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Jennet Device, a nine-year-old girl, became the star witness in the Pendle witch trials. Under King James I's Daemonologie, legal rules were suspended, allowing her to condemn her family to the gallows. This blog explores how the state weaponised a child to secure England’s most notorious witch-hunt conviction
Written by Simon Williams
History is rarely a chronicle of the innocent. It is, more often than not, a ledger of power, a study in how the machinery of the state, the crown, the courts, and the ambitious men who serve them, can be turned upon the most vulnerable with a cold, clinical efficiency. In the damp, windswept corner of 17th-century Lancashire, beneath the looming shadow of Pendle Hill, twenty people were accused of witchcraft.
Of those, ten were hanged. Their story is not simply one of superstition triumphing over reason, though superstition played its part. It is a story of poverty and land disputes, of family feuds and local vendettas, of a monarchy desperate to assert its divine authority, and of a legal system that proved all too willing to condemn the friendless and the frightened. It is, in short, a story that tells us far more about the powerful than it does about the accused.
To understand the Pendle witch trials of 1612, one must first understand the world that produced them. Lancashire in the early seventeenth century was, by the standards of the English crown, a problem county. It was geographically remote, economically poor, and religiously suspect. The Reformation had transformed England's official faith within living memory, but in the northern counties, the old Catholic practices persisted with a stubborn tenacity that alarmed Protestant authorities in London.
Lancashire was known to harbour recusants, those who refused to attend Church of England services, and the county's gentry included families with well-documented Catholic sympathies. In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a group of Catholic conspirators had attempted to blow up Parliament and the Protestant King James I, the authorities were in no mood for leniency toward religious nonconformity of any kind.
King James himself was a crucial figure in what was to come. He had arrived in England from Scotland in 1603 as a monarch already deeply invested in the reality of witchcraft. His 1597 treatise Daemonologie, written before he became King of England, set out a learned and earnest argument for the existence of witches and the necessity of prosecuting them. He had personally overseen the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland during the 1590s, in which dozens of people were accused of conspiring with the devil to kill him by raising storms at sea.
James brought this obsession south with him, and it found expression in the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which expanded the categories of capital offence and made the prosecution of witches easier. The king's personal interest in the supernatural gave local magistrates both the incentive and the authority to pursue cases that might previously have been dismissed or handled more leniently.
The Pendle area itself was dominated by two rival families: the Demdikes, centred on Old Demdike (Elizabeth Southernes), and the Chattoxes, centred on Anne Whittle, known as Chattox. Both women were elderly, impoverished, and had long-standing reputations in the community as practitioners of folk magic, the kind of low-level cunning that involved healing the sick, finding lost property, or removing curses.
This sort of informal magical practice was widespread in early modern England and usually tolerated, but it also made its practitioners vulnerable. If something went wrong, if a neighbour's cow died, if a child fell ill, if a dispute turned ugly, the local cunning woman or wise man was an obvious scapegoat. The line between beneficial magic and malefic witchcraft was, in popular understanding, a thin and easily crossed one.
The immediate trigger for the Pendle trials was an encounter in March 1612 between Alizon Device, granddaughter of Old Demdike, and a pedlar named John Law. The precise details of what occurred between them are disputed, but the account preserved in the trial records, themselves a deeply partial document, holds that Alizon asked Law for some pins, that he refused, and that shortly afterward he suffered what appears to have been a stroke.
Alizon, apparently convinced of her own guilt, confessed when brought before the local magistrate Roger Nowell that she had sold her soul to the devil and used her powers to lame the pedlar. It was a confession that would set in motion a chain of events leading to the deaths of ten people.
Roger Nowell, the magistrate who received this confession, was a man of considerable local standing and evident ambition. He was a justice of the peace, a position that carried real power and real expectations. In pursuing the witchcraft investigation aggressively, he was acting in accordance with the preferences of his king and demonstrating the kind of zeal that could advance a career. He expanded his investigation rapidly, gathering testimony from the Device family and their neighbours, and summoning the elderly Demdike and Chattox, along with several younger members of their families, for questioning.
What emerged from his interrogations was, if the record is to be believed, a picture of intergenerational witchcraft, devil worship, and calculated malice. Old Demdike reportedly confessed to having had a familiar spirit for forty years. Chattox confessed to making clay images and using them to cause death.
These confessions must be read with extreme care. They were given by elderly, illiterate, and frightened women to a powerful magistrate in a legal system that had no concept of the right to silence, no legal representation for the accused, and a strong presumption of guilt. Torture was not legally permitted in English common law courts in the way it was on the Continent, but the conditions of imprisonment, the psychological pressure of interrogation, and the vulnerability of those being questioned made coerced confession a reliable outcome nonetheless.
Old Demdike died in prison before she could be tried. The others were sent to Lancaster Castle to await the August assizes.
The scope of the investigation expanded dramatically following a gathering at Malkin Tower, the Device family home, on Good Friday, 1612. The meeting was later characterised in court as a witches' sabbath, a gathering of malevolent conspirators plotting to kill the gaoler at Lancaster, blow up the castle, and free the imprisoned Demdikes and Chattoxes. The evidence for this interpretation rested almost entirely on the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device, who named the attendees and described the proceedings. Her testimony would prove devastating.
The use of child testimony in witchcraft trials was not unique to Pendle. Children were considered particularly reliable witnesses in such cases, partly because they were thought to be less capable of deliberate deception, and partly because the spectral evidence they could provide, visions, dreams, the identification of shapes that had tormented them, was considered of evidential value that an adult's word-of-mouth account might lack.
In practice, of course, a child of nine could be led, coached, or simply terrified into saying almost anything. Jennet Device named her own mother, Elizabeth Device, as a witch. She named her brother James. She named neighbours and acquaintances. Each name became an arrest, each arrest a potential execution.
