The Pendle Witches — 1612, Lancashire

In the shadow of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, the year 1612 became a turning point in England’s history of witch trials. What began as small quarrels and local suspicions spiraled into one of the most famous witchcraft prosecutions in the country. Ten people were hanged. Their stories were preserved not as quiet village tales, but in a published account meant to instruct the nation on how to recognise and punish witches.^[1]

A Landscape Primed for Fear

Early seventeenth-century Lancashire was a place where hardship and belief intertwined. The countryside around Pendle Hill was marked by poverty, harsh winters, and uncertain harvests. Families lived close to the land and closer still to each other’s secrets. Old feuds, unpaid debts, and simmering resentments lived side by side with folk remedies, charms, and whispered prayers.

It was also a region that church authorities and officials regarded as “backward” in matters of religion, a place where older beliefs clung stubbornly to life. In such a climate, the line between a village healer and a suspected witch could vanish with a single accusation.

The Demdike and Chattox Families

At the heart of the Pendle trials stood two rival families, each headed by an elderly widow whose name would become synonymous with witchcraft:

Elizabeth Southerns, known as Old Demdike, long whispered about as a woman with dangerous knowledge.
Anne Whittle, known as Old Chattox, matriarch of the rival family, also rumored to practice charms and curses.

Both women belonged to the tradition of “cunning folk”—people called upon for healing, charms, and protection. For years, villagers sought them out to cure sickness, lift a curse, or turn away bad luck. But in hard times, the same reputation that brought people to their doors could just as easily turn against them. When animals died, children sickened, or bread failed to rise, older stories about bargains and spirits resurfaced.

Old Demdike and Old Chattox had been locked in hostility for years. Their families traded insults and suspicions, and misfortunes were often laid at one another’s feet. That rivalry would prove fatal when the hunt for witches began.

The Spark: A Pedlar, a Curse, and a Chain of Accusations

The surviving records point to a seemingly small incident as the spark for the Pendle witch panic. A young woman, Alizon Device, granddaughter of Old Demdike, reportedly asked a passing pedlar for some pins. When he refused her, he soon suffered a sudden seizure or collapse in the road.

To a modern reader, the pedlar’s illness might look like a stroke or fit. To frightened onlookers steeped in tales of witchcraft, it looked like a curse unleashed. Under questioning, Alizon herself was said to have confessed that she had bewitched him. That confession was the first stone in an avalanche.

Authorities began looking not only at Alizon, but at her family and their known rivals. Old Demdike was arrested, and under pressure and interrogation she gave a confession that would later be used against her and others. Old Chattox and her kin were soon drawn into the investigation as tensions deepened and accusations spread like wildfire through the Pendle countryside.

Malkin Tower: The Good Friday Gathering

The story of Pendle took a darker turn at a crumbling cottage known as Malkin Tower, home to the extended Demdike family. On Good Friday of 1612, while some of the accused were already imprisoned, relatives and friends gathered there for what authorities later insisted was a witches’ sabbath.

The meeting may have been nothing more than a poor family sharing food and comfort at a time of terror. But when local officials learned of it, the gathering was recast as evidence of conspiracy. It was said that those at Malkin Tower plotted to blow up Lancaster Castle and free the imprisoned witches, and that they feasted on stolen goods in the Devil’s name.^[2]

Attendees at Malkin Tower were arrested and examined in turn. Each new arrest widened the circle of suspicion, until more than a dozen people stood accused. By the time the Assizes approached, the case had grown far beyond one alleged curse on a pedlar.

The Lancaster Assizes: August 1612

The trials took place at Lancaster Castle on the 18th and 19th of August 1612. The proceedings were later written up by the court clerk, Thomas Potts, in a book titled The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, which he claimed reflected the exams and trials faithfully.^[1]

Eleven people stood charged with witchcraft; ten would be condemned to die. Among the accused were:

Alizon Device
Elizabeth Device (her mother)
James Device (her brother)
Old Demdike (who died in prison before trial)
Old Chattox (Anne Whittle)
Anne Redferne (Chattox’s daughter)
Alice Nutter, a relatively wealthy woman whose presence among the accused showed that status offered no real protection from suspicion.
Katherine Hewitt
John Bulcock and Jane Bulcock
Isabel Robey of Windle

Many of the accused offered confused, frightened, or contradictory statements. Some, like Old Demdike, had confessed earlier under pressure. Others denied the charges to the end. But in a courtroom primed to believe in Satanic plots, denials carried little weight.

