After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - England's Worst Witch Trial: Pendle Witches

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Inside the heavy walls of Lancaster Castle, the darkest & deadliest of English witch trials played out in 1612 - the Pendle Witch Trials. By the end ten people would be executed and many more lives ruined. At their heart was a little girl, Jennet Device, and a book, Daemonologie by King James VI & I.Maddy and Anthony's guest today is John Callow, historian and author of The Last Witches of England and Witchcraft in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Hello and welcome to this episode of After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony.

And this week we are heading to Pendle Hill in Lancashire and we are talking about one of the deadliest and most dramatic witch trials in English history. We begin our story with a girl and with a book. Now the girl is in a courtroom inside Lancaster Castle. It's 1612 but the castle's dark walls have glowered over the surrounding countryside for hundreds of years. The girl's name is Janet. She is nine years old, and she is standing on a table. Out of her mouth flows the most extraordinary story, a denunciation, really, of her own kith and kin. She is telling the court how her mother and brother and sister and granny,

and more besides, are witches. That they consort with the devil in the shape of a black dog and use the dark arts to murder. She paints a picture of the Forest of Pendle, where her family lives as a place haunted by shadows and curses. The man most responsible for orchestrating this trial is Justice of the Peace, Roger Knowles. While we might be shocked by Janet's accusations,

Roger is less so, because Roger has read the book, an infamous text aimed at helping its readers catch witches, and which will change the legal and cultural landscape of 17th century Britain. Demonology by King James VI of Scotland and I of England is the only book about demons and witches ever written by a ruling British monarch. It is, in theory, a learned treatise and philosophical work, but in the hands of men like Roger Knowles, it represents a call to action and a handbook for a witch hunt. In its pages and among its many illustrations,

Knowles will find the perfect blueprint for his campaign of hate and fear, of score-settling, lies and wicked destruction. I'm so excited to get into this story today. We've been looking forward to doing Pendle for a while. We have, we have. And as a Northerner myself, I feel like this is a good history to tell. We're joined today by Dr John Callow, who's a historian, a visiting senior fellow at the University of Suffolk, and he's the author of two books, The Last Witches of England and Witchcraft in the 16th

and 17th century Europe. John, welcome to After Dark. It's lovely to be here. And for this topic, which we genuinely have been excited for quite a long time. But for readers and listeners and viewers who are a little bit less familiar, tell us who Janet Device actually is. Well, she's the youngest of a large extended family who live in the margins in Pendle Forest, who are caught up in this sensational trial. So literally, everything you think about society in our period, early 17th century, is turned on its head in that courtroom. It's the

child who directs the action against her elders, in one case against her social betters, and everybody is hanging, quite literally I'm afraid, on her words. It's a really disturbing inversion of the rules of 17th century society, the hierarchies of it. Before we get any further into the story, let's just go to the scene of the supposed crime, Pendle itself in Lancashire. What is Pendle like in 1612? It's a landscape that today has such atmosphere still

and hasn't really changed in its most rural parts, I would say, since the 17th century. No, that's right. I think obviously it's dominated by Pendle Hill that broods over the whole area. It's liminal in the sense that it's on the backbone of England. It divides Yorkshire and Lancashire. We know these women and men who were convicted in 1612 as the Lancashire witches, but there were Yorkshire witches as well. And the area is dominated in our period by the great forest of Pendle. So it's remote. The justices don't get there. The power of the Stanley family that absolutely dominated early modern Lancashire doesn't touch there. So the big magnates can't focus their spyglass in what's happening.