The trial itself took place at Lancaster on the 18th and 19th of August 1612, before judges Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham. It was, by the standards of the time, a relatively orderly proceeding, but the standards of the time were not high. The accused had no legal counsel. They had been imprisoned for months in miserable conditions. They faced a court that was already inclined to believe in their guilt by the confessions that had been extracted and the testimony of witnesses, including the remarkable Jennet Device.
Nineteen people were tried in total across the Lancashire witch trials of that year; ten from the Pendle area were hanged.
It is worth pausing to consider who exactly was condemned to die. They were, almost without exception, people from the margins of society. Elizabeth Device, Alizon Device, and James Device were members of a poor, semi-vagrant family with no social connections to protect them.
Alice Nutter was something of an anomaly: she appears to have been a woman of some property and social standing, and her presence among the condemned has puzzled historians ever since. Some have speculated that she was caught up in the trials for reasons connected to land disputes or religious nonconformity rather than any genuine accusation of malefic witchcraft. Others have suggested that she may have been a Catholic recusant whose real offence was her religion.
The truth is that we do not know, and the gap in the record is itself revealing: even a woman of relative status could not protect herself when the machinery of accusation had been set in motion.
The others, Anne Whittle (Chattox), Anne Redferne, Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock, Katherine Hewitt, and Isabel Robey, were people of no particular standing, whose names would have been entirely forgotten were it not for the circumstances of their deaths. Their guilt, in the terms in which the court understood guilt, rested on confessions obtained under duress, the testimony of neighbours with whom they had disputes, and the evidence of a child. By any modern standard of justice, their trials were profoundly unfair. By the standards of their own time, they were unremarkable.
What the Pendle trials illuminate with particular clarity is the way in which the machinery of legal accusation can be turned to serve purposes that have nothing to do with justice. Roger Nowell was not, as far as we can tell, a sadist or a fanatic. He was a pragmatist operating within a system that rewarded the prosecution of witches and punished leniency. The confessions he extracted were instruments of legal procedure, not reflections of truth. The witnesses who gave testimony against the accused were not necessarily lying, but they were operating within a framework of belief that made it genuinely possible to attribute misfortune to malevolent magic and to identify a neighbour as its source. The court that tried the accused was not corrupt in the crude sense of taking bribes; it was corrupt in the deeper sense of being structurally incapable of delivering justice to people without power or protection.
The Pendle witch trials are sometimes treated as a curiosity, a remnant of a credulous and superstitious age that has been safely consigned to history. This is a comfortable reading but not an accurate one. The specific content of the accusations, devil worship, shape-shifting, the making of clay images, belongs to a particular historical moment. But the underlying dynamics: the targeting of the marginalised, the use of frightened or manipulated testimony, the willingness of officials to pursue prosecutions that serve their interests and confirm their prejudices, the vulnerability of the unrepresented and the friendless, these are not historical curiosities. They are recurrent features of legal systems operating under political pressure.
Our knowledge of the Pendle trials comes primarily from a single source: Thomas Potts's The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613. Potts was a clerk of the court at Lancaster, and his account was produced with the approval of the presiding judges and was dedicated to two prominent members of the royal council. It is, in other words, an official document, produced to justify the verdict and celebrate the administration of justice. It is not a neutral record.
Potts shapes his material to present the accused as genuinely guilty, the confessions as voluntarily given, and the trial as a model of careful legal procedure. Where the record is thin, he fills it in with inference and assertion. Where the evidence is ambiguous, he resolves it in the direction of guilt.
Historians working with the Pendle material must therefore read against the grain of the primary source, looking for the gaps and inconsistencies that suggest a more complicated reality. The case of Alice Nutter is one such gap. The silence around the actual evidence against several of the accused is another. The reliance on child testimony, and the absence of any apparent corroboration for the most dramatic claims about the Malkin Tower meeting, are others.
Reading the historical record critically does not mean dismissing it as worthless. Potts preserves names, dates, and details that would otherwise be lost, but it does mean recognising that it was produced in the service of a particular narrative and must be interrogated accordingly.
The Pendle witches have become, over the four centuries since their deaths, a subject of sustained cultural fascination. They have been novelised, dramatised, and commemorated in local tourism. Pendle Hill is a destination for walkers and history enthusiasts, and the region has built a significant industry around the memory of 1612. This is not, in itself, a problem; there is value in keeping difficult history alive and in maintaining a connection to the communities and individuals whom history has otherwise left voiceless. But the commercialisation of the Pendle story does carry a risk: that the discomfort of the history will be smoothed away, that the condemned women will become colourful characters in a pageant rather than real people who were killed by a system that failed them.
The most honest thing that can be said about the Pendle witch trials is also the simplest: ten people were put to death for something that did not exist. They were killed not because they were witches but because they were poor, isolated, and without the social connections that might have protected them. They were killed because a king believed in witches, because a magistrate was ambitious, because a child's testimony was treated as reliable, and because a legal system designed to protect the powerful was turned against the powerless.
The details of the specific accusations, the clay figures, the familiars, the gathering at Malkin Tower, are fascinating as historical evidence of popular belief and legal practice. But they should not distract from the central fact, which is that the trial of the Pendle witches was an act of judicial murder dressed in the language of law.
To understand the wider context of the 1612 trials, read our full account of the real story of the Pendle witches, explore Roger Nowell's role in the Assizes, discover the surprising truths behind the Pendle trials, and see how these events fit into the broader history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
Published: 04 April 2026 | Last Updated: 11 June 2026
In this episode, we peel back the layers of myth and "witch-themed" folklore to conduct a forensic investigation into England’s most notorious miscarriage of justice:the 1612 Pendle witch trials. Part of the Histories and Castles Deep Dive series.
