The 1612 Lancashire Pendle Witch Trials: A Systemic Judicial Failure

The Lancashire assizes did not end when nine people were hanged at Lancaster on 20 August 1612. The statute behind the verdicts stayed on the books until 1735, Jennet Device was named among the accused in a fresh Lancashire case in 1633, and the story itself was retold, romanticised and commemorated for four centuries. This is the Pendle witch trials aftermath: what came next in law and in memory.

Key Facts

• Twelve were accused and ten were executed in 1612. Nine were hanged at Lancaster on 20 August, and Jennet Preston was hanged at York on 27 July.
• In 1633, a second Lancashire witch panic began after a boy, Edmund Robinson, made accusations against local people. Jennet Device was named among the accused, and a later record places her still in gaol on 22 August 1636. The details of this case rest on a small number of sources and are disputed.
• The case was referred to London, where the accusations were investigated, and Robinson is generally reported to have admitted that his story was untrue. Historians differ over the details.
• The 1604 Witchcraft Act, the statute used against the Pendle accused, remained in force until it was repealed by the Witchcraft Act of 1735. That Act stopped treating witchcraft as a real crime and instead penalised people who claimed to have magical powers.
• Potts's account became the main source for the case. It was reprinted in the nineteenth century, including an edition for the Chetham Society in 1845.
• Pendle's legacy is now managed as heritage. The 2012 quatercentenary produced the Lancashire Witches Walk between Barrowford and Lancaster Castle and the Pendle Sculpture Trail.

Study note: the Lancashire witches of 1604 to 1613 form a depth topic in Edexcel A-level History, Paper 3, Option 33 (The Witch Craze in Britain, Europe and North America, c1580 to c1750).

A Verdict That Did Not Stay Settled

This piece is not another retelling of the trial. The story of the Pendle witches covers the human narrative, and the judicial audit of the trials covers how the prosecution was legally constructed. What follows is the aftermath: what the verdicts of 1612 set in motion, in law and in memory.

The most immediate legacy was Jennet Device herself. She was about nine when she gave evidence against her mother and brother, and Potts reports her evidence in the third person, so the wording is his. The court accepted a child's evidence against her own family, and James I's Daemonologie (1597) had argued for relaxed rules of evidence in witchcraft cases. But Daemonologie was a treatise, not a statute, and the trial created no binding legal precedent. What it did leave was an example that later accusers could point to.

1633: When Lancashire Repeated Itself

In 1633 a second wave of accusations spread through the same part of Lancashire. A boy named Edmund Robinson claimed that he had seen a gathering of witches, and named local people as taking part. Jennet Device was among those named. The case was referred to London, where the accusations were examined, and Robinson is generally reported to have admitted that he had invented the story. The play The Late Lancashire Witches by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome was written and performed in 1634, while the affair was still unfolding.

The record of what happened to the accused is thin. Jennet Device is recorded as still in gaol on 22 August 1636, and her later fate is uncertain. The case is important because it shows that an accusation of witchcraft, once made, could follow a person for a lifetime. The wheel of accusation that turned in 1612 did not spare the child who had helped to set it moving.

The Slow Death of a Law: 1604 to 1735

The 1604 Witchcraft Act remained law for well over a century. English courts continued to hear witchcraft cases, and prosecutions became rarer and convictions harder to secure as the seventeenth century went on. Alice Molland, tried at Exeter, is usually cited as the last person executed for witchcraft in England, in 1685, though the record for her case is thin. Jane Wenham was convicted at Hertford in 1712 and reprieved.

Parliament repealed the 1604 Act with the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Rather than lowering the penalty, the new Act stopped treating witchcraft as a real, prosecutable crime. It made it an offence to pretend to have magical powers, which was close to an inversion of the logic that had convicted the Pendle accused.

How Thomas Potts Shaped the Record

The court clerk Thomas Potts wrote his 1613 account, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, on the instruction of the trial judges. It outlived them by centuries. For historians it remains both indispensable and a persistent problem: it is the main detailed source for the Lancaster trials, and it was written to justify the verdicts. Modern scholarship on Pendle, including the work of James Sharpe and Robert Poole, has spent as much effort reading around Potts's biases as reading through his text.

From Gallows to Guidebook: Pendle in Popular Memory

The Victorians turned Pendle into fiction before historians turned it back into evidence. William Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Lancashire Witches, published in the late 1840s, romanticised the case for a mass readership and did more than any academic account to fix Pendle Hill in the popular imagination as a place of dark magic. Several of the most repeated claims about the case are tested in the myths that surround the Pendle trials.