And it falls to Roger Noel, as you said, to actually go and investigate. So a dark landscape and a landscape blighted by poverty. a dark landscape, a landscape blighted by poverty. There are two women in the early 17th century who were excused church attendants because they couldn't clad themselves decently. They literally didn't have anything to wear. So it's an area that has not been looked at, particularly by central or even local government,

and it's where, as well the catholic faith persists i have to tell a little story for this part in the podcast last year i went when i was recording for a totally different podcast um for the wonderful church's conservation trust and we went and stayed me and the producer and the presenter of this show. And I believe it is available now. We stayed in a Catholic church that was built in the very narrow window of Mary's reign. And it was in the shadow of Pendle Hill and not too far away from there. And we spent the night in the church. And it was an interesting experience. Some of us in the group felt that, you know that certain things had happened in the night.

I didn't see anything myself, but we were woken up at 2, 3 a.m. by intense screaming in the church. You were? Three of us, yes. There was screaming in the church, obviously heart thudding. We wake up in this darkness and an owl had gone into the church and it was flying around the ceiling. It was incredible. But even today, that part of the world, it has a feeling of remoteness and of the past there. And I always think of the Pendlewich story when I think of Lancashire. It's something that's written into the landscape even now. Absolutely.

By novels that we'll talk about later, by popular culture. And even when you talk about the halls and being in the church and Lancashire ghost stories, if you think about you've still got Catholic lords of the manor around there, the Shireburn family dominate, who are the big local Catholic family. If you think that they've got to keep their religion a secret and they've got missionary priests slipping across from the continent, as happened at Salmsbury,

that's one of the motors to that witch trial, which was linked to Pendle, and you've got Protestant servants who might inform on you, then inventing a ghost is actually quite useful. If you've got a priest hole and there's somebody moving around at night, it's one of the explanations I've heard for the fact that every Lancashire Hall seems to have its own ghost story. So there's a tradition of supernatural occurrences even in the 17th

century that this is a land that is peppered with something other. I think that other is injected by the trials in the Pendle Forest and you get the production of witch plays down in London. Some of the Lancashire witches end up in the fleet prison from a later outbreak that we're going to talk about. Even at court, Ben Johnson puts on a mask. Actually, a few years before this, where witches figure by the 1630s on the London stage, witches always speak in Lancashire accents.

And of course they do. You see that now even. I'll tell you how I know about this more so than anything. I learned about this during an episode of Most Haunted, which is possibly one of the most famous episodes of Most Haunted, I think, in the early noughties. Oh my God, it's intense. It's so intense.

It's like two or three episodes. I think it was a live episode at the time in lancashire on pendle hill in the supposedly places that these people have been i question some of that but yeah i don't know i was in my late teens or something so it's a story that has so much resonance then in pop culture in its own time or decades afterwards and still today that it's still going let's get into the story then that's caused these ripples throughout culture. So John, tell us, we've got Janet Devis up in court, we've seen her up in court, but let's rewind a little bit to how these accusations of witchcraft occur. What's the starting point for what is a really remarkable

story? The starting point is Janet's sister meeting with a peddler and begging some pins. So Alison goes to him. Charity is refused. It's almost the classic case of witchcraft confrontation. You ask for something, the something is refused, and then bad stuff happens. The peddler has a stroke and he's dead in a few days' time.

But on his deathbed, of course, he's attributing this to Alison Device and the confrontation on the roadside. And then that begins to spread and spread and spread as accusation and counter-accusation fly between two families on the margins and then the testimony of a little girl. So we've got the Devis or DeVice family, and we've spoken off-air before this, but how these pronunciations are sort of,

they change within the 17th century and people say different things now, but we'll go with DeVice maybe. So we've got Janet, we've got her sister Alison, but this is a much bigger family, isn't it? And they're a family that exists on the margins of that society. You've said there that Alison is begging for pins, so they really are the poorest of the poor.

They are begging and low-level crime of the matters, literally, of life and death and subsistence, that, again, they're outside the structures of the society. The father figures are absent. It's a matriarchy, but a very, very, very dysfunctional matriarchy. After all, Janet goes on to accuse her mother of these things. And the trial flares up in a way that spreads like wildfire. We mentioned at the start of this episode that there was a book.

