, at the home of Nicholas Starkie at Cleworth Hall in Tyldesley, Lancashire. When his two eldest children experienced fits, Starkie hired an exorcist, Edmund Hartley. However, the children grew dependent on Hartley and their condition worsened. Starkie was the nephew of Roger Nowell, and it seems likely that the family’s ordeal made a grave impression on him. Moreover, ‘wise women’ like Elizabeth Southerns and Anne Whittle would probably have heard of the ‘conjurer’ in their midst, and may have been influenced by those memories when confessing to Nowell years later. The multiple charges made against the Devices and their fellow suspects in 1612 spanned almost two decades.

It was the evidence of Jennet Device, aged between nine and eleven, that would seal the fate of the Devices. She has often been represented as a kind of ‘changeling’, a demonic child who callously betrayed her entire family. Froome challenges this theory by pointing out that much of Jennet’s testimony was confessional, and the young girl was probably fighting for her life.  In any case, the use of a child’s testimony was forbidden by English law, making the resulting convictions even more dubious. (Jennet’s story is a sad one, as she would later be charged with witchcraft during the second Lancashire hunt of 1633-34. This latter trial eventually collapsed, but there is no record of Jennet’s acquittal and she may have died in prison.)

The infamous meeting at Elizabeth Southerns’ home on Good Friday was seized upon by Roger Nowell as an example of a ‘witches’ sabbat’, and twenty local people were later arrested, supposedly named by Jennet as guests. Froome shows that Good Friday had long been associated with protective magic, which the Devices needed dearly after the recent arrests of Alizon and James. Potts claimed that the suspects were plotting to blow up Lancaster Castle, which, if proved, would have been classified as treason. But this charge did not stick and those found guilty of witchcraft were hanged, not burned, according to legal custom.

Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches is too long and detail-oriented to serve as an ideal introduction to the Pendle case, unless the reader already has an interest in magic. The Trials of the Lancashire Witches by Edgar Peel and Pat Southern (first published in 1969), or The Lancashire Witch Craze: Jennet Preston and the Lancashire Witches, 1612 (published 1995), or even Mary Sharratt’s  novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill (2010), are all good places to start.

However, for anyone who has a serious interest in the history of witchcraft, Wicked Enchantments is essential reading. What could have been, in less imaginative hands, a dull, academic tome is rendered an utterly compelling human tragedy, driven by Joyce Froome’s infectious passion for her subject. By acknowledging the reality of magic in early modern Britain, Froome gives some power back to the victims of the witch-hunts; and yet, by exposing the flaws and contradictions within popular accounts of English trials, she also goes some way towards proving the defendants’ innocence.

Original artwork by John Gilbert

William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) was a historical novelist and one of the most popular English authors of the later 19^th century. Born in Manchester, he trained as a lawyer and practised in London, but his true ambitions were always literary. In his youth, Ainsworth read adventure stories and was an admirer of Dick Turpin, the highwayman whose exploits were the subject of popular legend. The tale of Turpin’s overnight ride from London to York on his steed, Black Bess, featured in Ainsworth’s first novel, Rookwood (1834.)

Among Ainsworth’s nearly forty novels, several were set in his native Lancashire, including his most famous work, The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (1848.)

The Pendle witch trials of 1612 were, at the time, the largest witch-hunt in English history, only eclipsed by the infamous Matthew Hopkins in 1645. Ainsworth became interested in the case in 1845 after a partner in his father’s law firm, James Crossley, edited a revised edition of court clerk Thomas Potts’ record of the trial, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancashire – first published in 1613.

Ainsworth visited Pendle several times while working on his novel between 1846-47. The Lancashire Witches was serialised in the Sunday Times in 1848, and published in three volumes the following year.

The novel’s subtitle, ‘A Romance of Pendle Forest’, seems to allude to Ann Radcliffe’s bestselling Gothic novel of 1791, The Romance of the Forest. Unlike today’s romantic novels, which focus mainly on love, the Romanticism of Radcliffe and Ainsworth was closer to adventure fiction, typically centred on the ‘courtly love’ of a heroic knight and his beloved maiden in peril, with elements of the supernatural.

Though the Pendle trials had a background of early 17^th century religious Puritanism, Ainsworth depicts a ‘Merry England’ setting which recalls the pre-Reformation era of the early 1500s. Had he described the harsh, unforgiving nature of early Protestantism with greater historical accuracy, the accusations against the so-called ‘witches’ might have seemed less credible to Victorian readers.

