Pendle Witch Trials (1612): England's Most Famous Witch Hunt

The Pendle witch trials were held at Lancaster Assizes on 18–19 August 1612, when a group of men and women from the Forest of Pendle in Lancashire were tried for murder by witchcraft. Nine of them were hanged at Lancaster on 20 August, and a tenth person linked to the case had already been executed at York. Thanks to a detailed published account by the court clerk Thomas Potts, the Pendle case is the best documented witch trial in English history.

Background: witchcraft in Jacobean England

Witchcraft was a crime in England under the Witchcraft Act of 1563, and a harsher act of 1604 made causing death or harm by witchcraft a capital offence. King James I was personally interested in the subject. He had written a treatise, Daemonologie (1597), after the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland, in which he had taken part.

Lancashire was seen by the government as a wild, remote county where Catholic recusancy, the refusal to attend Protestant services, was widespread. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, magistrates were under pressure to show zeal against both Catholics and witches. The Forest of Pendle, around the great hill of that name, was a poor upland area of scattered farms.

The families of Pendle

Two families stood at the centre of the case. One was headed by Elizabeth Southerns, known as Old Demdike, an elderly blind woman who lived at Malkin Tower with her daughter Elizabeth Device and her grandchildren Alizon, James and Jennet. The other was headed by Anne Whittle, known as Chattox, with her daughter Anne Redferne.

Both old women seem to have worked as cunning women, people paid to heal, find lost goods or counter curses. Such work could easily be redescribed as harmful witchcraft. According to the confessions, the families had quarrelled for years, partly over a theft from Malkin Tower.

How the case began

On 18 March 1612 Alizon Device met a pedlar from Halifax, John Law, on the road near Colne and asked him for some pins. He refused. Soon afterwards he collapsed, apparently suffering a stroke, and Alizon, who seems to have believed in her own powers, accepted that she had harmed him.

Law’s son Abraham complained to the local magistrate, Roger Nowell of Read Hall. At the end of March Nowell questioned Alizon, her mother and her brother James. Their statements implicated Demdike and Chattox, who were examined in early April and accused of several deaths over many years. Demdike, Chattox, Alizon and Anne Redferne were sent to Lancaster Castle to await trial.

The Malkin Tower meeting

On Good Friday, 10 April 1612, a gathering of family members and neighbours took place at Malkin Tower. Nowell and a fellow magistrate treated it as a meeting of witches, and the witnesses later claimed that a plot to blow up Lancaster Castle and free the prisoners had been discussed.

The meeting led to further arrests, including Elizabeth and James Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John and Jane Bulcock and Alice Gray. Jennet Preston of Gisburn, then in Yorkshire, was also named, tried at York and hanged there in late July.

The trials at Lancaster

The accused were tried before the judges Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham. Demdike had already died in the castle gaol. The prosecution relied heavily on confessions, many made without legal advice, and on the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device.

When Jennet gave evidence against her mother, Elizabeth Device screamed and cursed and had to be taken out of court. Jennet also testified against her brother James and her sister Alizon. Alizon, confronted with John Law, now disabled, confessed and begged his forgiveness.

Nine of the Pendle defendants were found guilty: Chattox, Anne Redferne, Elizabeth, James and Alizon Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, and John and Jane Bulcock. Alice Gray was acquitted. At the same assizes three women from Samlesbury were acquitted after the evidence of the girl accusing them collapsed, while Isobel Robey of Windle was convicted. The condemned were hanged together on Gallows Hill outside Lancaster on 20 August 1612.

Thomas Potts and his book

Thomas Potts, the clerk of the court, wrote up the trials at the judges’ request. His book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, appeared in 1613 and is the main source for everything known about the case.

Potts quotes depositions and courtroom exchanges at length, but he was not a neutral observer. He wrote to justify the verdicts and to praise the judges and magistrates, and he sometimes summarised rather than reported evidence. Historians therefore read his account carefully, alongside what it reveals by accident about poverty, family feuds and popular magic.

What the trials reveal

The Pendle case shows how ordinary village quarrels, illness and misfortune could turn into capital charges when they met a magistrate eager to act and judges willing to accept unusual evidence. The use of a child witness, normally barred, reflected James I’s view that witchcraft was so secret a crime that ordinary rules could be relaxed.

The scale was exceptional for England, where witch trials were usually small and executions fewer than on much of the Continent. Historians estimate that fewer than 500 people were executed for witchcraft in England between the 1560s and the 1680s, compared with tens of thousands across Europe as a whole.

Later events showed how fragile such evidence was. In 1633–34 a boy named Edmund Robinson accused a new group of Pendle people, among them Jennet Device; his story was exposed as fabricated, though several of the accused remained in prison. Much later, the Salem witch trials of 1692 showed similar patterns of child accusers and community fear.

Legacy and memory

The Pendle witches have become part of the identity of north-east Lancashire. Pendle Hill draws large numbers of walkers, especially at Halloween, and local trails, guided tours and visitor centres retell the story. Lancaster Castle, where the accused were held and tried, remained a prison until 2011 and is now open to visitors.

Writers have returned to the case many times. William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Lancashire Witches (1848) made the story famous in Victorian Britain, and Robert Neill’s Mist over Pendle (1951) introduced it to later generations. Historians, by contrast, have worked to recover the real lives of the accused from Potts’s partisan account.

For the 400th anniversary in 2012 a statue of Alice Nutter was unveiled in her village of Roughlee, and the numerals “1612” were laid out in huge temporary figures on the side of Pendle Hill. The exact site of Malkin Tower has never been identified, though several locations near Newchurch-in-Pendle and Blacko have been suggested.

Timeline

• 1604: A new Witchcraft Act makes harmful witchcraft a capital crime in England.
• 1612, 18 March: Alizon Device meets the pedlar John Law near Colne.
• 1612, 30 March: Roger Nowell questions Alizon, Elizabeth and James Device.
• 1612, early April: Demdike, Chattox, Alizon Device and Anne Redferne are sent to Lancaster.
• 1612, 10 April: A Good Friday gathering takes place at Malkin Tower.
• 1612, late July: Jennet Preston is tried and hanged at York.
• 1612, 18–19 August: The Pendle accused are tried at Lancaster Assizes.
• 1612, 20 August: The condemned are hanged at Lancaster.
• 1613: Thomas Potts publishes The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches.

Why it matters

The Pendle witch trials are the most fully recorded witch hunt in English history and a window into the fears, beliefs and legal practices of early Stuart England. They show how poverty, rumour and official zeal could combine with deadly results, and they remain a powerful part of Lancashire’s local memory.