Forbidden History - The Pendle Witch Trials: Britain’s Salem

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

In this episode of Forbidden History, Dominic Selwood joins us to trace the terrifying rise of witch trials in Britain and beyond, exploring how fear, faith and accusation could turn suspicion into a death sentence. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Dominic Selwood: Historian and Journalist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. Our Patreon is now live. Head over and become a Forbidden Historian to unlock brand new exclusive episodes. Thanks for supporting the show. In 1612, something was said in a Lancashire village in Britain that could not be taken back. A name was spoken. Then another. Within weeks, a court was preparing to decide whether the devil was living a them. Of the many questions that were asked throughout those fateful days, we now only ask one. At what point did living at the edge of a community put you at the edge of the gallows? The Pendle Witch Trial is the most notorious in British history. James I of course was a king

who was absolutely terrified of witches. The jury returned verdicts of guilty on everyone, largely on the evidence of this nine-year-old girl. Joining us to investigate the tragedy of the Pendle Witch Trials is historian, author, and barrister, Dominic Selwood. He has an extensive knowledge both of law and history, which is perfect to help us unpack this disturbing medieval case. In 1612, England was a country uneasy with itself. The long reign of Elizabeth I had ended less than a decade earlier. and with it the fragile certainty she had imposed on a divided kingdom. Her successor, James I, ruled a nation still unsettled by the memory of recent upheaval.

This was not medieval England. It was a modernizing state governed by courts and written law, and yet it was also a country deeply paranoid and afraid of unseen enemies. The England James inherited was officially Protestant, but far from unified. The break with Rome in the 1530s had not erased Catholic belief. It had driven it underground. Catholics were outlawed, yet their faith persisted quietly in households across the country. Religious difference had now become a growing concern in a once mono-religious country,

and paranoia engulfed its inhabitants. Beyond London, state control thinned. In the northern counties, particularly Lancashire, authority came from the locals themselves, and most disputes that started there were settled there. These were communities bound by oral tradition rather than written law, and neighbors relied on one another more than distant magistrates. But that was all to change. The Pendle witch trial is the most notorious in British history,

and it has a status similar to the Salem Witch Trial in Massachusetts in the US. And it's helped by the fact it took place in a deeply wild and romantic part of Britain in the Forest of Pendle, which is in the Pennines in Lancashire, so just west of Leeds, a few miles north of Burnley. And it took place in the reign of Jennings. James I. And James the First, of course, was a king who was absolutely terrified of witches. A ship that he was once in nearly sank, and he blamed it on witchcraft, and forever thereafter, he thought there were witches everywhere. He wrote a book on them, demonology,

warning everybody of the reality of witches and of how evil they were. And he presided over witch trials himself. So the setting for the Pendle Witch trial is both wild, rugged, isolated, and in a country that is gripped by witch mania. King James' book, Demonology, argued that witches were real and actively conspiring with the devil to undermine Christian society. James rejected skepticism outright, insisting that disbelief in witchcraft was itself dangerous, a sign of moral weakness or complicity. He wrote this book before he ascended the throne in 1603.

and his beliefs followed him to the throne. We are, of course, in the reign of King James I now, which is long after the Reformation. And many people assume that killing witches was a thing that the Catholic Church mainly did. Historically, the Catholic Church didn't really care about magic or witchcraft. The church was interested in whether your Christianity was orthodox or heretical, whether you were doing Christianity right. They thought that magic and witchcraft didn't exist because the only powers in the world that could affect the supernatural space was God, Christ and the saints. They were the only people who could do miracles. Therefore everything else was fraudulent. So to the extent the church

had a problem with witches, it was because they were making stuff up that wasn't real. But the church didn't try them and didn't persecute them for most of its medieval history. That is, until about 1400, when something, and it's not really clear what, changed. It was a little bit after Black Death and obviously people had very different ideas about life and meaning after such a devastating event that killed so much of Europe. Between 1347 and 1351, Europe was torn apart by a catastrophe it could neither explain nor control. The Black Death killed an estimated one-third to one-half of the continent's population.

