England’s Notorious Pendle Witch Trials
Public DomainTwo of the accused witches during the Pendle Hill witch trials.
As the Basque witch trials raged in Spain, another, smaller witch trial was taking place in England. Unlike many other witch trials, however, the Pendle trials included people who readily agreed they were witches.
At the time, many in England were on high alert for witches. James VI — now James I of England — had written a creed against witchcraft after his “brush” with witches in New Berwick, and local authorities had their eye out for any sign of witchcraft. In Pendle Hill, a Catholic stronghold in Protestant England, this led to an investigation into a woman named Alizon Device.
In 1612, a peddler named John Law accused Device of cursing him and causing him to have a stroke after he refused to give her some of his wares. Swiftly put on trial, Device confessed that she had asked the Devil to attack Law. Then Device claimed that her grandmother was a witch as well and that members of the Chattox family (who happened to be rivals of Device’s family) were also members of the occult.
Tom Oates/Wikimedia CommonsLancaster Castle, where some of the Pendle Hill witch trials took place.
From here, accusations of witchcraft began to fly in Pendle Hill. Not only were Device’s family and the Chattox family accused of being witches, but so were six other people. The accused witches went through sensational trials, during which Device stuck to her story about cursing Law. She even fell to her knees when he entered the courtroom, confessed again, and burst into tears.
In the end, 12 people were accused of killing 10 people using witchcraft. Just 11 of them went to trial — one, Device’s grandmother, died after being imprisoned in a dank cell — and 10 were found guilty. They were subsequently hanged for this “crime.”
Though the witch trials of Pendle Hill were not as expansive as those in the Basque territory or even those in New Berwick, they stand as some of England’s most notorious and best documented. They were intricately recorded by Thomas Potts, the clerk of the court, in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster.
