Ten people were hanged after the Pendle witch trials of 1612 because an English court at Lancaster found them guilty of witchcraft, and a nine-year-old girl’s evidence weighed heavily with it. The case began with a request for pins.
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How did it start?
Near Colne in Lancashire, Alizon Device met a pedlar named John Law and asked him for some pins. The Guardian’s Blake Morrison writes that she may have been offering to buy them, but more likely, being poor, she was begging.
The pedlar refused. She cursed him. A few hundred yards on, he collapsed with a stroke that paralysed his left side and left him unable to speak.
His son reported Alizon to a local magistrate, Roger Nowell, who interrogated her. BBC Bitesize also dates the start of the case to 1612 and says the accusations spread to other people, mostly women related to Alizon.
Why did it grow?
Nowell sent four women to await trial in Lancaster. Elizabeth Device stayed at home, at Malkin Tower, which Morrison says seems to have been a cottage and not a tower.
On Good Friday, Morrison reports, she and her friends and neighbours talked of travelling about 40 miles to Lancaster to free the four. He calls it improbable that they would ever have acted. Nowell took no chances, and 15 more men and women were charged.
The legal background mattered too. BBC Bitesize notes that King Henry VIII declared witchcraft a crime in 1542.
What did the court hear?
The trials ran over two days, Tuesday 18 August and Wednesday 19 August 1612. The jury weighed a range of offences, including murder and cannibalism.
The testimony of Jennet Device, aged nine, was crucial. Standing on a table in front of the court, she spoke against her mother, her brother and her grandmother. Her mother had to be taken away before the evidence could begin.
Morrison notes a contrast. The judge set aside what an older child said against three other accused people. Jennet’s modesty and innocence were taken to guarantee her reliability.
What happened next?
The court convicted ten of the accused and condemned them. The hangings took place the next day, on the moor above Lancaster. Elizabeth’s mother, Demdike, had already died in prison during her four months there. BBC Bitesize also records that ten people were convicted and executed.
Justice Bromley told those acquitted that some among them were as deep in the matter as the condemned.
The story did not end there. Jennet herself was accused of witchcraft in a second Pendle case in 1634, on a child’s say-so, and she was acquitted. The law against witchcraft in England was repealed in 1736.
Why do people still remember it?
Morrison gives two reasons. So many people were tried at once, which was rare, and the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, published a detailed account.
Today, BBC Bitesize says, you can tour the dungeons and courtrooms at Lancaster Castle, and follow a sculpture trail in Pendle that tells the stories behind each of the accused.
