The Pendle Witches: The 1612 Trial and the Child Who Decided It

On 18 August 1612, the story of the Pendle witches narrowed to a courtroom at Lancaster Castle, where a nine-year-old girl was lifted onto a table so that everyone could see her.

Her name was Jennet Device. She was a beggar’s daughter from a tumbledown house under Pendle Hill, and she had been brought there to speak against her mother. The record says Elizabeth Device understood what was about to happen before her daughter said a word, and that she screamed, cursed, wept, and would not stop, until the judges had her dragged out of the room. Then the child, quite composed, gave her evidence to the empty space where her mother had been standing.

She named her mother. She named her brother James and her sister Alizon. She named neighbours, and a gentlewoman, and people she had eaten beside at a gathering on Good Friday. By the twentieth of August, ten of the people who became the Pendle witches were dead on Gallows Hill.

There is a detail in this that the ghost tours tend to leave out, and it is the one that should keep you up. Under English law as it stood that summer, Jennet Device could not have testified at all. A child under fourteen could not swear a credible oath, and evidence that could not be sworn was evidence a court would not hear. What made her admissible was not a change in the law but a book, written by the King himself, arguing that in cases of witchcraft the usual protections could be set aside, because witchcraft was a crime so hidden that ordinary proof would never find it.

So the loophole opened, and the child walked through it, and ten people were hanged. And the manner of it worked so well that it was remembered, and copied, and carried across an ocean to a village in Massachusetts eighty years later, where other children stood up and named their neighbours.

That is the part of the Pendle witches story that is fully documented. Court clerk, official publication, names, dates, the lot.

The rest of it is the hill.

Pendle rises out of east Lancashire like something surfacing: five hundred and fifty-seven metres of gritstone whaleback with nothing much around it to argue with, so that from certain roads it seems to follow you. People have been walking up it for four hundred years to see whether the stories hold. They come at Halloween in numbers now, with torches and phone cameras, and they come back down having felt something or having felt nothing at all, and both groups tell it the same way afterwards.

What they are looking for is the ten who were hanged. What is actually written down is stranger, and harder, and involves no ghosts whatsoever: a family who made a living from being feared, a magistrate with a list to compile, a king who dreamed of witches, and a little girl standing on a table in a room in Lancaster, doing exactly what the adults around her required.

Twenty-two years later, in the same county, on the word of another child, Jennet Device was tried for witchcraft herself.

Pendle Hill: The Country of the Pendle Witches

It is not a mountain and it is not quite a moor, and the people who live under it mostly call it the hill, as though there were only one.

Pendle sits alone in east Lancashire, between the Ribble Valley and the old cotton towns, and its isolation is the whole of its character. Five hundred and fifty-seven metres, a long flat summit ridge with a steep western scarp dropping away beneath it, and no neighbouring high ground close enough to break the line. From below it reads as a single mass, dark against whatever the sky is doing, and because the country around it is low and rolling it stays in view for miles. Drive the road from Clitheroe towards Nelson and it swings slowly across the windscreen, first on one side, then ahead, then behind, never quite gone.

The summit itself is disappointing in the way that most summits are. Peat and coarse grass, a trig point, a scatter of cairn stones, wind coming across with nothing to stop it. On a clear day the view runs to the Yorkshire Dales and, if the air is unusually good, west as far as the Irish Sea. On most days it runs to about forty metres of cloud. The climb from Barley, which is where nearly everyone starts, is short and unkind: a made staircase of stone slabs up the eastern flank, twenty minutes of it if you are fit, and the top arrives more abruptly than it should.

The villages are the point, though, more than the summit. They ring the base of the hill and they are small: Barley, Newchurch in Pendle, Roughlee, Sabden, Barrowford a little further out. Stone cottages, a church, a pub, sheep in the fields between. This is the country the accused actually lived in, and it has not been landscaped into a heritage site. It is still farmed, still lived in, still ordinary in a way that catches you out. The Forest of Pendle, which appears constantly in accounts of 1612, was never a forest in the modern sense. It was a royal hunting ground, and by the seventeenth century it was largely cleared, poor grazing land worked by tenants who were not doing well out of it.