However, Ainsworth does show the decades of religious turmoil which led to the witch-hunts in a long prelude to the main action, wherein a Cistercian monk, Borlace Alvetham, is falsely accused of witchcraft by his rival, Brother John Paslew. Alvetham escapes execution by selling his soul to Satan, and returns as the warlock Nicholas Demdike, grandfather to Elizabeth Southern alias ‘Demdike’, one of the accused in 1612.

This backstory is fictional, but it is interesting to see witchcraft linked to Catholicism from the outset. Lancashire was considered to be a rather lawless and backward region at the time, and it certainly housed its share of Catholic recusants – including two martyrs, executed in the 1590s, both related to Alice Nutter, one of the witches hanged in 1612.

Alice Nutter has long fascinated scholars and authors alike. The widow of a prominent local farmer, she was of a higher social standing than her fellow accused and it has long been assumed that she was mistress of Roughlee Old Hall. This is incorrect, however, and she actually lived at the more humble Crowtrees Farm in Roughlee.

Ainsworth, like other early researchers, mistakenly believed Alice Nutter to be of nobler birth than she really was, and thereby chose to make her the ‘ringleader’ of the witches, though there is no evidence of this.

Using artistic licence, he also portrayed the young peasant girl, Alizon Device, as Alice Nutter’s illegitimate child. Though untrue, this was an effective fictional device – Alizon became a Cinderella figure of genteel origin, set apart from the other, less reputable Devices.

Alizon’s first appearance, as the ‘May Queen’ at the village fair, establishes the ‘Merry England’ myth and our sense of her as the beautiful, good-hearted maiden. Other characters, such as Elizabeth Device, are physically deformed (she has a squint in her left eye), or aged and blind like Demdike or Chattox, and this is said to signify their criminal tendencies.

Ainsworth’s lower class characters speak in a broad Lancashire dialect, but his gentry folk speak in a more literary style. With the exception of Alice Nutter and Alizon Device, Ainsworth depicts the accused witches, mostly poor, as wicked, whereas his educated characters are blessed with the finer human traits, such as courage and honesty – in line with the Christian ideal. Nance Redferne is attractive enough, but also duplicitous and cruel, while Jennet Device, chief witness for the prosecution, is a witch herself in Ainsworth’s retelling. Thomas Potts, the court clerk who recorded the case for posterity, is caricatured as a mean, petty civil servant.

However, the quality of Ainsworth’s research also reaped some benefits. With James Crossley’s aid, he learned that Elizabeth Southern (‘Demdike’) was descended from Isold de Heton, a 15^th century noblewoman who was a recluse at Whalley Abbey, before her scandalous affair with a freebooter named Blackburn was uncovered, leading her into disgraced exile. This illustrates how a poverty-stricken old woman like Demdike could, in fact, retain links to nobility – showing that social divisions were perhaps not as rigid as they seemed.

Though Ainsworth enjoyed both wealth and fame in his lifetime, his reputation has not endured quite so well. The superstitions and class prejudices of his era have aged badly, and works such as The Lancashire Witches were essentially middlebrow, written chiefly to entertain rather than to inform or prompt his readers to question the validity of the subject.

As an account of the Pendle trials, Ainsworth’s most celebrated tome is largely unreliable, and his narrative style is laboured and oblique. But the gothic and romantic motifs Ainsworth employed in the story are striking even today, and his details of Lancashire’s history and culture are, partially at least, of genuine value.

Read The Lancashire Witches online at Project Gutenberg

HerStoria is a new quarterly magazine, launched in Liverpool this February.  Its byline is ‘history that puts women in their place’. Women’s role in history has sometimes been overlooked, though the same could also be said for other groups such as the working class and non-whites. Focussing on their stories helps us to understand the past as experienced by society at large, and not only through the narrow perspective of ruling elites.

The current edition features a female football fan on its cover, and includes both famous names like Sylvia Pankhurst and Jane Austen, as well as lesser-known figures like Jane Nassau Senior, a former opera singer and pre-Raphaelite model who became a leading social reformer.  Another article revealed the hostility experienced by early women doctors. There are detailed book and web reviews, event listings, and an illustrated ‘Suffrage tour’ of Huddersfield.

