The Lancashire Witches

A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill

Philip C. Almond

• Verlag: I.B. Tauris
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780857732644
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Landeskunde

In the febrile religious and political climate of late sixteenth-century England, when the grip of the Reformation was as yet fragile and insecure, and underground papism still perceived to be rife, Lancashire was felt by the Protestant authorities to be a sinister corner of superstition, lawlessness and popery. And it was around Pendle Hill, a sombre ridge that looms over the intersecting pastures, meadows and moorland of the Ribble Valley, that their suspicions took infamous shape. The arraignment of the Lancashire witches in the assizes of Lancaster during 1612 is England's most notorious witch-trial. The women who lived in the vicinity of Pendle, who were accused alongside the so-called Samlesbury Witches, then convicted and hanged, were more than just wicked sorcerers whose malign incantations caused others harm. They were reputed to be part of a dense network of devilry and mischief that revealed itself as much in hidden celebration of the Mass as in malevolent magic. They had to be eliminated to set an example to others.
In this remarkable and authoritative treatment, published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the case of the Lancashire witches, Philip C Almond evokes all the fear, drama and paranoia of those volatile times: the bleak story of the storm over Pendle

CHAPTER ONE

A Witch Hunt Begins

The Witch Hunter

In the annals of seventeenth-century witchcraft, it is Matthew Hopkins who is most remembered as the witch-finder, responsible for the hunting and executing of some sixty witches in the year 1645.¹ Roger Nowell’s tally of witches discovered was much lower. Nonetheless, it was he whose carefully constructed interrogations and examinations of suspects and witnesses appeared to lay bare a thick network of witches and witchcraft in Pendle Forest and its surrounds in the spring of 1612. Certainly Thomas Potts saw his activities as crucial. ‘In the end,’ he declared, ‘Roger Nowell Esquire, one of his Majesties Justices in these partes, a very religious honest Gentleman, painefull in the service of his Countrey: whose fame for this great service to his Countrey shall live after him, tooke upon him to enter into the particular examination of these suspected persons: And to the honour of God, and the great comfort of all his Countrey, made such a discovery of them in order, as the like hath not been heard of.’²

Potts was right. Outside of the East Anglian witch hunt in 1645 associated with Matthew Hopkins, the execution of ten persons in Lancashire, together with some eight found innocent, was unusual within the history of English witch trials. England was one of those parts of Europe, as James Sharpe notes, ‘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’.³ Thus, the nineteen persons tried at the Lancaster Assizes in August 1612 constituted the largest number of witches to be tried at one Assize in England up until that time. The ten executions that resulted are of numerical significance among the estimated five hundred executions for witchcraft that took place in England over the period from the passing of the first witchcraft statute in 1542 to the repeal of all witchcraft statutes in 1736.⁴ The ten executed were accused, during the course of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, of having murdered some nineteen persons.

Born in 1551, Roger Nowell was about sixty-two years of age when he began his hunt for witches. Of a staunchly Protestant heritage, he had succeeded his father in 1591 to the family estate in Read, Lancashire, in the neighbourhood of Pendle. We do not know what drove his understanding of demonology or witchcraft, though he was always more interested in criminal law than demonological lore. There is no sign in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches that he had read, for example, classic Catholic demonologies such as the Malleus Maleficarum, or English Protestant variants such as George Gifford’s A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerors (1587), his A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593), or William Perkins’s Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608). Nor do we know whether he was familiar with King James’s Daemonologie.⁵ What we can say with certainty is that he was familiar with the Witchcraft Act of 1604. As a magistrate, we would expect him to be, but more than this, it formed the intellectual framework which underpinned all his activities, and his interrogations and examinations were driven by it.

The Witchcraft Act of 1604 superseded the Elizabethan version of 1563. In that earlier version, ‘against Conjurations, Enchantments, and Witchcrafts’, the penalty for damage caused to persons or their property by witchcraft was one year’s imprisonment, and being pilloried for six hours once in every quarter of that year for the first offence. For any subsequent infraction, an offender faced the death sentence. Treasure seeking, the restoration of lost or stolen property, or provoking any person to unlawful love by witchcraft met the same penalties for a first offence. For a further offence, the punishment was the forfeiture of all goods to the Crown, and life imprisonment. The penalty was harsher for murder by means of witchcraft. The invocation of any evil and wicked spirits for any purpose whatsoever, or the use of any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery to cause the death of any person, warranted the death sentence.