Newchurch has the church of St Mary, whose tower carries a circular stone mark that visitors have taken for centuries to be the Eye of God, set into the fabric to watch for witches. Its actual origin is unrecorded. There is a shop opposite that sells stuffed witches and tea towels, and the two things sit across the road from each other without apparent embarrassment.

What the place does not do is announce itself. There is no gate, no threshold, no moment where the atmosphere changes. You are in Lancashire farmland, and then you are still in Lancashire farmland, and the hill is simply there above the field wall, and somewhere in these lanes a family called Device kept a house that no longer exists.

The reason people come is that ten of their neighbours were hanged as the Pendle witches.

The History of the Pendle Witches

The whole of it turns on a moment of ordinary rudeness on a road.

On 18 March 1612, a young woman named Alizon Device met a pedlar called John Law on the road near Colne and asked him for pins. He refused her, or he was slow about it, or he said something. The accounts differ on the detail and agree on the shape. She was angry. She said something as he walked away. A short distance further on, John Law collapsed. He survived, but he had lost the use of one side of his body and the power of clear speech: what a modern reader recognises immediately as a stroke, and what everybody present in 1612 recognised as something else.

Alizon herself seems to have believed she had done it. When Law’s son brought her before the local magistrate, she confessed, not under torture, which English law did not permit in such cases, but readily, and in detail. She said she had sold her soul to a black dog. She asked Law’s forgiveness. By every indication she was as convinced as her accusers.

The magistrate was Roger Nowell of Read Hall, and it matters a great deal who he was. Nowell was a Justice of the Peace in a county the Crown regarded as barely governed. Lancashire in 1612 was the most stubbornly Catholic region in England, notorious for recusancy, the refusal to attend Anglican services, and every Justice in the county had been instructed that year to compile lists of those who would not take communion. A magistrate who produced results was a magistrate being noticed. And the results most valued in that particular season, by that particular king, were witches.

James I had come to the English throne in 1603 carrying a personal preoccupation with the subject. He had presided over witch trials in Scotland, believed himself to have been the target of a coven’s storm-raising, and in 1597 published Daemonologie, a treatise arguing not only that witches were real but that the ordinary rules of evidence were inadequate against them. It is a short book and an enormously consequential one, and its central argument is procedural: because witchcraft is committed in secret, courts must accept proofs they would reject in any other case.

Nowell pulled the thread. Alizon’s confession implicated her grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, known throughout the district as Old Demdike, a blind woman in her eighties who had been regarded locally as a witch for half a century and who does not appear to have troubled to deny it. It implicated Anne Whittle, called Old Chattox, the matriarch of a rival family. Demdike and Chattox were cunning folk, which in the seventeenth-century Lancashire economy was a job: healing with herbs and charms, blessing livestock, finding lost property, and, when times were harder, trading on the fear that a woman who could cure could also curse. The two families had been feuding for years, and when questioned they cheerfully incriminated each other.

Demdike, Chattox, Alizon Device and Chattox’s daughter Anne Redferne were committed to Lancaster Castle in April.

Then came Good Friday. With four of their family in gaol, the Devices held a gathering at their house, Malkin Tower, whose location has never been definitively established, and something like twenty people came. A neighbour’s sheep was stolen and eaten. In any other year it would have been a family council held by frightened people. In 1612, reported to Nowell, it became a witches’ sabbath, complete with an alleged plot to blow up Lancaster Castle and free the prisoners. Eight more arrests followed.

By August there were twelve accused. Demdike never reached trial; she died in the castle, in conditions bad enough that dying there was unremarkable.

The trials opened at the Lancaster Assizes on 18 August. The accused had no counsel. They could not call witnesses in their own defence. They had, in the strict sense, no defence at all: the procedure allowed them to respond to charges and nothing more.

And the Crown’s principal witness was Jennet Device, aged nine.

She was, by the account of Thomas Potts, the clerk who published the official record, entirely steady. She identified those who had been at Malkin Tower. She described her mother’s familiar spirit. She gave evidence against her mother, her brother James, her sister Alizon, and against Alice Nutter, a gentlewoman of independent means whose presence among the accused has never been satisfactorily explained, and who protested her innocence to the end while others around her confessed.