My favourite piece was ‘Harlots, Whores and Witches’, in which Deborah Lea examines the pattern of witchcraft accusations in early modern England. Steering clear of the ‘epidemic’ trials which were actually quite rare, Lea turns her attention to slander cases brought by women in the ecclesiastical courts. She relates the label of ‘witch’ to other tensions, including attacks on sexual propriety. It should be added, however, that many accused witches were elderly, impoverished widows whose constant begging annoyed their neighbours.

I also enjoyed Louise Hume’s profile of Caroline of Brunswick, the spirited wife of King George IV. As a resident of Brighton, where George once lived as Prince Regent, I was interested to learn more about the woman whose name has been given to many local streets and even a pub. It seems that she was more than a match for her feckless husband.

HerStoria’s tone is neither academic or too populist, but somewhere inbetween. It will be useful to students of history and feminism as a starting-point for research, and entertaining to more general readers, male and female, who can explore the personalities and happenings of our collective past. Individual copies and subscriptions can currently be obtained online, but I do hope it will soon be stocked in newsagents and bookshops as well.

The Lancashire Witch Conspiracy is a remarkable new book by John A. Clayton, focusing on the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. He has undertaken extensive research to achieve what seemed impossible, bringing valuable new evidence to light. It was the largest witch trial in England at that time, surpassed only by Matthew Hopkins’ reign of terror as the Witchfinder General nearly four decades later.

No legal records have survived, but the Lancashire case was so sensational that a court clerk, Thomas Potts, was commissioned to write a pamphlet defending the hangings of eleven witches, mostly frail and elderly women. Designed to exonerate the judges from criticism, his account has perpetuated the myths surrounding magic and witchcraft.

In the first half of his book, Clayton details the history of Pendle Forest from the Norman Conquest until the reign of James I. He traces the lineage of Lancashire’s landowning gentry, many of whom were instrumental in the accusations of 1612. Clayton paints a picture of a rising gentry, stopping at nothing in their quest to gain more land. The contrast between their acquisitive lifestyle and the primitive conditions endured by the peasantry is shocking.

The network of intermarriages and family feuds sowed the seeds of resentment among the common people, and in the latter part of the book Clayton probes the forgotten history of those accused of witchcraft. They were part of a vanishing culture, and their closeness to nature and old-time religion made them vulnerable to the forces of change. The term ‘conspiracy’ is over-used but appears to be apt in this case.

For those with a casual interest in the story, this book might be too in-depth. But anyone with a passion to know more about the history of Pendle and the fate of its witches will find it a richly satisfying and definitive study, taking us to the heart of the matter and asking all the right questions, while keeping its enduring intrigue alive for generations to come.

Visit John A. Clayton’s website here

Read more about the Pendle Witches here

I studied Elizabeth Gaskell’s North And South for my English Literature A Level, without much enthusiasm. Nearly 20 years later, I’ve taken a look at Mrs Gaskell’s other work. She also wrote a number of short stories in the gothic genre, seemingly a world away from her more familiar social realism.

Lois The Witch is a novella based on the Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century. Its heroine is an English girl, orphaned and sent to live with relatives in America. Gaskell depicts the climate of the new country powerfully. From the outset there is a sense of barely-suppressed fear and suspicion.

Puritanism had its grip on the pioneers, and tales of Indians in the woods are fed to the unsuspecting Lois. Nattee, the Indian maid, tells other stories – of memory and magic, her only link to a land and culture that has slipped from her hands.

It is perhaps inevitable that Lois, stranger in a strange town, will be accused when rumours of witchcraft start to fly. The strength of this novella lies in its characters – Gaskell could easily have written them off as grotesques, given her themes of religious mania, ignorance and bigotry. But she resists the temptation, and shows through each individual how the hysteria spread and turned the people of Salem against each other.

As is not uncommon in Victorian fiction, Mrs Gaskell interjects the narrative with her own opinions, and the benefit of hindsight. The story is less effective when she inserts statistics and speeches from the real Salem trials. It reads too much like journalism and seems out of place when she has already evoked the phenomenon so well through her own imagination.

All in all, Lois The Witch is well worth reading for anyone who has an interest in the Salem case. It has been published as a novella, and is also included in a collection of Mrs Gaskell’s gothic works.

Read Lois The Witch online – here