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Thomas Potts’ 1613 tract, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, is often read as a factual record of the Pendle trials. In reality, it was a sophisticated piece of state propaganda. This blog analyses how Potts used the machinery of the law to transform poverty and medical ignorance into a demonic conspiracy.
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 found, but something to be constructed.
Thomas Potts was not a historian recording the 1612 Pendle trials. He was a court clerk assigned to justify them. His Wonderfull Discoverie excluded evidence of innocence, dehumanised the accused, and cemented a legal precedent that reached from Lancaster Castle to Salem.
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.
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 “uncovering” 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.
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.
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.
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 revelation. 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.
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.
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 uncover 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.
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.
Go deeper into the evidence
If this forensic account has gripped you, both resources below go further: the book into the complete 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 →Thomas Potts was the Clerk to the Lancaster Assizes who was instructed by the presiding judges to write a full account of the trials. Raised in the household of Thomas Knyvet, the man who arrested Guy Fawkes, Potts was a creature of the establishment with deep roots in state security. He understood precisely what was required of him: not a neutral record, but a document that would justify the verdict and advance the careers of the men who commissioned it.
No. Potts did not produce a verbatim transcript; he produced a selective and highly charged account designed to present the accused as guilty. He systematically excluded evidence that might have suggested innocence, omitted the legal processes that preceded the trials, and used emotionally loaded language to dehumanise the defendants. The text was explicitly revised by Judge Bromley before publication to ensure it served the court’s preferred narrative.
Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham were ambitious men with personal reasons to need a success. Altham was attempting to recover from a previous miscarriage of justice at the York Assizes, while Bromley was lobbying for a more prestigious judicial post near London. By staging a high-profile witchcraft prosecution that aligned with James I’s personal obsession with demonic conspiracy, they demonstrated their zeal to the crown and used Potts’s text as the evidence of it.
Potts consistently dehumanised the accused, describing Elizabeth Device by her facial deformity as though it were a physical mark of demonic possession. He presented Jennet Device, a nine-year-old child who testified against her own family, as a divine instrument rather than a terrified or coached witness. Throughout the text, he reframes the mundane as sinister: a welfare gathering becomes a satanic conspiracy, a stroke victim becomes evidence of a demonic attack.
The Propaganda Funnel describes the process by which messy, ambiguous reality was systematically transformed into a clear narrative of guilt. A medical stroke became a “magic strike.” A gathering of starving relatives became a “Grand Assembly” plotting to blow up Lancaster Castle. An oatmeal payment between rival families became evidence of a demonic protection racket. Potts was the final operator of this funnel, fixing each reclassification into the permanent legal record.
The text became a bestseller and remained the primary source on the Pendle trials for four centuries. More significantly, Potts’s treatment of Jennet Device’s child testimony helped cement a legal precedent for suspending normal evidence rules in witchcraft cases. This precedent later contributed to the framework used in the Salem witch trials of 1692, making the 1612 Lancashire proceedings a direct ancestor of mass judicial hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic.
This article is part of the Wizardry and Witchcraft series. Read all articles at historiesandcastles.com/blogs/witches.
→ The Pendle Witch Trials: The Real Story — The full account of who was accused, why, and what the record actually shows.
→ The 1612 Lancashire Assizes: A Forensic Review — How the court proceedings were structured to produce a predetermined outcome.
→ Jennet Device: The Child Witness — The nine-year-old whose testimony condemned her own family.
→ Roger Nowell’s Role and the 1612 Assizes — The magistrate whose ambition set the prosecutions in motion.
Published: 05 April 2026 | Last Updated: 09 July 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.