And we'll talk a little bit about this a little bit more. But what is that book? We mentioned who it's by, but tell us why it's important in the context of this story. The written word is so important for the spread of ideas on witchcraft. And we talk about, I think it's important to make a distinction between the learned tradition about witchcraft, about King James VI and I's demonology, and popular ideas, village-level witchcraft. The peddler who collapsed believed himself genuinely to have been cursed. So that's a belief. It's only when those beliefs are taken seriously by the people in power

that really bad stuff happens, and justice is changed to suit that paradigm. So the classic text, as you say, is King James's Demonology. It's a book written in response to James's experience in Denmark, picking up his bride, where he came to believe that storms were raised against him to stop Anne of Denmark being taken back to Edinburgh. He has a conspiracy against him by the Earl of Bothwell.

And the Scots crown, the Stuarts hanged by a thread, is the last one. They've been spectacularly unlucky through wars and assassinations and his mother losing her head to Queen Elizabeth. So Bothwell presents an existential threat to James. And James, through this rather tangled web of accusations of witch plots, initially among the poor, they then extend to the sort of middle classes in Edinburgh, and he gets frightened, he gets terrified in actual fact, and he sees this demonic conspiracy pulling away his throne. I think also he is one of the most intellectually curious people, there's only Alfred like him, who's ever sat on the English throne. You could

say his ancestor, James IV of Scotland, there ever was a Renaissance king, it's James IV, did everything right until the last 15 minutes of his life. But James is intellectually curious, he's erudite, he's incredibly patantic. He would be the person telling you that he was the brightest person in the room. In some ways he's very modern. He writes The Counterblast to Tobacco. You know, he predates the Dolan Hill report by, you know, 300 or more years. So we see this.

There are things in his fabric, I think, that are very modern. He's bisexual. He's open about it as far as you could be. It's not a problem for him. He believes in peace rather than war. He's a very effective king, both north and south of the border. Spends a lot of money, but he's there to enjoy himself as well.

there to enjoy himself as well and then he has this canker in his cv that he writes this book on witchcraft do you think it's fair to say that there's an element of his personality that's quite paranoid and that's not to say without reason there are conspiracies and plots against him but do you think all that curiosity when it's channeled with in accompaniment with that paranoia that it that it causes this fear of witches and other supernatural elements i think he is a man who has been raised in an atmosphere of fear if you look at the stewart house in scotland none of his predecessors have come to a good end yeah they don't die on their beds he's a child monarch now how much more unstable can any kind of power dynamic be when you're raised to this with competing regents and factions and whatever he's then trying to navigate the domination of the kirk this is john knox's

scotland after all so he's got to navigate all of this, and then he is confronted by real plots. I mean, the most famous one in his reign south of the border being the gunpowder plot. And there is an argument that late in his life he applies the same methodology to Jesuits as he does to witches. They're the same threatening, undermining. It's, to use that wonderful phrase from Kipling, it's like the rats gnawing cables in two that will bring everything

crashing down around you. So he has this sense that power is fragile and febrile, and he remembers in a way that his son doesn't't that there's a joint in his neck am i right in thinking that there is a connection between the gunpowder plot and the pendle witch trial and that one of the men who is i think investigating the gunpowder plot writes something about the pendle witches absolutely and also thomas potts who's uh we've talked about demonology and and i'll go back on demonology in a second, but Thomas Potts' account is the first-hand account of the trial by the clerk of the court,

and that is dedicated to the individual you're discussing and also to the king. And what Potts is trying to do is he's trying to make his career. He's trying to get royal favour. He's trying to get out of rural Lancashire and head straight for London and the Bucks. That's where his head's at. So we have these two worlds.

We've got the world of the devices in Lancashire, this poor family living in a very rural area. And then we've got this world of the king and all these ambitious career men trying to get ahead and trying to get noticed and using James's ideas, the publication of demonology, and this fear that the king has to try and advance themselves. By the time the Pendle Witch Trial happens, what's happened to demonology as a text that means it's relevant in rural Lancashire? Well, there are two things mainly.

