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This episode contains discussions about the persecution of witches and witchcraft. It should be noted that for this discussion, these terms refer to the medieval Christian concept of witches and witchcraft, and not modern wickah or witchcraft. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.
I am one of those people. My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. Witchcraft is a fascinating topic that is often written and wondered about, yet is still quite elusive and mysterious. It's also interesting because popular opinion about witchcraft has remained relatively the same since it was officially defined in Europe in the early 15th century.
That popular opinion is that witches are people to be feared and punished. While humans today don't fear witchcraft as much as they did in the past, the fact remains that witches have been feared, persecuted, imprisoned, and killed for much of human history. In the medieval era, witches were feared so much that witch hunts often resulted in accusations, trials, and sometimes executions of suspected witches. Between 40 and 50,000 suspected witches were tried and executed between 1450 and 1750 in Europe and America, with most of these trials occurring between 1580 and 1660.
Around 500 of these occurred in England. One of the biggest witch trials to occur in England during this time were the Pendle Witch Trials, or Lancashire Witch Trials. Before I get into these, some context on witchcraft in general is required. This about witchcraft and magic have long been part of many cultures all across the world, but it was in Europe, specifically the area around Switzerland in the early 1400s where what we now think of in the Western world as a stereotypical witch was defined.
Trials at this time and place established that witches were magical practitioners who owed their powers to the devil and received these powers through packs with him. This version of the witch further developed during the 1400s, becoming more complex. It became accepted knowledge that witches were not isolated individuals but members of a demonic, anti-Christian, heretical cult. This new ideological era of witch hunting is well represented by the writings of Dominican Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Springer in their 1487 publication, Malius Maleficarum, or The Witch Hammer.
This book lists many physical and mental behaviors of women that were believed to indicate witchcraft or bewitchment and required punishment. It also gave guidance in the prosecution and dispatch of identified witches. At the time it was widely regarded by many lay people to be the irrefutable truth thanks to a statement in the beginning of the book that said all who doubt the existence of witches and this method of dealing with them were in opposition to the church and were therefore heretics. After publication of the Malius Maleficarum, there was a noticeable drop in witch accusations and executions.
However, the number rose again in England in the 1560s after heightened concerns over religious conformity helped renew official church interest in what were termed the devil's agents. These concerns over religious conformity came with the Protestant Reformation, which, while usually considered to have started with the publication of the 95 Theses by Martin Luther in 1517, became officially visible in England when King Henry VIII disagreed with Pope Clement VII on the question of marriage annulment in 1529. It was during Henry VIII's son's reign, King Edward VI, that Protestantism took over for Catholicism as the official religion in England. Witchcraft was made a criminal offense in 1542.
During Queen Mary I's reign, which began in 1553, Edward's Protestant reforms were reversed, beginning a Catholic counter-reformation, where a resurgence in Catholicism included the exiling of Protestant populations, heresy trials, and the creation of the Inquisition. Queen Mary I soon became known as Bloody Mary for her intense persecution of Protestants. Upon assuming the throne after Mary in 1558, Queen Elizabeth I restored England to Protestant ism. Elizabeth also undertook a campaign to suppress Catholicism in England, however it was more moderate and less bloody than Mary's.
During this religious upheaval, both Catholics and Protestants attempted to validate their theology by performing successful exorcisms and prosecuting witches. The general population were forced to adopt the official religion of the crown, and therefore were expected to conform to whatever sect was in power at the time, making for a very confusing 50 or so years. James I became king of England in 1603, a time when the upper echelon of society were very skeptical about the witchcraft threat, but the general population were still quite concerned. King James I had written a book in 1597 called Demonology, as he had become quite obsessed with finding witches.
However, at the time of the trials we're going to talk about in this episode, he had become more skeptical. At this point, he was more interested in exposing witchcraft fraud. By 1630, skepticism about witchcraft began to grow in educated and official circles in both England and continental Europe, causing a final decline in witch trials and executions. The last official execution of an accused witch took place in Sweden in the 1670s, but there were witch burnings in Poland well into the 1700s.