The 1604 Act, ‘for the better restraining of said offences, and more severe punishing the same’ significantly modified the earlier statute. Now, not only the invocation or convocation of evil and wicked spirits was forbidden, but the death sentence was mandatory for any person who ‘shall consult, covenant with, entertaine, imploy, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose’. The death penalty was also the punishment for taking up ‘any dead man, woman, or child, out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth; or the skin, bone, or any other part of the dead person, to be imployed, or used in any manner of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Charme, or Inchantment‘. The death sentence for killing persons by witchcraft was extended to any witchcraft in which a person is ‘Wasted, Consumed, Pined, or Lamed, in His or Her body, or any part thereof’. The penalty for a second offence in treasure hunting, finding lost or stolen goods, or love magic was increased beyond forfeiture of goods and life imprisonment to death.⁶

Roger Nowell and his fellow justices of the peace, therefore, knew what they were looking for; and, as we will see, for the most part, they found it. Still, if Nowell and his Lancashire colleagues took up the new legislation, it was not similarly taken up at the Lancaster Assizes. Rather surprisingly, although there was plenty of evidence to support such charges, none of the indictments for witchcraft in the Lancashire trials were for consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding spirits; and Potts, in his editorialising, made little of it. Even though the legislation allowed for charges that amounted to heresy, the indictments in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches stayed focused on crimes – murdering and harming people and animals.⁷

The Satanic Covenant

However, for Roger Nowell, if not for Thomas Potts and Judges Bromley and Altham, the satanic compact or, perhaps better for the Protestant Nowell, the Presbyterian version embedded in the legislation – the satanic covenant – was the core of witchcraft. In English witchcraft cases, torture was not used to extract information or confessions. We do not know what enticements or threats, if any, Nowell might have used to persuade Alizon Device to confess to having lamed John Law through witchcraft in his examination of her on 30 March. She had, after all, at least according to Abraham Law, confessed the day before. He was no doubt a skillful interrogator; and, as Lyndal Roper has pointed out, the role of the interrogator was especially important. Particularly crucial was his capacity to create a relationship with the suspect, albeit one that was ambivalent and unbalanced. ‘It was a brutally unequal relationship,’ writes Lyndal Roper. ‘The interrogators shaped the story that the witch confessed, even if they did not consciously believe themselves to be doing so; the witch, though she provided the substance and detail of the material was not free to provide any narrative she liked. Consciously or unconsciously, she learned what she had to say.’⁸

Having extracted a confession from Alizon Device, we can imagine Roger Nowell moving excitedly to his next question, ‘How did you become a witch?’, and leading Alizon through a series of questions which elicited from her just how she had done so. No doubt, her account of how she became a witch came later in his interrogation of her, but it was with her account of this Satanic covenant that Nowell began his report of her confession:

She saith, That about two years agone, her Grandmother, called Elizabeth Sothernes, alias Dembdike, did (sundry times in going or walking together, as they went begging) perswade and advise this Examinate to let a Divell or a Familiar appeare to her, and that shee, this Examinate would let him suck at some part of her; and she might have and doe what shee would. And so not long after these perswasions, this Examinate being walking towards the Rough-Lee, in a Close of one John Robinsons, there appeared unto her a thing like unto a Blacke Dogge: speaking unto her, this Examinate, and desiring her to give him her Soule, and he would give her power to doe any thing she would: whereupon this Examinate being therewithall inticed, and setting her downe; the said Blacke-Dogge did with his mouth (as this Examinate then thought) sucke at her breast, a little below her Paps, which place did remaine blew halfe a yeare next after.⁹

She had never seen the black dog again, she went on to say, until that fateful day of 18 March when, having had her argument with the pedlar, it appeared again to her and offered to lame John Law. There were here neither charms, nor potions, nor spells, nor images – the usual accompaniments of witchcraft. The laming of John Law was, in Nowell’s account, the direct consequence of the spirit’s offer to Alizon. We can assume too, that at some time on the same day, John Law was asked by Roger Nowell about the black dog. He remembered a fierce black dog, and Alizon shortly afterwards, appearing in his room in the ale house, as he lay in great pain unable to move. Roger Nowell wove it into his written account. Nevertheless, Alizon was not indicted for covenanting with spirits, but, in accordance with the 1604 Act, only for having lamed John Law as Potts, in his customary formally legal way, put it ‘so that his bodie wasted and consumed, &c. Contra Formam Statuti, &c’.¹⁰ Alizon was held for trial at the Lancaster Assizes in August.