The old idea, which was, I have to say, I think personally, a very kind of xenophobic and quite patronising idea, was that King James, when he came down south, suddenly got more liberal and he stopped believing in witches and he became, if you like, inverted commas, civilised. If you read the biographies of the king that were written, you know, from the post-war period onwards, it's all cloaked in this. It was an aberration.

I think we've got to the stage from the 1980s where we know it's not an aberration. He carries on thinking and writing about witchcraft. So when they issue the King's book, his collected works as a sumptuous presentation copy, there are beautiful existing copies in the University of Durham Library, and I'm sure in London as well. Demonology is there front and centre. It's there with his book about good governance that he writes

for the young Prince Henry. And more importantly, when he writes the book for Prince Henry, who should have been king if an early death hadn't prevented it. He lists witchcraft as one of the supreme crimes that demand the death penalty, so he hasn't removed all that from his thinking. More importantly, demonology informs the guides to the jurymen that were becoming the meat and potatoes of judicial practice, and on top of that, you've got the Elizabethan witchcraft statutes that pass all this into law and are being firmed up through this period, they're becoming far stricter. So you've suddenly got all this pressure

that suggests that, contrary to the earlier generation that came before the king, witchcraft existed, was dangerous, and could be practiced by your neighbors. So we have the social, cultural, and legal context of the wider English, or British for what it was at that time, with demonology, with the influence of the monarch. time with demonology with the influence of the monarch let's go back to pendle hill yeah and let's talk about an incident that occurred specifically on good friday 1612 because that changes things slightly in this story doesn't it well it absolutely does because it gives evidence of a plot the family's concerned they have a meal they have have their friends coming from over the border in Yorkshire, they have a big get-together at Melkin Tower. Now, Melkin means dirty, horrible, all those kinds of things.

There was a recent excavation, actually, up on Pendle Hill, where they thought they'd actually found the outlines of this ramshackle building. So they get together in the forest, and they eat tellingly stolen mutton. Right. So somebody steals and kills a very old sheep. But this again shows that this is plenty for them. And then, according to Janet's testimony, the talk gets wilder and wilder and wilder about what they're going to do. They're going to free their family members. They're going to blow the castle sky high. Echoes of the gunpowder plot. They're going to free everybody.

But those tropes are the very things that the authorities are most threatened by. Sounds like a good pub session where your conversation escalates and escalates and your ambition escalates as you go. Shouting at each other over the table. It's interesting to me about the mutton, just to focus on that for a second,

that that detail comes down to us. And there's something that's so rebellious about that, about taking the property of the landowning classes, or at least the people who are farming on that land owned by the landowners, and performatively cooking it and eating it. That's an act of great defiance. I think you could read it like that.

You could look at it as its necessity and extremists. These are people who steal because basically through disability, through age, through gender, they've got very little choice about how they earn their daily bread. In fact, one of the very graphic counterattacks on witch belief written by a schoolmaster from Clitheroe just down the road who relationship with the devil, is he says if the devil was serious about bringing down monarchies, he'd never have sent Demdike and Chatex begging from door to door. And he's got this wonderful expression. He says, for no more than a soured pail of milk.

And he captures that idea of their raw poverty. And their powerlessness their absolute powerlessness and i think the continuing theme through most accounts of witchcraft certainly this not the big state trials in bamberg in germany where it was state power or urban grandier in france you know ken russell's amazing film The Devil, so it's quite different. But the stuff we're looking at around Pendle is all about the powerful and the powerless. And that is the dynamic we're tapping into. Okay, so we've got the peddler who Janet's sister Alison supposedly curses. He has a stroke and he's rendered incapable. Then we've got this big family meeting where all the family come together.