According to Dr. James Sharpe, a professor of history at York University, scholars have been fascinated in witch hunts and trials since shortly after they ended, and have hypothesized many reasons as to why they occurred. Early ideas suggest they occurred due to the ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity of the people of the time, especially the clergy and trial judges. However, more recently, thanks to more in-depth study of the cultural, political, and religious context in which the trials occurred, the reasons for witch hunts have been found to be quite complex and very dependent on the location and time of the individual witch hunts, as well as the social, economic, religious, and political climate.
However, there are several consistent factors that appear to contribute to most instances of witch hunts. One of these was the Christian Church, which created a specific image of the witch as a servant of Satan and an enemy of God, as well as putting stress on their followers to conform to whichever sect was currently in power, causing its good citizens, which meant to the church good Christians, to either deviate from the church or seek out witches in order to prove their own goodness, lest they be suspected of heresy or witchcraft themselves. Another factor is interpersonal tensions between villagers, spats between neighbors, usually when one neighbor denied help to another. A person in need out of anger and desperation often cursed at the unhelpful neighbor and was then labeled a witch.
This type of conflict often set witch hunts in motion as more neighbors cried witch on the same person or on others in the same community. In England between 1580 and 1660, tension in small communities was often caused by a growing population, a more drastic distinction between rich and poor, and the rich becoming more commercially oriented rather than community oriented. The role of gender also came into play. Eighty percent of accused and executed witches were female.
The theological decrees, judicial laws, and courts were all written and run by males. That's not to say there weren't male witches, there were, but they were usually in the minority. It's also important to note that many of those accusing women of being witches and giving evidence against them were also women. European witch trials often had very similar features when it came to accusations.
Witches were accused of flying by night to sabbits or large meetings of witches, having sex with demons, having familiars or consorting with demons that took the shape of animals, and cursing people, crops, and animals with ill health. Many times large groups of people were accused, labeled as covens, and tried together. However, the rich accusations and trials of England were a little different than those of continental Europe, in that most times night flying, sabbits, and sexual encounters with demons were not mentioned, and individuals or only a few people were accused and tried at a time. Even so, the witch trials in Lancashire near Pendle Hill had far more in common with continental witch trials.
The local traditions of the area also impacted the Lancashire witch trials. There were a variety of witch beliefs in the area, not just the official packed with the devil witch. Cunning persons, or wise women and men, were people that practiced good witchcraft, usually herb-based medicine, and midwifery, or gave advice on how to care for sick animals. The community often depended on cunning people, as physicians were expensive and often reserved for the social elite.
Many times a popular cunning person developed a loyal following in their community and a sort of power generated by respect for their practice. There were also many fraudulent cunning people, hoping to dupe unsuspecting villagers out of their money with fake medicines and charms. Around the time of the trials which took place in 1612, Lancashire was thought of as a wild, lawless place by many officials. It was also a suspected Catholic holdout, as there hadn't been a local official church governing body present in the area since the 1530s.
Not just a religious order, local churches were like civic bodies in many respects. They oversaw records of births, marriages, and deaths, helped settle community disputes, acted as go-betweens for the rich and poor, and kept the calendar. The trials of the Lancashire or Pendle witches occurred in 1612, and unlike many witch trials, these were quite well documented for the time. This is because the clerk of the Lancashire court, Thomas Potts, published an account of the trials soon after they occurred.
This book was quite popular for many years afterward, and has been reprinted many times. While the work is not a transcript of the proceedings, it does recount what happened during and after the trial, and Potts' reflections on the situation. It's important to remember that even though much of our knowledge of the trial comes from Thomas Potts' book, it wasn't an innocent text. It did rely heavily on witnessed depositions and accounts of what happened in court, but it was also edited in order to reveal all the dreadful details in the most dramatic way.
More importantly, Potts was conscripted to write his account by the judges of the case, and therefore the account shows them as impressive, efficient, and serving justice to the evil viewers. Before we get into the details of the Lancashire witch trials, let's pause for a word from our sponsors. Our regular sponsor is Audible.com. Audible can provide you with interesting and engaging audiobooks.
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And now back to the podcast. Most of what I'm about to relate comes from Thomas Potts' book, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancashire, which was published a year after the trials took place. As I said, much of what he wrote was augmented to validate the judge's decision to hang nine women, including one in York and two men for witchcraft. It's likely much of what he wrote has been embellished, but without actual trial records, it's hard to say how much.