Elizabeth Device’s removal from the court is the moment the whole trial turns on. She could not be permitted to face the child. The child could not give evidence with her mother in the room. Everyone involved understood the pressure that a nine-year-old was under, and the solution adopted was to remove the source of the pressure and proceed.

Ten were convicted and hanged on Gallows Hill at Lancaster on 20 August 1612: Elizabeth, James and Alizon Device; Anne Whittle and Anne Redferne; Alice Nutter; Katherine Hewitt; Jane and John Bulcock; and Isabel Robey. Alice Grey was acquitted. Jennet Preston had already been tried and hanged at York the month before.

The reason we know any of this in such detail is Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, and the reason it exists is that the trial judges commissioned it. It is not a neutral transcript. It is a document produced by the winning side to demonstrate that justice had been done, and it needs to be read as such. But it is also, by a wide margin, the fullest surviving account of any English witch trial, which is why the Pendle witches are known and hundreds of comparable cases are not.

The precedent it set outlasted everyone in it. Jennet’s testimony established in practice what Daemonologie had argued in theory: that in witchcraft cases a child’s word would be heard. Prosecutors elsewhere took note. The technique travelled, and eighty years later, in Salem, it was children who stood up and named their neighbours.

In 1634, a ten-year-old boy from Newchurch named Edmund Robinson told a story about two dogs that turned into a woman and a boy, and a witches’ feast he claimed to have seen. Twenty people were accused on his word. One of them was Jennet Device.

That case collapsed. Robinson admitted he had made it up; the accused were examined in London and the convictions were not carried out. But acquittal in 1634 did not mean release, because prisoners were charged for their own keep and the poor could not pay. A woman named Jennet Device appears in the Lancaster gaol records still held there in 1636, and after that she disappears from the documentary record entirely.

The Legend of the Pendle Witches

The hauntings arrived late, and they arrived from a particular direction.

Nothing in the seventeenth-century material describes the Pendle witches as ghosts. Potts records the accused as living people who were tried and executed; the supernatural content of the trial is all things the accused were said to have done while alive. The idea that they came back belongs to a much later Pendle, one shaped decisively by fiction. William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches, published in 1849, was a Victorian Gothic novel and a considerable bestseller, and it did to Pendle roughly what Bram Stoker later did to Whitby. It fixed Alice Nutter as a tragic heroine, populated the hill with atmosphere it had not previously carried, and gave the district a mythology that visitors have been arriving to confirm ever since.

What people report today falls into a few recognisable shapes.

The commonest is the figure on the slope: a dark shape moving on the hillside at dusk or in mist, sometimes several, seen from below or from a distance and gone when approached. Local reluctance to be on the hill after dark is genuine and frequently mentioned, and it predates the ghost-hunting industry that now sells access to it.

The second is the sound. Walkers describe footsteps behind them on paths where nobody else is, voices in the wind on the summit ridge, and the particular unnerving quality of silence in the cloughs where running water suddenly cannot be heard.

The third is concentrated at the sites rather than the hill: St Mary’s at Newchurch, where the Eye of God looks out over a graveyard containing a stone the tour guides identify as the Nutter family’s, and the lanes around Roughlee, where Alice Nutter’s statue now stands and where sightings cluster with a regularity that says as much about where people expect to see things as about what they see.

Then there is Malkin Tower, which is a legend in its own right precisely because nobody knows where it was. Several sites have been proposed. None is confirmed. The Device family house has become a location that exists in the record and nowhere on the ground, which has not stopped a considerable amount of activity being attributed to it.

The most-cited modern episode is the 2011 discovery, during work on a Lower Black Moss reservoir, of a seventeenth-century cottage that had been sealed and largely forgotten, and, bricked into its wall, the mummified body of a cat. This was widely reported as the Malkin Tower found at last. It almost certainly is not, and the archaeology does not support the identification. But the cat is real, and it is worth understanding what it means: immuring a cat in a wall was a recognised apotropaic practice, a charm against witchcraft. It is not evidence that witches lived in that house. It is evidence that whoever built it was frightened of them, which tells you something more useful about the district than a coven would.

Television did the rest. A Most Haunted investigation on the hill in 2004 produced claims of possession and of a crew member being seized from behind, and that broadcast is traceable in the shape of the reports that followed it. The commercial infrastructure now on the hill, the overnight vigils, the guided lockdowns, the equipment supplied, dates from that period.