It's maybe a show of power. Maybe they're panicking and they come together to discuss what's going to happen next. So how do we get from this Good Friday celebration with the stolen mutton and everyone's getting drunk in Malkin Towers, this really grim place. So they're celebrating within the confines of this terrible poverty. How do we get from that to one of the most sensational witch trials in English history? Well, we get there, as with most witch hunts, that it's almost like dropping a pebble or a marble into a pool of water and that the accusations spread and spread and spread. a pool of water and that the accusations spread and spread and spread so we've got roger nowell who has read demonology who is obviously somebody who believes in the reality of witchcraft who

follows the leads and interrogates people as justice of the peace and constructs a case and that case spreads and spreads and spreads so So it's not just these two competing, quarrelling beggar families who drag each other to the gallows effectively between their two matriarchs, Demdike and Chattox, who hurl accusation and counter accusation against each other. But also you get Alice N nutter dragged into it fantastic name absolutely you know that's been borrowed by singers and all sorts ever since and she doesn't fit she's young she's a widow she's wealthy and she's not part of these two families nothing to do she well how do they get to trial well when j when the young girl is cross-questioned by Roger Knoll,

who takes her briefly into his household and looks after her, she gives testimony that Alice Nutter was at this great assembly of witches. Now, either it's complete fiction that somebody was out to get Alice Nutter for something, or she'd gone to sympathise with people who were her tenants, who were down on their luck. Sorry to interrupt you, but Alice Nutter is of a higher social class. Oh, absolutely. She's a gentlewoman. She's rich, She's wealthy. She's integrated in local society. And even when you look at the accounts of the trial through Thomas Potts, the clerk of the court, he can't quite make this fit. And I think with his account, he frames the witches in every meaning of that word.

And bits of the story that don't make for a gripping narrative, he drops out. So he's not bothered about the witches tried in Yorkshire. He's not bothered about the woman from Gisborne. He's not bothered about the outbreak at Salisbury that was proved to be a hoax. He doesn't care about that. He focuses the narrative on these two familial groups

and upon Janet. He cannot make Alice Nutter fit easily, so he talks about her vengeful nature. Now, if we think about this as an age where we talk about the humours in people, how they're made up, we think about James's devastating summary in Demonology where he says, James's devastating summary in Demonology where he says, but we all know there are so many more women than men. Women are more susceptible because of their passions, because they took the apple in the garden.

It's all true. I'm so sorry. On behalf of women everywhere. You're going to get cancelled for that. And he evolves this. And we can't get away from, you know, very often, which hunts are put down to misogyny. Full stop.

We need to know nothing more. You cannot get away from the fact that reading King James's book, it's a deeply misogynistic tract. You can't divorce that from his personality. So this idea of the vengeful woman of the manor, Alice Nutter, is the way that Potts palms it off. And that has a great afterlife in the fiction that surrounds the witches. We get Harrison Ainsworth's novel. We get Robert Neill's great piece of work, Mist Over Pendle, which has never gone out of print.

piece of work, Mist Over Pendle, which has never gone out of print. And in Mist Over Pendle, Alice Nutter becomes the real villain of the piece, that she's somebody who is murdering people in the community. She has the old deers growing deadly nightshade on the slopes of Pendle, and it's

a great detective novel. But it turns everything on its head to see these people really were up to no good, when in actual fact other than village disputes and tensions, almost certainly they weren't. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap.

Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour. Anne of Cleves. Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors,

I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. With all of that in mind, let's go back to the archive. Yep. Or try. Yep.

Get as close as we can. We know there's a trial. Yep. How does that go? Who's testifying against whom? And what's the outcome? Well, in a nutshell, Janet is the key witness. It's a trial where there is a particular theatre, a particular theatricality. So Janet being stood up on a table in that courtroom. She has a stage. She has absolutely a stage, which is ironic to go back to demonology

when James, in explaining what the magistrate does, and he means king as well as magistrate, but he uses the term magistrate, he says that every action is a set-up on a stage. And this is what this little girl is performing. She picks people out who were at the gathering at Malkin Tower. When Justice Bromley tries to lead her and suggest that there were improbable people there,