The Lancashire witch trials began with one incident involving a young woman named Alison Device, granddaughter of a local Pendle cunning person known as Old Demdike or Mother Demdike, but whose real name was Elizabeth Southerns. Alison was traveling through Troden Forest, about five miles east of Pendle Hill on the 21st of March, 1612. She was either begging or making her way home. She came upon a peddler named John Law and either begged or wanted to purchase some pins from him.
He refused, and she apparently cursed his name. Almost immediately, he collapsed in what is thought by modern medical professionals to have been a stroke. Law made it to the nearest town, Colne, where he remained in a fragile state until his son, Abraham, arrived. Abraham Law listened as his father described the incident.
John Law said that on top of the cursing, he'd also seen a large black dog with fiery eyes, standing near him when Alison came to look in on him in Colne. Believing that the granddaughter of Old Demdike had used witchcraft against his father, Abraham Law reported the incident to the local justice of the peace, magistrate Roger Noel. At 65, Roger Noel was an experienced justice and an important landowner in the area. He had sound, Protestant family connections, but there's no direct evidence of his attitude or knowledge of witchcraft.
Therefore, it's unclear if he was a determined witch hunter or a gentleman with standard views that was sucked into a growing mass of accusations and confessions of witchcraft. On the 30th of March, Noel interviewed Abraham Law, then called in Alison device, thinking she had really caused John Law's sudden illness, Alison confessed. She said after Law had refused to sell her pins, she'd met a black dog in the forest. It had asked her what she wanted it to do to John Law.
She had asked what it could do, and it said, lame him. Alison went on to say that her grandmother had seduced her into the service of the devil. She also said Demdike had bewitched their neighbor John Nutter's cow to death, and that Demdike could do magic like creating butter for milk in an instant. She then called out Anne Whittle, another cunning person whose alias was Chateox, for bewitching her father, John Device, to death, for not paying a yearly sum he only paid, so Chateox would leave him alone.
Alison revealed that Demdike and Chateox had been rivals for years, vying for customers as well as who was the most powerful healer in the area. In April 2nd, Noel called in Elizabeth's Southerners, alias Old Demdike, as well as Anne Whittle, alias Chateox. Demdike confessed that 20 years previous, she had come across the devil or a spirit in the shape of a young boy. He had given his name as Tib and said if she gave him her soul, she would have all she desired.
She asked nothing of Tib at first, but he came to her often. At one point he came to her as a brown dog and tried to suckle blood from under her left arm. She was driven mad for two months after that. She also said that she never did any harm, even when she could have done so against those who wronged her.
She then accused Chateox's daughter Anne Redfern of making clay dolls in the shape of people in order to be rich them. Chateox blamed Demdike for sending the devil to her in the shape of a man, who she said took her body and soul. His name was fancy and she let him suck blood from her left rib. In return he had fed her and promised gold and silver, but she had received no money and the food did not satisfy her hunger.
Around April 4th, Roger Noel decided that there was enough evidence to commit Alison, Old Demdike, Chateox and Anne Redfern to prison in Wall Tower at Lancaster Castle. But they would await a full trial at the next session of the Assizes in August. Courts of Assizes were periodic courts held to rule on civic and criminal cases in England. Assizes heard the most serious cases every quarter year, cases that were too serious for regular local magistrates courts.
A day or two after the accused witches of Pendle were jailed across the border of Lancashire in York, another woman, Jeanette Preston, was tried and acquitted for using witchcraft to kill a child. The fate of Jeanette Preston and the witches of Pendle would soon become tied together. On April 10th, Good Friday, a meeting was held at Malkin Tower, the home of Old Demdike and her family. Most people in the area were at church, as it was a criminal offense to skip church on holy days, which is why a young constable was alerted by neighbors to this illegal meeting.
The constable also noted that Jane's device, Alison's brother, had stolen a sheep in order to provide a meal for the meeting. The constable alerted Roger Noel. It was suspected that it was a meeting of witches, plotting how best to set their brother in free. Talk even circulated that these witches were planning a second gunpowder plot in which, like Guy Fox had attempted at Parliament in 1605, they would use gunpowder to blow up Lancaster Castle.