Nowell now had another inquiry to initiate, for he had ‘turned’ Alizon. She had implicated her grandmother, Elizabeth Sowtherns, alias Demdike, in her initiation into witchcraft. According to Thomas Potts, Demdike (or Dembdike), was an old woman of eighty years of age. She had been a witch for fifty years, though her daughter said forty, and she herself was to admit to only twenty. Potts was never to lay eyes on her, nor, though for different reasons, she on him, for she was both lame and blind. Apart from this, we have no physical description of her from him or any of the other sources. Potts, to his credit, resisted inventing one. She was a widow, but we know nothing of her husband. She was the ‘Sincke of villanie and mischiefe’ from which it all began.¹¹ She lived in the forest of Pendle, ‘a vaste place, fitte for her profession’,¹² at Malkin Tower, close to the home of her widowed daughter Elizabeth Device, and her grandchildren Alizon, James, and Jennet Device.¹³ She was a powerful matriarch.

The location of Malkin Tower is disputed,¹⁴ but no doubt it was within sight of Pendle Hill, the sombre ridge that brooded over the intersecting pastures, meadows, and moorland of the Ribble Valley as the events of 1612 unfolded. William Harrison Ainsworth in his The Witches of Lancashire in 1849 described the landscape in terms that evoke the dire social and economic situation faced by the inhabitants of Pendle at that time. ‘Dreary was the prospect on all sides,’ he wrote, ‘Black moor, bleak fell, straggling forest, intersected with sullen streams as black as ink, with here and there a small tarn, or moss-pool, with waters of the same hue – these constituted the chief features of the scene.’ Apart from occasional signs of human habitation, ‘All else was heathy waste, morass, and wood’.¹⁵

John Swain has recently informed us that substantial population growth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Pendle region had put severe pressure on the local economy, primarily based on cattle rearing and woollen cloth making. There seems to have been a number of families in Pendle who were forced to rent or squat in cottages with very little land, in spite of an Act of 1589 prohibiting the use of cottages with fewer than four acres attached to them. Malkin Tower was probably one of these.¹⁶ Demdike and her family would have lived on the edge of dire poverty, hence their involvement in begging as a necessary supplement to any other cottage industry in which they were engaged. The other major cunning family in this story, that of Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, also lived on the edge of penury as small tenant farmers.¹⁷

Demdike was also a professional ‘cunning woman’. The ‘cunning’ or ‘wise’ folk were practitioners of beneficent magic. They used herbal and magical medicine to heal the sick and the bewitched, find buried treasure, identify thieves, tell fortunes, induce love, and undo malevolent magic.¹⁸ They were prolific in early modern England, and popular: ‘they attaine such credit,’ declared Reginald Scot in 1584, ‘as I have heard (to my greefe) some of the ministerie affirme, that they have had in their parish at one instant, xvii. or xviii. witches: meaning such as could worke miracles supernaturallie’.¹⁹

Reginald Scot, like most Protestant theologians, did not distinguish the cunning folk from practitioners of malevolent witchcraft. Both had made compacts with the Devil, if only tacit ones in the case of the cunning folk. Indeed, William Perkins saw cunning or wise folk, the ‘unbinding’ witches, as more abhorrent than the ‘binding’ ones. ‘The good witch,’ he declared, ‘is he or shee that by consent in a league with the devill, doth use his helpe, for the doing of good onely. This cannot hurt, torment, curse, or kill, but onely heale and cure the hurts inflicted upon men or cattell, by badde Witches … Now howsoever both these be evil, yet of the two, the more horrible & detestable Monster is the good Witch: for look in what place soever there be any bad Witches that hurt onely, there also the devil hath his good ones, who are better knowne then the bad, being commonly called Wisemen, or Wise-women.’²⁰

No doubt Perkins found the good witch more threatening because he or she was in direct competition with the clergy. As Leland Estes points out, for the Puritan clergy, in thei...