The 2012 quatercentenary of the trials produced two lasting pieces of commemoration: the Lancashire Witches Walk, a long-distance route between Barrowford and Lancaster Castle, and the Pendle Sculpture Trail. The case also remains on the Pearson Edexcel A-level History syllabus, in the Witch Craze option. Four centuries on, Pendle is taught as a case study in how legal systems can fail, not as a story about the supernatural.

People Also Ask

What changed in English law after the Pendle witch trials?

The 1604 Witchcraft Act, the statute used against the Pendle accused, stayed in force until it was repealed by the Witchcraft Act of 1735. The 1735 Act stopped treating witchcraft as a real crime and instead penalised people who pretended to have magical powers. Prosecutions became rarer through the later seventeenth century, and Alice Molland's execution at Exeter in 1685 is usually cited as the last witchcraft hanging in England.

What happened to Jennet Device after the trials?

Jennet Device, aged about nine in 1612, was named among the accused in a fresh Lancashire witchcraft case that began in 1633. A later record places her still in gaol on 22 August 1636. The details of the case rest on a small number of sources, and her later fate is uncertain.

When did England stop executing people for witchcraft?

Executions became rarer through the later seventeenth century. Alice Molland, tried at Exeter, is usually cited as the last person executed for witchcraft in England, in 1685. Jane Wenham was convicted at Hertford in 1712 and reprieved. The underlying law was not repealed until 1735.

How did Thomas Potts's account shape later history?

Potts's 1613 book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, is the main detailed source for the Lancaster trials. Because Potts was instructed by the trial judges to write it, historians treat it as a valuable but partisan document. It was reprinted in the nineteenth century, including an edition for the Chetham Society in 1845.

How is the Pendle case remembered today?

The case was romanticised in Victorian fiction, most notably in William Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches of the late 1840s. The 2012 quatercentenary produced the Lancashire Witches Walk and the Pendle Sculpture Trail, and the case remains part of the Pearson Edexcel A-level History syllabus.

Are the Pendle witch trials included in Pearson Edexcel A-Level History?

Yes. They form part of Paper 3, Option 33: The Witch Craze in Britain, Europe and North America, c1580 to c1750, within the depth topic on the Lancashire witches of 1604 to 1613. Students study the background to the trials, the 1604 Act, the conflict between the Device and Chattox families, Roger Nowell's investigation, the Lancaster assizes, Jennet Device's evidence, and Thomas Potts's account.

Where can I buy books about the Pendle witch trials?

The Pendle Witch Conspiracy is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle. An Investigated History digital download is available exclusively from Histories and Castles.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

Potts, Thomas (1613): The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, W. Stansby for John Barnes. The clerk's account of the 1612 Lancaster assizes, the foundational primary source, though written to justify the verdicts. Available via Early English Books Online and WorldCat.

Heywood, Thomas and Richard Brome (1634): The Late Lancashire Witches. A stage play written and performed while the Edmund Robinson case was still unfolding, showing how quickly the second Lancashire panic entered popular culture.

Ainsworth, William Harrison: The Lancashire Witches. A Victorian novel of the late 1840s that did much to fix Pendle Hill in the popular imagination as a place of dark magic.

Lumby, Jonathan (1995): The Lancashire Witch-Craze: Jennet Preston and the Lancashire Witches, 1612, Carnegie Publishing. A study of the legal and political background to the assizes.

Poole, Robert, ed. (2002): The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, Manchester University Press. An academic collection examining the trials, their evidence, and their long afterlife, including the 1633 case and the case's later cultural legacy.

This article's account of the 1633 Edmund Robinson case rests on a small number of sources, and historians differ over the details. Readers should distinguish reasoned historical analysis from the folklore and embellishment that have grown up around the Pendle case since 1612.

This article is part of a series. Read more in Wizardry and Witching.

Deepen Your Understanding

• Pendle Witches: The Real Story Behind England's Most Notorious Witch Trials: the full account of the 1612 trials, from a pedlar's collapse to the gallows at Lancaster.
• Jennet Device: The Child Witness of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials: the nine-year-old whose evidence was central to the Lancaster convictions, and what became of her.
• Roger Nowell's Role and the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials: the magistrate who took the statements and built the case.
• Thomas Potts and the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials: the court clerk whose 1613 account is the main source for the case.
• The Law of Fear: A Judicial Audit of the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials: the legal mechanics of the prosecution, from the 1604 Act to the evidence heard at Lancaster.
• The Pendle Witch Trials: Surprising Truths: the myths that popular retellings still repeat.
• Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Myths, Fears and Trials: the older beliefs about witches that shaped the world of accusers and accused.
• The Witch’s Familiar: From Demonic Imps to Beloved Pets: how belief in animal helpers grew in England, including the familiars named in the Pendle case.
• Trial by Water: The Dark History of Witch Ducking and Other Ordeals: the ordeals used to test suspected witches.

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