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In 1612, fear and suspicion gripped Lancashire as twelve villagers faced trial for witchcraft at Lancaster Assizes. From cunning women like Demdike and Chattox to child witness Jennet Device, the Pendle witch trials revealed a world torn by poverty, religious paranoia, and deadly accusations that echo through history.
Written by Simon Williams
In August 1612, ten people were hanged at Lancaster following England's most documented witch trial. They were poor cunning folk from the hills around Pendle. Their prosecution was driven by religious paranoia, local rivalries, and the ambition of a magistrate determined to please the king.
I have spent considerable time with the primary sources of the 1612 Pendle trials, and what strikes me most is not the scale of the tragedy but its ordinariness. These were not powerful figures brought low by political enemies. They were elderly women, a teenager, a child, and a handful of neighbours from one of the poorest corners of Lancashire. What destroyed them was a combination of forces as old as history: fear, poverty, rivalry, and a magistrate who saw an opportunity.
The Pendle witch trials have accumulated four centuries of legend. Ghost tours, novels, and Halloween festivals have wrapped the story in atmosphere. I want to strip that away and look at what actually happened on a road near Colne in March 1612, and why it ended with ten people on the gallows.
To understand the Pendle trials, you need to place them inside the England of 1603, when James I arrived from Scotland to take the throne. James brought with him a deep, genuine terror of witchcraft. His 1597 treatise Daemonologie set out his belief that witches were agents of Satan engaged in a conspiracy against Christian society. Within a year of his accession, the 1604 Witchcraft Act sharpened the penalties for anyone convicted of practising harmful magic.
Lancashire in 1612 was already a county under suspicion. It was regarded by the authorities as a stronghold of Catholic recusancy: families who refused to attend Anglican services and were therefore considered potential traitors. Government agents kept watch. Local magistrates had every incentive to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown by rooting out threats, real or imagined.
Add to this the economic misery of the period. Harvests had failed repeatedly. Plague had visited the region. Communities were bound by tight networks of debt and dependency, and those networks made accusation a weapon. If your cow died or your child sickened, it was easier to blame the woman who had cursed you last autumn than to accept that illness was random.
Two old women dominated the landscape of suspicion around Pendle Hill. Elizabeth Southerns, known as Old Demdike, lived near Malkin Tower at the foot of the hill with her daughter Elizabeth Device and three grandchildren: Alizon, James, and the child Jennet. Anne Whittle, known as Old Chattox, lived nearby with her daughter Anne Redferne.
Both women were in their eighties. Both worked as cunning folk: local practitioners who offered herbal remedies, protective charms, and the lifting of curses for payment. This was a recognised, if legally precarious, occupation in early modern England. Cunning folk operated throughout the country; they were consulted more often than condemned. What made Demdike and Chattox different was their rivalry.
The two families had accumulated years of mutual accusation and resentment. Customers switched between them carrying grievances. Each blamed the other for livestock deaths, illnesses, and personal misfortunes. When events forced a confrontation with the law in 1612, those old wounds became fatal.
In March 1612, Alizon Device, Demdike's teenage granddaughter, was on the road between Colne and Trawden when she encountered a pedlar named John Law. The precise sequence of events is contested in the primary sources. What is agreed is that shortly after their encounter, Law suffered what was almost certainly a stroke: sudden paralysis affecting one side of his body.
Law's son Abraham brought a complaint. Alizon, terrified, confessed. She told the authorities she had cursed Law after he refused to sell her pins. She then went further, accusing her grandmother Demdike and the rival Chattox of witchcraft. Years of suppressed accusation came flooding into the open in a matter of days.
Magistrate Roger Nowell of Read Hall moved quickly. Nowell was an ambitious man with connections to the court, and in a county already under scrutiny for recusancy, a witchcraft prosecution was both a duty and an opportunity. He began gathering testimony with a thoroughness that looks, in retrospect, more like case-building than impartial inquiry.
If you want to examine the primary source material yourself, The Pendle Machine walks through the confessions, court records, and witness statements in forensic detail.