Priests died faster than they could administer last rites, and fields were left unharvested. For many living through these times, the world appeared to be ending. And if God was responsible, then God was either angry or withdrawing his protection. In the absence of medical understanding, the plague was interpreted through moral and spiritual frameworks. The trauma lingered for generations, reshaping how Europeans understood divine justice. Long after the plague itself had passed, the fear it embedded remained, a readiness to believe that unseen forces could destroy entire communities, and that someone, somewhere, must be to blame. But a Dominican friar, called Kramer, wrote a book called Amalius Meneficorum.

the hammer of the witches. And in it, he really relied on that bit in the Bible in Exodus that says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And so from that point on, the church did start persecuting witches. But the vast majority of the witch craze happened after the Reformation. And it was more to do with Protestant theology that whereas in the Catholic world, as long as you went to mass and observed the sacraments you were saved, in the more Protestant world, everybody was now fighting a personal battle against the devil. So it became much easier for people in communities to point out those who they thought weren't fighting quite hard enough

and were imperiling themselves and other people. Pendle in the early 1600s was a very rural, agricultural, forest community. It's not some way where you would expect detailed records to have been created and survive. But magically, we do have to have. have records of the Pendle Witch trial, very, very full records, because the court clerk at the trial, a man called Thomas Potts. After the trial, realizing that this was quite a big story, he came down to London and he worked with the two judges who'd sat on the trial, Sir Edward Bromley

and Sir James Alton, and he wrote the story of the trial. So the three of them had been in the courtroom, they'd heard everything that was said, and they had the papers, they had the witness statements, they had the confessions. So they were able to use all of these and put them into the book. So it was published as the wonderful discovery of witches in the county of Lancaster and became an immediate bestseller. Thomas Potts was not a journalist in any modern sense, but a court clerk responsible for recording proceedings and managing court documents. That role placed him inside the Pendle courtroom, where he worked closely with the presiding judges. The facts that underlined the trial were really very sensational.

They concerned two families, both with bad reputations, and both with a sideline in magic. It started with a woman called Alison Device, and she stopped a peddler and asked him to give her some pins from his bag. and he refused to do this and there's been some speculation because pins are often used in magic for sticking into dolls and wax images. The peddler didn't give her the pins, but as he walked away,

he fell down and he was lame. And Alizon put it about that she had used her familiar spirit in the form of a black dog to attack and lame the peddler. In medieval and early modern England, a peddler was a traveling traitor who moved from village to village, selling small goods such as pins, cloth, ribbons, and household items.

Peddlers occupied an uneasy position in rural society. They were useful, bringing goods to isolated communities, but also viewed with suspicion because they were outsiders, without fixed homes, or clear ties to local authority. This story got to the local magistrate, a man called Robert Knowle, So he hauled in Alison and her brother, James, and her mother, who was known as Squinting Lizzie, and eventually her grandmother, who was known as Old Demdyke. And all of them confessed to being witches.

They didn't seem to think this was a dangerous thing to do. They spoke about their witchcraft, they gave examples of it. But they said they weren't the bad witches in the neighbourhood. The bad witches were another family, which was run. by a matriarch called Old Chattox. And Old Chattox apparently had put a spell on squinting Lizzie's husband and murdered him. So that was who they said Noel should be going after.

Noel, like a sensible magistrate, decided this was probably all rubbish and didn't bother with any of it and just left it alone, just thought it was a family feud. However, shortly afterwards, Good Friday came round. And this is quite a, Puritan Protestant community and squinting Lizzie threw a party on Good Friday. And that caused a real problem because it was a day of sadness, of mourning, of introspection,

of recognising for the people at the time that Christ their saviour had been nailed to the cross. It was the opposite of a day on which you should hold a party. And so Robert Noel, the Magistra, decided that it had probably been a witch's Sabbath, and that they'd been speaking the truth. Now, whether he really believed it, whether he thought he could gain favour, royal favour, because the king thought there were witches everywhere, by finding some witches and trying them, we can't know. But he decided to hold a trial.