This is true or not is not known, but it's more likely this rumor sprung from fear rather than fact. On April 27th, Elizabeth Device, Alison's mother and her two siblings, James and Jeanette Device, confessed to the meeting at Malkin Tower in front of Roger Noel. They also implicated many other locals as witches by saying they had been present at the meeting. These accusations convinced Noel and the other justices of the peace he conferred with that they were facing a major witchcraft outbreak.
The three devices were jailed. The justices' fears were confirmed when on May 19th, Chateox and James Device, who had already confessed to being witches by this point, made further statements to the keeper of Lancaster Castle, Thomas Koval, the mayor of Lancaster, William Sands and another justice of the peace, James Anderson. They accused many people in the area of witchcraft. Alice Nutter, a gentle woman of fortune from nearby roughly, was accused of being present at the witch's meeting and of working with Dendike to be witch people.
Catherine Hewitt, alias Mould Heels, was accused by Jane's device of bewitching people. Jane and John Bullcock, a mother and son, were accused of bewitching a local noblewoman and being present at the meeting. Margaret Pearson was accused of having a familiar in the shape of a man with cloven feet who helped her kill a horse in nearby Pentahem. Isabel Robey of St.
Helens was accused of bewitching a man who had jilted her. Jeanette and Jane's device especially gave plentiful and vital evidence which initiated wider allegations of witchcraft around Pendle Hill. James said he had met a brown dog coming out of Malcan Tower on the day of the meeting and that he'd hurt shrieks like those of crying children outside the tower. The dog had asked him for his soul so that he could have revenge on whoever he wanted.
Then that night, James said a thing like a cat or a hair came to him in the night and sat on his chest. He also stated that his sister, Alice and device, had bewitched Jane Bullcock's son, John, and that chat talks had dug up three skulls from the local cemetery, removed some of their teeth and given them to his grandmother, Demdike. He also said Demdike made a clay doll of Ann Nutter, a relative of Alice Nutter, and burned it, bewitching Ann to death. He then told of his mother Elizabeth devices, familiar, which looked like a brown dog that was called a ball.
Jeanette, who was nine years old at the time, gave evidence against James, saying he had sold himself to the devil and that his familiar was a black dog named Dandy. She said that at the meeting of Malcan Tower, James had stolen the sheep and that John Bullcock had turned the spit to roast that sheep. She then said her mother had tried to teach her two spells, one for creating drink and one for curing a bewitched person. She also mentioned that Jeanette Preston, who had been tried in York previously and acquitted, had been present at the Malcan Tower meeting.
According to Potts account, at this point, all the suspects were beginning to panic and accuse one another. Neighbors brought up incidents from years before, and it became more obvious that a feud between old Demdike's family and chat talks family was espousing most of the accusations. Potts also recorded that Jeanette's mother screamed out in fury, cursing her daughter and had to be removed from the room while Jeanette was accusing her. As I said, Sabbats and demonic pacts hadn't really been common in English witchcraft trials previous to the Lancashire trials.
According to Dr. Stephen Pumphrey's senior lecturer at Lancaster University, it's possible Potts wrote these into his account in order to vindicate the judges for their actions. He was also likely appealing to royal authority, as Potts' report contains adherence to the principles set out by King James in his book, Demonology. On the 27th of July, Jeanette Preston was tried again in York for suspecting witchcraft against the Lister family members of the local gentry.
This time, she was found guilty and sentenced to execution by hanging. Potts included her trial in his account as the same judges had presided over both trials and Jeanette Preston was mentioned in the accusations of Jeanette device. Jonathan Lumbee, rector of Eccleson, Chester suggests that the two trials were actually more interrelated than previously thought, as the gentry accusers and magistrates in both cases were part of the same Protestant social network and had family experiences suffering at the hands of alleged witches. Lumbee hypothesizes that the outcome of Jeanette Preston's trial had a powerful impact on the Lancashire witch trial.
On the 18th and 19th of August, the Pendle witches all stood a trial. By this point, all to Demdike had died in prison. Chateaux, Elizabeth device, James device, and Anne Redfern were tried on the 18th. All but Redfern were found guilty.