By early April, four people were in Lancaster Castle: Demdike, Chattox, Alizon Device, and Anne Redferne. Then on Good Friday 1612, the Device family held a gathering at Malkin Tower. Witnesses told Nowell this was a witches' Sabbath; that food was stolen; that the group planned to blow up the castle and free the prisoners.
Whether the meeting was a conspiracy or a desperate family council is impossible to determine from the surviving record. What it provided was a pretext. Eight more people were arrested in the days that followed. Among them was the nine-year-old Jennet Device, who would become the prosecution's most powerful asset.
The trials opened on 18 August 1612 at Lancaster Castle, presided over by judges Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. The courtroom was crowded. What followed was a performance of justice that relied almost entirely on confession, hearsay, and the testimony of neighbours with longstanding grudges.
Familiars were described as black dogs and brown dogs, appearing in dreams and demanding the souls of the witches in return for power. Deaths were attributed to curses spoken months or years before. Elizabeth Device was condemned on the evidence of her nine-year-old daughter. James Device confessed to consulting with a familiar named Dandy.
The evidence was flimsy even by the standards of the day. Yet ten were hanged at Gallows Hill on 20 August 1612.
Old Demdike never faced trial. She died in Lancaster Castle in the months before the Assizes, her health destroyed by imprisonment. Chattox confessed, possibly to save her soul, possibly under pressure. One accused, Alice Grey, was acquitted. The rest either hanged or died in custody.
The reason we know the Pendle trials in such detail is Thomas Potts. Potts was a clerk at the Lancaster Assizes who was commissioned to write up the proceedings. His account, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, was published in 1613 with the approval of the presiding judges.
I find it telling that Potts's account was not a neutral legal record. It was shaped to present the prosecution case in its best light, to celebrate the judges, and to reinforce King James's belief in the witchcraft threat. Details were omitted. Testimony was smoothed. What Potts produced was, in effect, state-sponsored propaganda dressed as reporting.
This matters because Potts's text has been the primary source for almost everything written about Pendle since 1613. The full forensic account of what he suppressed and why is in The Pendle Witch Conspiracy.
The Pendle witch trials are sometimes described as an example of hysteria or mass delusion. I think that framing lets the real actors off too lightly. There was no hysteria here. There was a magistrate who identified an opportunity. There were judges who wanted to please the king. There was a community fractured by poverty and long-running feuds. And there was a legal system willing to accept the word of a nine-year-old child as sufficient to hang her mother.
Demdike and Chattox were cunning women scraping a living in a world that offered them no other option. Alizon Device was a teenager who almost certainly believed she had caused John Law's stroke, and whose terror produced confessions that spiralled beyond her control. Jennet Device was a child weaponised by the machinery of the law. None of these people were what the legend claims they were.
Jennet's later life provides a grim postscript. In 1634, she herself was accused of witchcraft. She spent time in prison before the case was eventually dismissed. The wheel of accusation, it turned out, spared no one who had once been touched by it.
Go deeper into the evidence
If this forensic account of the 1612 trials has gripped you, both of the resources below go further: the book into the full documentary record, the download into the evidence you can examine yourself.
The Pendle Witch Conspiracy
The full forensic account of the 1612 trials: Nowell's methods, Potts' propaganda, and the evidence the official record tried to bury.
Read on Amazon →The Pendle Machine
Work through the primary sources yourself. Examine the confessions, the court records, and the child testimony that sent ten people to the gallows.
Download now →Pendle Hill rises above Lancashire's fields in a long, dark ridge that collects cloud and mist in a way that seems almost deliberate. To walk its slopes on a grey October afternoon is to understand why the place retained its association with witchcraft long after the gallows were taken down. The heather, the wind, the abrupt change from farmland to open moorland: it generates a kind of unease that guidebooks describe as atmosphere but that feels, in context, more like memory.
The tourist industry around Pendle is significant. Ghost tours, witch trails, and Halloween events draw visitors from across Britain and beyond. I have no objection to this; the local economy benefits, and the story reaches people who might otherwise never have heard of Alizon Device or Jennet or Malkin Tower. What I ask is that visitors remember who these people actually were. Not figures of legend. Not symbols of supernatural power. Ordinary Lancashire folk, crushed by forces larger than themselves.