What almost none of it is about is the trial. The reported phenomena at Pendle attach to the hill, the villages and the churchyards, but rarely to Lancaster, where the actual dying happened, thirty-five miles away. The ghost story has settled on the landscape that looks like a ghost story rather than on the site of the events it claims to commemorate. Whatever is happening on Pendle Hill, it is not the ten of them coming home.

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The Skeptics: What the Pendle Witches Case Actually Shows

The sceptical account of Pendle is not a debunking, because there is very little to debunk. Almost nobody, including most of the people running ghost hunts on the hill, argues that the Pendle witches were witches. The interesting sceptical work is elsewhere: on why a district full of reasonable people arrived at ten hangings, and on what visitors are experiencing now.

Start with the trial, because the rational explanation there is not a theory. It is documented procedure.

The accused had no counsel and could not call witnesses. The principal evidence against several of them was the testimony of a nine-year-old, admitted under a doctrine the reigning monarch had personally authored. Every structural feature required to produce false convictions was present, and the outcome was the outcome those features were designed to produce. You do not need a modern sensibility to see this; contemporaries in London saw it clearly enough in 1634, when the same county produced twenty accusations on a child’s word and the Privy Council took one look and stopped it.

The confessions are the part that trips people up, and they have a straightforward explanation that does not require anyone to have been lying. Alizon Device confessed because she believed it. She had been raised in a household where her grandmother’s reputation for power was the family’s principal asset, and when a man collapsed moments after she cursed him, the causal account available to her was the one she had been taught. Old Demdike had spent fifty years being the woman you did not cross. There is no reason to think either of them experienced their confession as false. Belief in one’s own maleficence was an ordinary feature of the seventeenth-century mental landscape, and its presence is evidence about that landscape, not about the supernatural.

Then there is the economics, which is where the sceptical reading gets genuinely uncomfortable. The Device and Chattox families were destitute in a district that had little to spare. Cunning folk occupied a functional niche, healing, blessing, charm-work, and the same reputation that brought custom made a woman a plausible defendant. Begging backed by an implied threat is a survival strategy, and it worked right up until the moment it made you worth prosecuting. Both families were doing it. Both families informed on the other with what reads, in Potts, like enthusiasm. Pendle is not a story about superstition descending on innocents from outside. It is a story about poor neighbours in competition, and the state supplying a mechanism.

Roger Nowell’s incentives complete it. A Justice in a recusant county under instruction to identify religious nonconformity, in a reign where witch-finding carried favour, encountering a confession that could be developed. It does not require malice. It requires only a man doing his job in the direction his job rewarded.

As for the hill itself, the sceptical explanations are unusually specific and unusually good.

The figures on the slope have a named candidate: the Brocken spectre, an effect in which a walker’s own shadow is cast onto cloud or mist below them and appears as a large, indistinct human form, often ringed with light, that moves when they move. Pendle’s topography produces it readily: a steep scarp, frequent low cloud, and walkers arriving at a ridge with mist beneath. It is the single most convincing explanation on offer, and it accounts for the recurring detail that the figure vanishes on approach.

The sounds are less exotic still. Wind across an exposed summit ridge, moving through bracken and over gritstone, generates a broad acoustic profile that the auditory system readily resolves into voices and footsteps, the same faculty that finds faces in wallpaper, applied to noise. Add the peculiar deadening effect of mist on sound and the sudden silence in the cloughs stops being strange.

And then there is what people bring with them. Expectation is the most powerful instrument on that hill, and Pendle’s visitors are the most primed audience in England. They have climbed a hill famous for witches, at night, in October, having paid for the privilege, in a group, in the dark, with equipment whose readings they have been told to interpret as presence. Under those conditions, reporting nothing would be the anomalous result. The 2004 television broadcast and the industry that grew from it did not discover activity on Pendle Hill so much as instruct several hundred thousand people in what to look for.

There is one thing the sceptical account does not dispose of, and it is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over.