The Child Who Condemned Her Family

Perhaps the most haunting figure in the Pendle story is nine-year-old Jennet Device, younger daughter of Elizabeth Device and sister to Alizon and James. Too young to understand the full weight of her words, she became the star witness against her own family.

In a scene that still chills historians, Jennet was brought into court, seated on a table so the judges could see and hear her clearly. When her mother Elizabeth was brought in, the woman reportedly screamed and cursed at the sight of her child giving evidence. Jennet, coached and questioned, described her mother and others as witches, claiming to have seen gatherings and familiar spirits.

According to Potts, Jennet declared that she had seen her mother attend witch meetings and call upon spirits to harm people. Her testimony, repeated with the solemnity of a child who believed she was telling the truth, sealed the fate of her family. The court treated her words as pure, untainted by adult fear or calculation. In reality, they were shaped by the terror and pressure surrounding a child who had been taught what to say.

Voices from the Trial

Potts’s published account preserves fragments of what the accused are said to have confessed. Whether these are exact words or polished versions, they reveal the kind of story the court wanted to hear.

In his book, he describes Old Demdike as admitting to a long relationship with a spirit:

She confessed that some twenty years past, a spirit had appeared to her, promising that if she would give him her soul, she should have anything she desired.^[1]

Of Jennet Device, he writes:

She said she had seen the Devil kill a man, and had seen many witches ride and fly through the air.^[1]

Whether spoken under fear, shaped by suggestion, or crafted by Potts himself, these lines offered the judges exactly what they expected: a world in which poor villagers made pacts with devils, rode through the air, and plotted harm against their neighbors.

Gallows Hill: Ten Deaths

On 20 August 1612, ten of the accused were taken to the place of execution near Lancaster, commonly remembered as Gallows Hill. They were hanged—a method deemed more “ordinary” and respectable than burning, but no less final. Old Demdike had died in prison before she could join them at the gallows.

No last words of theirs were recorded with the care given to their confessions. Once sentence was carried out, they existed in the official record only as examples: warnings to others not to stray from the path of obedience and orthodox belief.

For the families left behind, the aftermath was devastation: children orphaned, households broken, and reputations blackened beyond repair. The true cause of their suffering was not witchcraft, but fear and the need to find someone to blame.

From Trial to Legend

The Pendle Witch Trials did not fade quietly into local memory. Thomas Potts’s book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, was printed and reprinted, turning the case into a kind of official story about how witches were uncovered and punished in England.^[1]

Over the centuries, the story of Pendle has been retold in ballads, novels, documentaries, and tourist guides. Pendle Hill has become a site of dark fascination: walkers tread its slopes, tours trace the routes of the accused, and shops sell charms and souvenirs in the witches’ names.^[3]

In popular memory, Pendle is both a ghost story and a cautionary tale. On one level, it has all the ingredients of folklore: lonely cottages, old women with reputations for magic, mysterious illnesses, and a hill that looms like a shadow over the landscape. On another level, it is a brutally human story about what happens when fear, poverty, and power join forces against the vulnerable.

What Pendle Reveals

The Pendle Witch Trials reveal more about human beings than they do about magic. They show how easily ordinary quarrels can be transformed into deadly accusations when the culture is ready to believe in conspiracies and demons. They show how the words of a frightened child can outweigh the desperate denials of adults. They show how the law can become a weapon in the service of fear.

By the time the last body swung from the gallows, the people of Pendle had not rid themselves of evil. Instead, they had sacrificed their neighbors—the old, the poor, the difficult, the inconvenient—to a story they thought would keep them safe.

In the broader timeline of witchcraft, Pendle stands between the earlier demonological theories and the later, even more sweeping panics to come. It is one chapter in a longer history of accusation and persecution, but its voices echo loudly: a child on a table in court; an old woman accused by a rival; a community convinced it had uncovered a nest of witches when in truth, it had only exposed its own fears.

Next in the Timeline

From the windswept hills of Lancashire, the witch-hunting imagination would not stay confined. Across the ocean, in a New England village called Salem, suspicion would again erupt into trials, accusations, and executions. The questions raised at Pendle—about fear, law, and belief—would resurface in another time and another landscape, with hauntingly similar results.

Next: The Salem Witch Trials.

Footnotes

Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), the principal published account of the Pendle witch trials, often reprinted and used as a key source by later historians. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
For the account of the Good Friday meeting at Malkin Tower and its role in widening the accusations, see modern summaries of the case based on Potts, including regional histories of Lancashire and Pendle. ↩
On the later memory and legacy of the Pendle witches, including tourism, memorials, and ongoing public interest, see recent cultural histories and local heritage interpretations of Pendle Hill and the Lancaster witch trials. ↩

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