So he committed them all for trial. Most of them went to Lancaster, to the Assizes. One went to York, and that's how they wound up in a courtroom being tried for witchcraft. The trial really explains. The trial really explored what had happened on that Good Friday, who had been there, and what were the reputations of these people. By then, one of the women had gone back up to Yorkshire, so she was tried separately at the York Assizes.

But the main trial happened in Lancaster Castle, which is still there today, at the Assizes. And what happened at the trial was different to what would happen at a trial today. In England and in America, there would be prosecution, there would be defence. There would be a jury, the prosecution would put their version of a story, the defence would be allowed to attack and challenge, then the defence would put their version of a story and the prosecution could attack and challenge. The judge would give guidance, make sure the right rules were observed,

and the jury would come in with a verdict. That is not how trials worked in the early 1600s in England. There was no prosecution and defence. What happened was that the statements that Robert Noel, the magistrate had collected, were read out. as were confessions by the individuals involved, because they spoke about their witchcraft. And there was some live evidence given in court, but the defendants weren't able to challenge that evidence. So there was no cross-examination or questioning.

So they were all charged under the Witchcraft Act. And the evidence that came out was very shocking. There was lots about their guiding diabolical spirit. their familiars, the animals that they kept and used to do their bidding, spells that they used to blame and harm other people, killing how they murdered people, either by taking wax or clay effigies, putting pins in them, cutting bits off them, throwing them into fires, taking scalps from recently buried bodies, teeth from recently buried bodies, burying them under doorways of enemies that they wanted to harm.

In early modern England, animals linked to witchcraft were known as familiars. Creatures believed to act as intermediaries between a witch and the devil. They were usually ordinary domestic animals, able to move unnoticed through daily life. Cats, especially black cats,

were the most frequently named, believed to house spirits that fed on a witch's blood. Dogs often disqual. described as black or unnatural, appear repeatedly in accusations, including at Pendle, where a black dog was said to attack the peddler on command. Toads and frogs were associated with poison and decay, while ferrets, mice, rats, and birds also appear in English trials as lesser spirits, kept hidden in homes. These animals were believed to be fed, sometimes through blood, and sent out to do the witch's bidding.

I mean, the details were very, very colourful. But then the high point of the trial was a nine-year-old girl. So this was Alizon Devices younger sister, Alison the one who started it by asking the pedlar for the pins. Alizon, the daughter of Squinting Lizzie and the granddaughter of Old Demdike. So Janet DeVice was nine years old, and she had been at the party on Good Friday. and she said she would give evidence.

And the mother and the sister, Alison, device, was very upset when Janet got up in court to give evidence and was so upset that Janet said, I can't give my evidence while she's here. So the judges removed Alison from the courtroom, so Alison was tried without her even being present in the room. Jenet was put up on a table and told to tell her story. And the story Janet told was that, yes, it had been a witch's Sabbath.

Yes, her mother was a witch. Yes, her sister was a witch. Yes, her grandmother was a witch. Her brother who'd stolen a sheep to slaughter at the party. He was a bad sort as well. She walked around the court. She took some people by the hand and identified other people, not in those families who'd been at the party.

And at the end of it, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on everyone, largely on the evidence of this nine-year-old girl. And so, at the very end, when everyone was convicted, 10 people were led out of the court and up Gallows Hill and were hanged, and Janet lost the majority of her family. The one who was tried in York similarly was found guilty and also hanged. The York trial serves as a reminder that Pendle was not an isolated miscarriage of justice, but part of a wider judicial system already primed to convict.