On the 19th, Redfern was tried again, along with Alice in Device, Alice Nutter, John and Jane Bullcock, Catherine Hewitt, Isabelle Robie, and Margaret Pearson. All were found guilty. All but Margaret Pearson were sentenced to hang. Pearson was sentenced to stand on a pillery during four market days in four separate towns to publicly confess her crimes.
She would then spend one year in prison. Some of the accused witches, such as Alice in Device, seemed to have truly believed themselves guilty, but others protested their innocence to the end. On August 20th, the ten people found guilty of witchcraft, eight women and two men, were executed by hanging. Along with Jeanette Preston, these eleven hangings were an unprecedented death toll for a single witchcraft trial in England.
At the time, witchcraft trials had a high acquittal rate, and when people were found guilty, very few were executed. The execution of eleven witches was very unusual. Immediately after the trials and executions, Judge Sir Edward Bromley, who presided over both the Lancashire Witches and Jeanette Preston's trial, published a tract justifying his decisions in the case. It's possible this was done as a response to the public reaction to such a large number of executions.
Three other women accused as witches in Sammelsbury were acquitted at the Lancashire sizes. A young woman, Grace Sowerbutts, had accused four women of abusing her by witchcraft and cannibalizing children. One woman wasn't even tried, and the rest of the accusations were thrown out of court. Judge Edward Bromley had presided over this case, too, and Potts wrote that Bromley had a knack for recognizing fraudulent charges, and that these charges had actually been part of a Catholic plot.
This shows how diverse witchcraft beliefs and the official response to them could be in Lancashire, as well as how witchcraft was a contested issue between Catholics and Protestants. Having caused the deaths of her mother, brother, and sister, Jeanette Devise may have eventually been accused of witchcraft herself. A woman with that name was listed in a group of twenty tried at the Lancashire sizes on the 24th of March 1634, however we can't be certain that it was the same Jeanette Devise. An official record from 1636 states Jeanette Devise was still held in prison two years after her trial.
There are many interpretations of what was really going on during the Lancashire witch trials, a feud between two families, the rich trying to get rid of some of the more powerful poor, or Protestants trying to get rid of suspected Catholics. While we have no solid evidence, there are traces to be found in Thomas Potts' account, as well as the original legal documents surrounding the case. As I mentioned before the break, the area was suffering from population pressure, resulting in poverty and a lack of resources, especially for those at the lowest tier of society. However, it's hard to link economic pressure directly to the 1612 trials, as most of the accused and the accusers were of the same social class.
The area around Pendle Hill was thought of as a Catholic stronghold by many Protestants. Some researchers have found some evidence for religion playing apart in the Lancashire trials. However, the local Protestant manifesto doesn't mention witchcraft as an issue in the area. In summary, we don't know the exact mix of contributing factors that created a witch panic in Pendle in 1612.
We still don't know why the authorities were so ready to accuse so many people of witchcraft, and then so keen to see them hanged. We also don't know the location of Malcolm Tower, or where Chattox family lived. We do know a number of factors influenced the situation, but the exact combination of factors has been lost to history. If you'd like to know more about the Lancashire witch trials, I highly recommend a collection of academic papers on many aspects of the trial called the Lancashire Witches Histories and Stories, edited by Robert Poole.
Another book I found very useful in my research was James Sharps' book Witchcraft in Early Modern England. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, Witchcraft remains mysterious despite hundreds of years of study surrounding it. Even more fascinating is that despite this plethora of research, public opinion on witchcraft has remained relatively the same since the early 15th century. This antiquated fear of witches, the lasting reputation of evil, and the misunderstanding and confusion about what was really going on has left witches, witchcraft, and witchhaunts shrouded in mystery.
Which is why the Lancashire witch trials and all witch trials for that matter spark our morbid curiosity. The Morbid Curiosity Podcast was produced by H. Lloyd. If you'd like to get in touch or suggest a morbid topic for me to talk about, you can tweet the show, at Morbid Podcast, or find us on Facebook and Instagram, at Morbid Curiosity Podcast.
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My name is Halley, and until next time, thanks for listening.