Thomas Potts and the 1612 Pendle Trials

Written by Simon Williams

History, as I have often observed, is rarely about what people believe it to be. It is not a collection of fables or a series of supernatural coincidences. It is a study of power—its exercise, its abuse, and the clinical efficiency with which the state can grind the bones of the weak to grease the wheels of the strong. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the damp, windswept corners of 17th-century Lancashire, and no document exposes this machinery more nakedly than Thomas Potts’ 1613 tract, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster.

We are told the story of the Pendle witches is one of broomsticks and demonic familiars. It is nothing of the sort. It is a story of a manufactured reality, a piece of sophisticated state propaganda written by a man who understood that in the England of James I, truth was not something to be discovered, but something to be constructed.

The Architect of the Record: Thomas Potts 

To understand the text, one must understand the man who held the pen. Thomas Potts was not an impartial observer. He was the Clerk to the Lancaster Assizes, an experienced court official whose very pedigree was steeped in the politics of state security. Potts had been raised in the household of Thomas Knyvet, the man celebrated for apprehending Guy Fawkes and thwarting the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

Potts was a creature of the establishment. He understood that the King was not merely a monarch, but a self-appointed theologian who viewed witchcraft as a form of high treason. When Potts was instructed by the presiding judges, Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley, to write a full account of the trials, he knew exactly what was required of him. This was not a journalistic endeavour; it was a career-making assignment.

The Judges’ Agenda: Careerism at the Bar 

We must look at the men who commissioned this work. Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham were not men of blind superstition; they were men of high ambition. Altham was desperate to salvage a reputation tarnished by a previous miscarriage of justice at the York Assizes, while Bromley was actively lobbying for a promotion to a more prestigious judicial circuit near London.

The Lancaster Assizes provided these men with a stage, and Potts provided them with the script. By "discovering" a massive satanic conspiracy in the heart of Lancashire, they proved their zeal to a King who was personally obsessed with rooting out "enemies of the state". The Wonderfull Discoverie was explicitly revised and corrected by Judge Bromley himself before publication to ensure it was "fit and worthie" for the public eye. It was, in modern terms, a "dodgy dossier" designed to justify the state-sanctioned execution of ten people.

The Anatomy of the Text: Verbatim or Fabricated?

Potts writes with a style that suggests a verbatim, word-for-word account of the courtroom proceedings. He describes the screams of the accused and the steady voices of the witnesses with such vivid detail that the reader feels transported to Lancaster Castle. However, modern historical analysis reveals this to be a masterful literary illusion.

The Wonderfull Discoverie is not a transcript; it is a "reflection" of what the court decided had happened. Potts systematically excludes the build-up to the trials and the specifics of the legal processes that might have suggested innocence. Instead, he focuses on the most sensational evidence, using highly emotionally charged and biased language to ensure the reader views the accused as monsters.

He describes Elizabeth Device as an "odious witch," focusing on her facial deformity—a left eye set lower than the right—as if it were a physical manifestation of her demonic nature. By the time Potts has finished with her, she is no longer a woman suffering the effects of crushing poverty; she is a creature of the pit.

The "Propaganda Funnel": Reclassifying Reality

What Potts achieved was the final stage of what we might call a "Propaganda Funnel". The raw material of the case was a messy collection of village gossip, a generational family feud between the Demdike and Chattox families, and a series of mundane medical emergencies.

Take the case of John Law, the pedlar whose collapse triggered the entire hunt. Modern forensic reality tells us he suffered an acute neurological stroke resulting in instant aphasia and hemiplegia. But in Potts’ narrative, this is reclassified as a "magic strike" by a demonic familiar.

The text further takes a meeting of starving subtenants at Malkin Tower on Good Friday—a "council of desperation" held to support relatives already rotting in Lancaster Gaol—and reimagines it as a "Grand Assembly" of witches plotting demonic terrorism. Potts deliberately links this gathering to the trauma of the Gunpowder Plot, claiming the group intended to blow up Lancaster Castle and murder the gaoler. By framing a welfare crisis as a national security threat, Potts made the mass hanging of the "conspirators" not only legal but necessary.

The Star Witness and the Constitutional Perversion 

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Potts’ record is his treatment of the star witness, Jennet Device. Under the normal rules of 17th-century English Common Law, a nine-year-old child was legally barred from giving evidence in a capital trial.

However, King James I, in his intellectual perversion of the law found in Daemonologie, argued that because witchcraft was a "heinous" and secret crime, the normal rules of evidence must be suspended. Potts records the "steady" testimony of this child as she condemns her own mother, brother, and sister to the gallows.

He does not present Jennet as a coached or terrified child caught in the machinery of the state; he presents her as a divine instrument of discovery. In doing so, Potts helped cement a "grim precedent" that would later haunt the judicial systems of both England and the American colonies, providing the legal blueprint for the mass hysterias at Salem.

The Record as a Business of Extortion

We must also recognise that Potts’ account reveals, perhaps inadvertently, that witchcraft in 17th-century Lancashire was less about the Devil and more about "Poverty as Pathology".

He records the "oatmeal protection racket" between the Device and Chattox families, where a payment of eight pounds of oatmeal annually was the only thing preventing a "curse". In an era of a 39% rent increase and the "crushing economic squeeze" of land enclosures, the desperate survival tactics of marginalised women—begging and intimidation—were legally reclassified by Potts and the court as demonic warfare.

The "witches" were not an organised coven; they were rival "cunning folk" competing for a limited market of healing and charms in a religious vacuum created by the dissolution of Whalley Abbey.

Conclusion: The Endurance of Myth

Thomas Potts succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. By dedicating his book to Lord Knyvet and aligning it with the King’s paranoid theology, he turned a local welfare crisis into a landmark event in English history. The Wonderfull Discoverie became a best-seller, and for four hundred years, it has remained the primary lens through which we view the events of 1612.

But as historians, we must look past the "witch-themed" tourist gloss of modern Pendle. The real horror revealed by a critical analysis of Potts’ text is not found in the "glassy stare" of Alizon Device, which modern science suggests was simply neurodivergence.

The horror is found in the clinical precision with which a professional court clerk and two ambitious judges used the lives of the poor to write their own tickets to the top. Thomas Potts did not discover witches; he manufactured them. And in doing so, he provided the ultimate case study in how the state can weaponise the law to destroy the vulnerable while claiming the moral high ground of national security.

References Used

Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613): The primary source for the trial details, descriptions of the accused, and the Malkin Tower "plot."

King James I, Daemonologie (1597): Cited for the legal and theological framework for suspending childhood evidence protections.

The Anatomy of a Witch-Hunt (Course Syllabus): Provided the "Propaganda Funnel" and "Poverty as Pathology" frameworks.

The Pendle Forensic Dossier: Provided the forensic vs. folklore analysis regarding medical strokes and neurodivergence.

Lancaster Castle & Historic UK Articles: Contributed the details of courtroom settings and the biography of the judges.

"The Devastating Story of Alizon Device" (Scaredy Cat Skeptic): Provided character profiles and the "glassy stare" descriptions.