The fact that all these people lost their lives as the result of the evidence as a nine-year-old is very shocking to us today. In courts in England, at least today, a child of any age can give evidence, but the judge gives very, very careful warnings to the jury. to the jury to explain that they need to understand it as the evidence of a child and not the evidence of a grown-up. And steps are taken to try to make sure the evidence is as good as it can be, but nevertheless it is still a child's evidence. And depending on how young the child is, they can have all sorts of reasons for maybe

telling a slightly different story to what actually happened. Why Jenet told the story she did is simply not clear whether she'd fallen out with her. her family or was enjoying the attention or thought this is what she had to say because it's what the court wanted her to say. It's really not known. But back in the day of the trial, James I had written in demonology that the evidence of a child was fine in a case of treason against God, which is how he saw witchcraft, because extreme measures needed to be taken when dealing with such a serious and a grave crime. And one of the long-term consequences of the Pendle Witch trial and Janet's evidence was that it became normalized to allow children's evidence to convict

adults as witches. And so a very, very similar tragedy unfolded 80 years later in Salem, Massachusetts at the Salem Witch Trials in America, where again, children's evidence was relied on, largely for what happened, and there, more than the 10, Pendle, 19 people were executed, and five died in prison. Visit BetMGM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager.

Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGEMG emigem operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

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of witchcraft. One of the Pendle witches who was hanged was a woman called Alice Nutter. And she's attracting quite a lot of attention recently because she's a bit different to all the others. She didn't come from one of those two feuding families. And recently a counsellor put up a statue of her to try and tell her story that she was a bit different. She was actually a local landowner and pretty wealthy in her own right. And one suspicion is that Robert Noel, a magistrate, might simply have been trying to get her out of the way to get her lands. But young Janet device had crossed the courtroom and taken Alice Nutter by the hand and said she was at the party on the Good Friday.

Alice was not able to give an alibi for the day, although she did protest very fiercely that she was innocent, and even as she was being hanged, she was protesting that she was innocent, and bystanders noticed that she was protesting more than anybody else, and it was quite a heart-wrenching sight. Now, there's a local legend that she actually was a Catholic, And of course at that time in this country, it's just several generations after the Reformation.

There were still lots of Catholics. They were known as recusants. And they operated quietly in secret. They had secret masses. They kept their religion a very, very private matter. It being Good Friday, if Alice was a Catholic, she would have gone to a secret mass somewhere. And that's why she wasn't able to give an alibi for where she was. And interestingly, in her family, there are two people who were canonised, two Catholic martyrs,

the blessed John Nutter and the Blessed Robert Nutter, who'd been executed a few decades earlier for being Catholics. They weren't her blood relatives. She was married into the Nuttors, but they were her relatives through marriage. So there's a theory, and it's gaining stronger and stronger ground, that that actually, well, it was a miscarriage of justice in all of their cases, obviously, because there's no such thing as a witch. but that in her case it was an even more manifest miscarriage of justice because she was really being persecuted for being a Catholic and not able to give an alibi. Whether that's true or not, no one knows, but it's a strong local tradition. Another reason some historians suspect Alice Nutter may have been Catholic

lies in her wealth and status. Unlike most of the accused, she was a landowner with independent means, a profile more typical of dissident Catholic families than marginal villagers. After the Reformation, Catholicism often survived mainly among the gentry. They could afford fines for missing church and quietly support private worship. In that context, Alice Nutter's prosperity may have made her both capable of remaining discreet and vulnerable to suspicion once accusations arose. So when Nutter was protesting her innocence, that was as far as she could go. She wasn't able to say where she was, because that would have opened questions as to who she was with,

who were these secret Catholics at this Mass, who was the priest, and that would have led to other deaths. So she was protecting them and sacrificed herself. The Pendle witch trial was taking place just a little bit before the peak of the witch craze. There had been some medieval witch trials, but it really flared, after the Reformation, kicking off around 1550. The peak really was in the mid-1600s, and the Pendle Witch Trial was in 1612. So it was part of the upswing towards the peak