she doesn't rise to the bait. So it seems genuine, like I'd suggest many show trials seem genuine. And she touches people's hands, doesn't she? She does. So creepy. it's really creepy absolutely and that her own mother rails against her in the courtroom so you can imagine what's going on you're dealing with a frightened vulnerable child she's nine right she's nine who is taken into noel's household there's a wonderful phrase in Robert Neill's novel, Missed Over Pendle,

where you last see her in one of the final scenes. It talks about her being scrubbed and fed and contented in a way she never had been before. So if we think about marginality and children who are literally seen but never heard, suddenly for your words to be accepted by people who are powerful, who have money and influence in county society, you can see where people might be led. We'll never know. But I think in all of these cases of witchcraft, it's the power imbalance that gets you to the dreadful end. So one of the suspected witches had died in the jails underneath Lancaster Castle. Because they're there for a long time.

They're there for a long time as other cases go on, as people are pulled in from Yorkshire, and they have to wait for the circuit judges to turn up. So they're actually put on hold because judges travel to the remote bits of England to administer justice and cases build up and build up and build up. One of the interesting things or one of the significant things, I think, about the jurymen, and they were, of course, all men at that period, is very different to some other Assize trials. You look at other witchcraft trials, and it's almost machine justice. You look at the Exeter Assizes, and you look at the records there.

They're getting through sometimes 20, 30 cases in a day. And you think these things are heard they must have been 10 minutes basically the Pendle Witches are not like this this is why we've got this record from Potts people at the time really invested in it and took it as proof definitive that there was something happening in this dark corner of the kingdom that a light needed to be shone on. So ten of the women go to the scaffold on the town moor in Lancashire up near where the grammar school is today. There's a little crossroads,

and that's supposedly where the gibbets were, and they're hanged. And how many people were on trial altogether? Just so we can get a... I think it was 12. There were 12 at the Assizes in Lancaster. It spread out because of Salmsbury, there's Yorkshire, there's the pre-trials, there's the Fatma and Gisborne. So we've got a big outbreak by 17th century standards. And 10 people are hanged.

It says so much about the power of Janet's words that they go to the gallows largely on her testimony. I think we would say in modern popular terms, she is the star witness. Well, that's not the end of Janet. If we skip forward a little bit, let's talk about the next part of Janet's history. You might remember that we began our story in 1612 with little Janet standing on a table in court and the book that had led them there. But we end our story years later in 1634

with Janet now 31 years old, a grown woman, in court again at a witch trial. But now the tables are turned. She stands accused of being herself a witch. What's more, the accusations are coming from the mouth of a young child, a boy called Edmund Robinson. Edmund tells the court how he had come home late one day, having seen something so extraordinary that he was sure if he recounted the experience to his family, he would surely not be blamed for his tardiness. He said he had been out picking berries when he saw two greyhounds. He tried to make them chase a rabbit but they refused.

Then one turned into a witch. The other into first a boy and then a horse. into a witch. The other into first a boy and then a horse. They took him away to a barn that was full of at least 60 witches with ropes hanging down. When they pulled on these, delicious food descended. Among those feasting witches

he saw none other than Janet Devise. Okay, the tables really have turned now. What's this, two decades later? John, what's happening? Janet is now accused of being a witch, and not only that, in the testimony of a small child. Well, she's dropped out of public view after her big moment

in the courtroom in Lancaster Castle. You do wonder, of course, what that experience... And this is one of the things we can play all kinds of tricks with the past and try and fill in the gaps, but I don't think it takes much imagination to think what she must have gone through. She has no family to look after her. Because she sent them.

She sent them to the gallows. She's got nothing to go back to it's clear that roger knowled the justice drops her like a hot stone yeah so she's back on her own resources absolutely so it may well be her identity as a member of a witch family is the only thing that gives her currency if we think about the way people beg and the way the name of the witch attaches itself to familial groups, to people who are at the margins of society, that name certainly attached to her. So we have this blank, as you say, 20 plus years when she vanishes to end up like Groundhog Day, back in Lancaster Castle, back in the cells, accused herself of witchcraft, and as you say, by a child, this time a little boy.

