The Pendle Witch Trials: Surprising Truths

The Pendle witch trials of 1612 have gathered four centuries of legend, and much of what people repeat about the case is wrong or more complicated than the story allows. This is not the full narrative of the trials. It is a myth-by-myth audit of the claims that popular retellings keep getting wrong, checked against what the surviving record says.

Key Facts

• Date: Trials at Lancaster on 18 and 19 August 1612; nine hanged at Lancaster on 20 August 1612
• Location: Pendle Forest, Lancashire; tried at Lancaster Castle
• Key figures: Elizabeth Southerns (Old Demdike), Anne Whittle (Old Chattox), Alizon Device, Jennet Device, Roger Nowell
• Outcome: Twelve accused and ten executed. Nine were hanged at Lancaster, and Jennet Preston was hanged at York on 27 July 1612. Old Demdike died in gaol before trial, and Alice Grey was acquitted.
• Primary source: Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), a partisan account
• Significance: One of the best documented English witch trials, and one of the most mythologised

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).

Ghost tours, novels and Halloween marketing have smoothed the case into a familiar shape: a coven, a curse, a witch-finder. The record is stranger and more mundane than that. For the full account of what happened, read the story of the Pendle witches. This piece is narrower. It lists the specific claims about the case that are widely believed and either wrong or far less certain than they sound.

Myth: Pendle Was the Largest Witch Execution in England

Ten executions in one year made Pendle notorious, and it is often called the largest witch execution in English history. It was not. The Bury St Edmunds trials of 1645 ended with 18 executions, and the Chelmsford trials of the same year with about 19. Pendle is remembered because Potts published a full account of it, not because it was the deadliest case. Set against the wider European witch craze it was also small, since mass trials on the continent could kill far more people in a single region.

Myth: The Confessions Were Extracted by Torture

Judicial torture was used in Scotland and across much of continental Europe, but it was not part of the ordinary English legal process, and none is recorded at Pendle. The pre-trial statements were taken by the magistrate Roger Nowell, who was building the case, from frightened prisoners held in gaol. That makes them weak evidence, though the record does not show what pressure was applied. The absence of torture is one of the more surprising facts about how the case was built.

Myth: Every Accused Person Was a Poor, Desperate Old Woman

Most of the Pendle accused were poor, and several belonged to the cunning-folk families of Demdike and Chattox. Alice Nutter was the exception. She was a comparatively wealthy widow of a yeoman farmer, with no known link to the cunning-folk trade. The sources do not say why she was accused or why she was convicted alongside people from a very different social class. Her case is a reminder that poverty alone does not explain who ended up on the gallows.

Myth: Malkin Tower Was a Witches' Lair

The name conjures something out of a horror film. The record is plainer. Malkin Tower was the home of Old Demdike, and its location is unknown. The Good Friday gathering of 10 April 1612 was presented by the prosecution as a meeting of twenty witches planning to blow up Lancaster Castle. A likelier reading is a gathering of relatives and friends after the arrests of the family. The evidence for the plot rests on statements taken by the magistrate, and it has never been independently confirmed.

Myth: Pendle Was the Last English Witch Trial

The Pendle hangings were far from the end of English witch persecution. The last execution usually cited is that of Alice Molland at Exeter in 1685, though the record for it is thin. Jane Wenham was convicted at Hertford in 1712 and reprieved, and the 1604 Act was finally repealed in 1735. What happened to English witchcraft law after 1612 is covered in the case's legal aftermath.

Myth: Nobody at the Time Thought This Was Absurd

Modern audiences sometimes assume seventeenth-century England was uniformly credulous about witchcraft. Scepticism existed, and it was published. Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) argued that many accusations rested on fraud, delusion or the persecution of vulnerable women. James I attacked Scot in the preface to his own Daemonologie (1597). The Pendle prosecution took place in the middle of a live argument about whether witches were real, and the 1604 Act showed which side had the law behind it.

Myth: The Story We Have Is a Neutral Transcript

Almost everything written about Pendle since 1613 traces back to one source: Thomas Potts's The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. Potts was the clerk of the court, and he was instructed by the trial judges to write it. It reads like reportage, but it is a partisan account, written to justify the verdicts. Treating it as a neutral transcript is probably the most consequential misreading of the case still in circulation. If you want to work through the primary material yourself, The Pendle Machine walks through the confessions, court records and witness statements.

What the Trials Were Actually About

The Pendle trials are sometimes described as an outbreak of mass hysteria. That framing hides the legal mechanics. A new statute made harm by witchcraft capital, a magistrate took statements from frightened people, and a court accepted the evidence of a child of about nine against her own mother. The law behind this is examined in the judicial audit of the trials. Potts reports the evidence of Jennet Device in the third person, so the wording is his. She was later named among the accused in a further Lancashire case in 1633. The wheel of accusation spared no one once it had turned.

People Also Ask

Were the Pendle witches really devil worshippers plotting against the King?

No. The prosecution presented the Good Friday gathering of 10 April 1612 at Malkin Tower as a meeting of twenty witches planning to blow up Lancaster Castle. That account rests on statements taken by the magistrate and reported by Potts. The location of Malkin Tower is unknown, and there is no independent evidence of an organised conspiracy against the Crown.

Was Pendle the largest witch execution in England?

No. Ten people were executed for the Pendle case, but the Bury St Edmunds trials of 1645 ended with 18 executions and the Chelmsford trials of the same year with about 19. Pendle is remembered because Potts published a full account of it.

Were the Pendle confessions extracted through torture?

Judicial torture was not part of the ordinary English legal process, and none is recorded at Pendle. The statements were taken by the magistrate Roger Nowell from frightened prisoners, which makes them weak evidence, but the record does not show what pressure was applied.

Was Thomas Potts's account of the trials a neutral record?

No. Potts was the clerk of the court, and he was instructed by the trial judges to write the account. His book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), is a partisan document written to justify the verdicts, not a neutral transcript.

Was Alice Nutter poor like the other accused?

No. Alice Nutter was a comparatively wealthy widow of a yeoman farmer, unlike the poor cunning-folk families at the centre of the case. The sources do not explain why she was accused and convicted alongside them.

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 court clerk's account of the 1612 trials, the foundational primary source, though written to justify the verdicts. Available via Early English Books Online and WorldCat.

James I (1597): Daemonologie, Robert Walde-grave. The king's treatise on witchcraft, available via Project Gutenberg.

Scot, Reginald (1584): The Discoverie of Witchcraft. An earlier, sceptical English treatise arguing that many accusations arose from fraud or delusion. It is useful context for how contested the belief in witchcraft already was by 1612.

Williams, Simon A.: The Pendle Witch Conspiracy: The True Story Behind England's Most Notorious Witch Trials, Histories and Castles. Available on Amazon UK.

This article is part of the Pendle Witch series.

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 1612 Lancashire Pendle Witch Trials: A Systemic Judicial Failure: what happened after the verdicts and the case's legal aftermath.
• 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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