that happened in the middle of the century. And then it all really was over in England into the early 1700s. In 1735, the Witchcraft Act was passed. And that, unlike the previous Witchcraft Acts, which had created offences of witchcraft said witchcraft is a fraud. So when it was prosecuting people under the Witchcraft Act 1735,

it was for pretending to be witches or pretending to have those powers. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 marked a decisive shift in how the British state understood witchcraft. Witchcraft was redefined as fraud and deception, not heresy or treason. This was a broader transformation of more modern ideals, influenced by the Enlightenment. The public had a growing skepticism

and an increasing discomfort with the mass executions of the previous century. An interesting feature of the Pendle Witch Trial was that one of those who was hanged was James Device, who was the brother who stole the sheep for the party. And that's quite important because men were hanged as witches.

Overall, during the entire witch craze globally, it's estimated that perhaps 20% of all those hanged-for-witchcraft were men. Although rarer than women or girls being found as witches, it did still happen to men. One of the most prominent examples of men being tried is John Lowe's, an elderly clergyman accused during the hunts, led by Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s. Lo's status as a minister, while being isolated within the community, made him especially vulnerable,

and he was executed despite the absence of physical evidence. Under interrogation, Lowe's allegedly confessed to witchcraft, but the confession was extracted after prolonged imprisonment, sleep deprivation, and pressure methods commonly used by Hopkins and his associates. According to contemporary accounts, Lowe's later recanted, reportedly calling Hopkins a rascal and a liar before his execution. The Pendle Witch Trial matters because of its place in the history of the Witch Cray's. A conservative view is that the witch craze was responsible for executing 40,000 to 60,000 people,

although the real numbers are not very easy to find and people have wildly different estimates. but that's a fairly conservative view. In England, the number was about 500 to 1,000. In Scotland, where King James I first had had more of an influence, and where religion was more strongly Puritan, the numbers a lot higher is 2,500, actually for a much smaller population as well. But Pendle is important because it was one of the largest single witch trials in England. The other main story about witchcraft in England is the witchfinder general, Matthew Hopkins,

who was active around the mid-1600s, particularly in the east of England in Essex and Norfolk, and he oversaw maybe 100 executions. Matthew Hopkins emerged during England's civil war as the most notorious figure of the witch hunts, styling himself the Witchfinder General, despite holding no official government post. active mainly in East Anglia in the 1640s, Hopkins exploited the collapse of local authority and Puritan anxiety to conduct wide-ranging investigations, charging communities fees while extracting confessions

through methods such as sleep deprivation and relentless interrogation. Working with local magistrates, he helps send dozens, possibly hundreds, to the gallows, normalizing suspicion as evidence and reputation as guilt. His brief career ended almost as abruptly as it began, but its impact was lasting. Around 1646 to 1647, public opinion had begun to turn against him as skepticism about which hunting grew, and the scale of executions caused unease, even among Puritan supporters. clergymen and legal figures openly criticized his methods, and the publication of his own pamphlet, the discovery of witches, appears to have backfired by exposing how flimsy his evidence often was.

Hopkins died in 1647, probably of tuberculosis, at a relatively young age. Contrary to later legend, there is no reliable evidence that he was tried, tortured, or executed as a witch himself. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment.

Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. But Pendle is a very, very significant. part of the story. It's quite early as the witch trials are really building up a head of steam and it legitimizes the idea that children can give evidence against their own family members. There's perennially a question around why people tried witches. And there are probably very many different reasons. The case of Robert Noel is really interesting because at first when he heard these allegations of witchcraft from Alizon, squinting Lizzie, and old Demdike, and then old chattocks, he dismissed it and wasn't interested.