The local reluctance to be on the hill after dark is old, and it is held by people who have nothing to sell and no reason to perform. Farmers, not visitors. It predates the television crews by a long way. You can explain it as inherited cultural memory in a district that has known what it is famous for since 1613, and that explanation is probably correct. But cultural memory is not nothing, and a landscape can carry an event long after the last person who witnessed it is dead. Something is on that hill. The evidence suggests it is four hundred years of knowing what happened there.

My Thoughts

I do not think anything supernatural has ever happened on Pendle Hill, and I have never been less reassured by a conclusion.

The rational account is complete here in a way it rarely is. Every element has an explanation, the explanations are good, and they interlock. The Brocken spectre is not a stretch. The confessions make sense. The economics make sense. I can follow the whole thing from a pedlar refusing a girl some pins to ten bodies on Gallows Hill without once needing to invoke anything that isn’t in the documentary record, and that is exactly the problem. The comfort of a ghost story is that it’s a ghost story. Nothing at Pendle offers that.

What I keep returning to is the table.

They lifted her onto it so the court could see her. That is a staging decision. Someone in that room worked out that a nine-year-old giving evidence would carry more weight if she could be seen giving it, and arranged the furniture accordingly. And when her mother started screaming, they did not stop the proceedings or question whether a child in that position could give reliable testimony. They removed the mother. The obstacle to the evidence was identified and cleared, and the evidence was taken.

I find I cannot make Jennet Device into a villain, and I notice how much writing about the Pendle witches wants to. The child who condemned her family is a better story than the child who was used, and it has the additional advantage of locating the horror in someone we can hold responsible. But she was nine. She had been in the custody of the men who questioned her. She had watched her grandmother taken away and her family destroyed over the preceding four months, and she said what the adults around her needed her to say. That is not a monster. That is what children do under that kind of pressure, reliably, which is precisely why the law had a rule against it: a rule that a king with a theory suspended.

And then the ending, which I have not been able to put down since I found it. Twenty-two years later, another child, another story, another twenty names. Hers among them. The machine she had been fed into turned around and took her too, and the last certain trace of her is a debt she couldn’t pay for the privilege of being imprisoned after an acquittal. The circle closes so neatly it looks authored, and it wasn’t. It was just the same mechanism running again on the same terrain, with a different child at the front of it.

Which brings me to the part I am least comfortable with, and it involves me.

There is now a commercial industry on that hill built on the deaths of ten people, and I do not think it is straightforwardly wrong. I have no appetite for the position that says people should not visit sites of historical suffering, or that curiosity about the dead is a moral failing. That argument usually turns out to be about taste rather than ethics, and it would condemn most of what I care about. But there is a difference between going to Pendle to understand what happened and going to Pendle hoping the hanged will perform. The second treats Elizabeth Device as an attraction, and she was a frightened woman who was screamed out of a courtroom before her daughter spoke.

The Dark Atlas is not innocent here. I am writing about Pendle because it draws people, and it draws people because ten of them died badly. I have used the fact of their deaths to hold your attention for four thousand words. The best I can say is that I have tried to spend that attention on what actually happened rather than on what would be more entertaining, but the transaction is the same one the ghost hunts are making, and I would be lying if I claimed otherwise.

So here is what I cannot resolve.

We tell ourselves we visit these places to remember. But nothing on Pendle Hill commemorates the trial. The reported hauntings cluster on the slopes and in the villages, and the industry has grown up where the scenery is, not where the deaths were. Lancaster is where they died. Almost nobody goes to Lancaster for this.

If what we were doing were remembrance, we would go where the gallows stood. We go where the view is better.

What is it that we actually want from the dead, when we climb a hill in the dark hoping to meet them, and would we recognise the answer if they gave it?

Visiting Pendle Hill: Practical Information

Pendle Hill is open access land and free to walk. The standard ascent starts from the village of Barley, where there is a pay-and-display car park, public toilets and a picnic site; the alternative from Downham is quieter and longer. From Barley the route follows Pendle House and then the stone-slab staircase up the eastern flank: steep, direct, and about forty minutes at a moderate pace. The path is well made and needs no navigation in clear weather.

Clear weather is the caveat. The summit is a flat, featureless plateau, and in low cloud the safe descent is genuinely hard to find; people get into difficulty on Pendle every year, and most of them are on a hill they assumed was too small to matter. Boots rather than trainers, a waterproof, and a phone with a map on it. If cloud is down, turn round.