And in some ways, there are common features. She appears as a figure who is just as marginal as the rest of her family had been, obviously a figure of terror. It doesn't take too much imagination to see that the feasts in the Forest of Pendle parallel each other at a 20-year distance, there's an awful amount of imagination going into the idea that the food, as you say, descends on pulleys and there's a complex system for how they all eat and deport themselves. It's very technical for a child's school. It is, but then we are living in a technical age and he's a child, obviously,

who didn't scruple at picking people out as witches. He has a career for the next couple of years with his father, also called Edmund Robinson, where this thing spirals, where they become witch hunters in their own right throughout Lancashire and into Yorkshire. And he has this ability of sensing witches in church congregations we have another account he goes into a parish church just outside the outskirts of Clitheroe with the express intention of walking among the congregation and picking out that's terrifying witches isn't it interesting that it's him and his father who do that whereas 20 years previously jenet doesn't have the opportunity is that a gender thing do you think that which

hunters not necessarily which accusers but which hunters in this period are exclusively male which hunters are always men always men right but that's the difference and the point we know a lot about the robinsons because one of the great critics of the witch trials took an interest in them because it was his church they walked into to perform the performance search for witches and did they find any well they try to but they get short shrift because in this case john webster the curate and takes them to task And he has the Robinsons watched. He knows that they've been earning money doing this. He knows that they're in it for a fast buck.

And he has the child looked after, talked to. It's almost the inverse of what Roger Knoll is doing. You know, makes much of him and then waits for the frauds to come out and he's been seeing this for a long time in lancashire he has two other accounts that he adds to this one is he talks about the horror of seeing two women hang in lancaster for the crime of witchcraft now we don't know who these two women are or where he gets that from. He has two instances where he directly reflects on the witch hunter's art, such as it was. He talks about women hanging on the town moor at Lancaster for the crime. And he talks about his own unmasking of

a little girl, a bit like Janet, who appears nowhere else in the trial literature. And apparently this child was said to be bewitched. She'd pick out witches, you know, she had the whole patter out of demonology. And one of the evidences of her bewitchment is that earthworms would come out from her coif, from the cloth that covered a woman or young girl's hair. Now, what Webster does is, again, he has her watched and he observes her mother and herself inserting these things from literally out of the garden, from cracks in the pavement. And he sees this through observation. Now, he applies the same thing to the Robinsons, and he depth charges their career. So the witch hunting is brought to an end.

But it is one of those terrible ironies that Janet, as huntress, becomes hunted in the second trial. So what happens to her? Do we know what the end of her story is? She's acquitted. She gets out. She leaves. She disappears back into anonymity. Now, is that because of a shift in public consciousness, public ideas about witchcraft? Are people more sceptical at this period? I think we've got to be careful about general scepticism.

There's obviously, at one level, the legal statutes are still there. Courts are still in the business of looking for witches. We've got great hunts later on in Scotland in the 1660s, where there's an enormous outbreak of witch hunting right through to the 1690s. We've got the cases down in Devon in the 1680s at the Restoration. So witch hunting doesn't go away. What changes in this period is the attitude of elites. Charles I, for all his many, many, many failings,

is not interested in witches, unlike his father. So there isn't the pressure from the top. And also, because possibly of royal favour, there just aren't the witchcraft tracts being published in London, which literature falls away right through the late 1620s into the 1630s, up until the time of the English Civil Wars. Stuff is not being published. So there isn't that kind of great onus on it.

What we do have at the residual level, of course, are the cultural artefacts, the plays that are around. So we have Middleton's play, The Witch, which is banned by the authorities because rather than looking at the poor, it looks at the rich. It looks at the scandalous Ovebury murder case that implicated the king and his favourites and the Countess of Essex in dabbling with poisons and the devil.