The Pendle witch trials began after Alizon Device, granddaughter of the cunning woman Old Demdike, encountered pedlar John Law on a road near Colne in March 1612. Law suffered a paralysing stroke moments after their meeting. Convinced she had cursed him, Alizon confessed under questioning and went on to accuse her own grandmother and their rivals the Chattox family. Magistrate Roger Nowell, eager to demonstrate loyalty to the witch-hunting King James I, seized on the accusations and widened the net of suspects over the following weeks.
Old Demdike (Elizabeth Southerns) and Old Chattox (Anne Whittle) were elderly women living near Pendle Hill who practised as cunning folk, offering remedies, charms, and curse removal for a fee. Both were in their eighties by 1612. Their families were bitter rivals who blamed each other for local deaths and misfortune. Demdike died in Lancaster prison before her trial. Chattox confessed to witchcraft at the Lancaster Assizes and was hanged in August 1612.
Jennet Device was approximately nine years old when she became the principal witness against her own family at the Lancaster Assizes. Her mother Elizabeth Device and brother James were both among the accused. Jennet testified that she had seen them practise witchcraft, and her evidence was decisive in securing convictions. Her appearance was legally unprecedented: English courts had rarely used a child's testimony so conclusively in capital cases. The Pendle trials set a grim precedent that influenced future witch prosecutions across Britain.
No evidence supports the existence of any supernatural wrongdoing. The accused were cunning folk whose practices were common across rural England. What the evidence shows is that prosecutions were driven by local feuds, religious paranoia under King James I, and the ambitions of magistrate Roger Nowell. Confessions were extracted under pressure and often relied on hearsay. The trials are now widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice in which poverty, superstition, and state power combined to destroy innocent lives.
The 1612 trials left two significant legal marks. First, Jennet Device's testimony established child witnesses as credible voices in capital trials, a precedent exploited in later witch prosecutions. Second, the trials reinforced the 1604 Witchcraft Act under King James I, hardening the legal framework for prosecuting alleged witches. Thomas Potts's published account, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches (1613), shaped public and official attitudes to witchcraft across Britain for decades.
Pendle Hill in Lancashire is a popular walking destination and remains strongly associated with the 1612 trials. The hill rises above the Ribble Valley near the village of Barley and offers a well-marked ascent to its summit. Nearby Barrowford has a heritage centre with displays about the trials, and Lancaster Castle, where the accused were held and tried, is open to visitors. Each October, Pendle hosts witch-themed festivals drawing thousands of visitors to the area.
Potts, Thomas (1613) — The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, W. Stansby for John Barnes. The court clerk's account of the 1612 trials; the foundational primary source, though shaped as prosecution propaganda. Available via Early English Books Online and WorldCat.
James I (1597) — Daemonologie, Robert Walde-grave. The king's personal treatise on witchcraft that established the cultural and legal climate in which the Pendle trials took place. Available via Project Gutenberg.
Williams, Simon A. (2024) — The Pendle Witch Conspiracy: The True Story Behind England's Most Notorious Witch Trials, Histories and Castles. A forensic re-examination of the primary record. Available on Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GXHYJXRX
This article is part of the Wizardry and Witchcraft series. Explore all articles at historiesandcastles.com/blogs/witches.
→ Jennet Device: The Child Witness of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials — The nine-year-old whose testimony sent her own family to the gallows
→ Roger Nowell's Role and the 1612 Assizes — The magistrate who orchestrated the prosecutions and why he wanted convictions
→ Thomas Potts and the 1612 Pendle Trials — The scribe who turned the trials into state-sponsored propaganda
→ The Pendle Witch Trials: Surprising Truths — The deeper political and social forces behind the 1612 verdicts
→ Trial by Water: The Dark History of Witch Ducking — The brutal testing methods used to identify witches across England
→ Witchcraft in the Middle Ages — The broader history of witchcraft belief that made the Pendle trials possible
Published: 14 February 2026 | Last Updated: 23 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.