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Public transport is workable but not quick. Clitheroe and Nelson are the nearest railway stations, with bus connections to Barley that thin out considerably outside weekday hours; check current timetables before relying on them. Driving is easier, and Barley’s car park fills early on autumn weekends.

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The villages under the hill are worth more time than the summit. Newchurch in Pendle has St Mary’s church with the Eye of God set in its tower, and Roughlee has the Alice Nutter statue. Barrowford’s Pendle Heritage Centre is the best single starting point for the history, and the Pendle Sculpture Trail in Aitken Wood above Barley is a short, well-signed walk. Lancaster, thirty-five miles north-west, is where the trials and executions actually happened: Lancaster Castle runs guided tours of the buildings where the accused were held, and Gallows Hill is now within Williamson Park.

Two notes on conduct. The land around the hill is farmed and lived in. The lanes are narrow, the fields are working fields, and the villages are somebody’s home rather than a heritage attraction, which matters most on the nights when large groups arrive. And the churchyards at Newchurch and elsewhere contain graves belonging to families still in the district. The stone identified on tours as the Nutter family’s is not a Pendle witches memorial and there is no reliable evidence connecting it to Alice Nutter, but people do visit it as though it were, and it is a grave either way.

Before you go

The Dark Atlas is a series about haunted places, taken seriously, one at a time. Pendle Hill opens Season 1.

If this piece was worth your time, the companion episode is where the same story gets told for the ear, and it goes somewhere the article does not. You can follow The Dark Atlas on Spotify so the next one finds you.

Everything else lives at shinstories.co.uk: the full historical record for each location, every source cited and checked, the visitor guides, and the places still to come.

Next in Season 1: Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England, and the man who needed it to be.

For readers of atmospheric folk horror

If the landscape, history and unease of Pendle stayed with you, The Land Demands Blood collects three literary folk-horror tales about grief, guilt and ancient vows in places where the earth itself listens.

Discover The Land Demands Blood on Amazon

Sources

Books and Academic Works

Affiliate disclosure: Some book links below are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.

Potts, Thomas. The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. London, 1613. The official account of the trials, commissioned by the presiding judges and the foundation of everything subsequently written. To be read as a document of the prosecution rather than a neutral transcript.

James VI and I. Daemonologie. Edinburgh, 1597. The King’s treatise on witchcraft, and the source of the evidentiary doctrine under which a child’s testimony was admitted.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Lancashire Witches. London, 1849. Victorian Gothic fiction, not history, but the single most influential text in shaping the modern legend and the reason Alice Nutter is remembered as she is.

Journalism and Long-form Reporting

Armitage, Simon. The Pendle Witch Child. BBC Four, 2011. Documentary treatment of Jennet Device’s role, with readings from Potts. Accompanying BBC News coverage remains available.

McCann, Barry. ‘Jennet Device: Whatever Happened To The Pendle Witch Child?’ Spooky Isles. On the 1634 Edmund Robinson case and the fragmentary record of Jennet Device’s later life.

Retrospect Journal (University of Edinburgh). ‘The Pendle Witches: How a Nine-Year-Old Girl Sentenced Her Family to Death.’ On the provenance and reliability of Potts as a source.

Official and Institutional Sources

Lancaster Castle. Visitor and historical information on the assizes, the prison, and the 1612 trials.

Visit Lancashire. On the Trail of the Pendle Witches. Route and site information for the villages, Pendle Heritage Centre, and associated locations.

The British Mountaineering Council. Material on Pendle Hill, including the Brocken spectre explanation for reported sightings on the scarp.

Further Reading

Holding, David — The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. A concise modern overview of the case.

The History Press. ‘The Pendle witches.’ Concise scholarly-facing summary of the trial and its aftermath.

Historic UK. ‘The Pendle Witches, a famous witch trial in Lancashire.’ Particularly good on the Lancashire recusancy context and the political pressures on local magistrates in 1612.

A note on what is not here. Several widely circulated details about Pendle could not be verified and have been left out rather than repeated: the identification of the 2011 Lower Black Moss cottage as Malkin Tower, which the archaeology does not support; the attribution of specific graves to named accused; and the various figures given for deaths on the hill. Where the record is silent, this piece says so.