And the point Middleton tries to make in his drama is that it's the poor suffer and the rich get off scot-free. For Charles and James, it's really troubling, so they ban it in short order so witch hunting in the 17th century i'm talking in very broad brushstrokes here it's really top heavy it's interested in punching down essentially and it's fine if you're looking for witches among the lower classes but the second that that is reversed and of course we see all kinds of inversions and reversals in this story then it becomes a problem it seems to me that the pendle trial is really a story on the one hand about these high elevated ideas these philosophical conversations about what witchcraft is what

the supernatural is and then at the other end it's this story of children being manipulated and abused and exposed to all kinds of horrors and manipulations, I suppose. What do you think is the takeaway from this story, John? Why should we care about the Pendle Witch Trials? We've talked a little bit about its cultural afterlife and why we remember it, but why do you think it's important for us today? Well, I think the sort of headline warning is the unqualified and uncritical acceptance of the word of the elite. The king's word, the king's book, the changing cultural attitudes to the reality of witchcraft allow people, allow the authorities, allow the justices to go down a particular persecutory path.

To be fair to James, he doesn't have any truck with child witnesses. He actually says they can't be trusted. And, you know, in some of his career, he unmasks demoniacs and children who say they're possessed. So he's not culpable for everything. But I think that idea that what we're really looking at is elite attitudes and the dangerous shift in them. So if we fast forward out of this into the 18th century,

at the end of the witch statutes, the number of people being singled out as witches doesn't significantly decline what happens is justices of the peace are not interested in prosecuting that's your mental shift that roger nowell in pendle is interested in finding witches his successors 20 30 40 years later are not in the same way, that the elites within Lancashire do not respond to the same way in the 1630s to the societal pressures. Now, it may be that the elites are more confident. There is an argument, and this is Professor Jim Sharp's argument, I can't claim

originality, but it's part of his brilliance of analysis where he looks at these cases and he says it may be that the elites are just not so threatened, that they've gone through, certainly by the late 17th century, the experience of civil war, the plagues and the famines are dying out. There's no threat to them. And therefore, they're not taking these things so seriously. They're not literally supping with the devil. And I think there is something in that argument. But elite attitudes are changing slowly but surely. And that's the key.

So in terms of the takeaway from why Pendle should be remembered, Pendle should be remembered because it is richly chronicled in a way no other English trial is. And, you know, we'd encourage listeners to go and look at some of those chronicles, actually, because that's the thing. We can sit here as historians and go, oh, these incredible sources. But they're there. You can see some of them online. You can go and look at them. And it's really it gets you as up close and personal to witchcraft in the 17th century terms as you're going to get if this is a subject that interests you then you should really have a look at them see what you can get and not

just witchcraft but the lives of ordinary people and people we wouldn't otherwise hear from and witchcraft is important because as you say it mainlines you into the mentality of village people at this period it gives voice to people who otherwise are completely without a voice. You're unlikely to get that rich vein of social history through a half-return account of figures. You're not going to get it from the sort of people who are writing about everyday life. With Thomas Potts' account of the Pendle Witches, you get what they actually said in

the court. And that's why writers, Walter Scott's the first one to pick up on it, who is as important as anybody in forging our conception of the past in these aisles. And he lights upon it because it is so rich, it's so detailed, and it's so human and inhuman. And that, I think, is what the Pendle trial gives us. It's also, I think, the lesson to be taken away of being led by the fashionable opinion. And that really is the Primrose Path to hell, a very different sort of hell than king james the sixth and first or roger nowell ever pictured envisaged well listen i think that's a great place to wrap it up i have thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed my visit to pendle hill and i know you

will have to this is one we as i said at the beginning we were really looking forward to thank you for listening uh to our podcast if you've enjoyed this episode please check out some of our back catalogogue, which will have other witchy topics in there too. Leave us a review and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Wendy's Small Frosty

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