But something happened that made him change his mind after the Good Friday Party. And it has to be a possibility that he saw a real possibility of convictions and that that could enhance his career. because, of course, the administration at the time, both in the courts and running up into the monarchy, which was at the head of the court system, was very much in favour of finding witches and of exterminating this evil from the kingdom. So for ambitious magistrates like Noel, having a good witch trial was something of a career move. Robert Noel continued to serve as a respected local magistrate and landowner in Lancashire after 1612. From a modern perspective, it's hard to comprehend,

but Noel's post-trial life suggests that Pendle was a legitimate exercise of justice within the political climate of the time. Whether Janet was fully aware of what she's doing or not is very hard to get at because we don't have her words. We have what the officials in the court thought of her. and they thought that she was a wonderfully coherent, cogent witness. But that's their view. So we're seeing her through the eyes of the clerk and the two judges.

And with the knowledge that the jury then went on to convict based on her evidence. But as a matter of common sense, does one really think that a nine-year-old would condemn the majority of their family to be hanged? One really has to wonder. In medieval and early modern communities, survival often depended on belonging. Villages were slow to change and highly suspicious of outsiders. Those who lived on the margins, the quarrelsome, the itinerant, or simply the unconventional, were remembered. Reputation accumulated slowly, and when hardship struck, it could harden into suspicion.

At Pendle, this pattern is visible in the family. who were accused. The device and the Chattuck's families were already known to their neighbors, already associated with poverty, conflict, and reputations for troubling behavior. What condemned them was not a single act, but years of being regarded as different. In that sense, Pendle was not a sudden eruption of panic, but the final moment in a long process where unconformity slowly became something the law could kill for. It's very easy to conflate into ideas of witchcraft people who have practices that might seem slightly on the witchy side, but actually when thought about in the historical context,

and no more than people using what's around them in beneficial ways for their communities. And as to whether some of those people imbued or implied some sort of supernatural or unusual abilities that they were better than any of the next people, that must have gone on. But that's different to admitting that it's what people think of or what people were tried of as witchcraft, but it does massively complicate the picture. People with spells or waxen images or pins or teeth of buried people is very much the fantastical, terrified vision of what a witch might be. No doubt a lot of it down to hysteria and with no historical basis.

at all. But of course in rural communities, there were people who had skills with plants, with herbs, some basic chemical knowledge, who were able to use this for health, helping people, midwifery, various other skills that were very much necessary in early communities. When accusations reached the court at Pendle, the spells described were never the everyday remedies or healing charms that existed in rural communities. Those practices using herbs or simple rituals to treat illness or protect livestock were largely ignored. Instead, the evidence focused on darker acts, spells intended to harm, maim, or kill. These acts were framed not as misguided folk practice, but as conscious cooperation with the devil.

Did people pretend that they might have had heaven-sent powers or slightly supernaturally enhanced powers in order to gain a bit of competitive advantage over other people or to reassure their patience? Almost certainly. But that's a very different thing to witchcraft the way it was seen in trials like the Pendle or Salem trial. Pendle helped legitimize the use of child testimony in witchcraft cases. The conviction and execution of adults on the evidence of a nine-year-old was treated in England as lawful and justified, not as a scandal. That precedent that children could identify witches and be believed resurfaced in Salem, where the accusations of young girls again drove the trials forward. Pendle also reinforced the idea that witchcraft was a civil crime, prosecuted by the state,

rather than the church. This meant ordinary legal safeguards could be suspended in the face of perceived existential threat. We cannot know the motives of those involved with any certainty, and we cannot recover the voices of the accused beyond what authority chose to record. What survives are outcomes and written evidence. These are things that feel recognizably modern, and that is where the unease lies. There were no bloodthirsty mobs waving torches and pitchforks, but legal processes we still recognize,

used to sentence people to death for witchcraft on the testimony of a child. The discomfort does not come from the mystery or superstition, but the recognition that these familiar institutions, operating as intended, were, and in some cases still are, capable of delivering irreversible injustice, for something so untrue. Thanks for exploring the past with us today.

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