What Happened to Jennet Device? Tracing a Burial the Popular Story Missed

Jennet Device, the nine-year-old whose evidence hanged her mother and brother at Lancaster in 1612, is usually said to have been accused of witchcraft again in 1634 and to have died in Lancaster Castle. When I traced that story back to its documents, I could not find one that records her death there. I did find a burial that may fit her better: Jennet Seller alias Devis, buried at Newchurch in Pendle on 22 December 1635. I put it at about two chances in three, and this article shows my working.

Key Facts

• The popular story: Jennet Device was accused again in 1634 and died in Lancaster Castle. I found no record of her death there.
• Potts (1613): in her examination, Elizabeth Device says she was rebuked for "having a bastard-child with one Seller". Potts does not say which child.
• Newchurch in Pendle register (online transcription): "Jennet Seller alias Devis" was buried on 22 December 1635. It is the only Devis in the burial index, and no Device, Devis or Devys appears in the baptism or marriage indexes I searched.
• Ffarington calendar (22 August 1636): lists a "Jennett Device" among the prisoners remaining at Lancaster. I have not seen the original entry.
• The collision: a woman buried in December 1635 cannot be on a prisoner list in August 1636. One of these records is not about the trial witness.
• My confidence: about two chances in three that the burial is the witness. A judgement, not a measurement.

The story most people tell

Ask anyone who knows the Pendle case what became of Jennet Device and you tend to get one of two answers. The first is a shrug: nobody knows. The second is a tidy little tragedy. The child who stood on a table in Lancaster Castle in August 1612 and gave the evidence that hanged her mother, her brother and a string of neighbours grew up, was accused of witchcraft herself in 1634, and died a prisoner in the same castle. Poor, friendless, ending where she had sent the others.

It is a good story, and it has an irony so neat that I distrusted it on first reading. I have spent a good part of this year finding out whether the neatness is earned. If you want the 1612 background first, our account of Jennet Device as a child witness covers the trial itself. This piece starts where that one stops.

What sent me looking closer

What bothered me first was a mismatch of vocabulary. Several popular retellings say the women held after the 1634 scare (the one that began with a boy called Edmund Robinson and a story about a feast in a barn) were acquitted or pardoned, and stayed on in Lancaster because they could not pay for their board. Versions of this appear on Spooky Isles and on the Agecroft Hall site, among others.

Then I read the Bishop of Chester's letter of 15 June 1634, which the National Archives publish in transcript as SP 16/269, folio 172. The women in it are not acquitted. They are described, in the old spelling, as tried and condemned and afterwards reprieved. I found no pardon in anything I read, and no unpaid fees either. A reprieved prisoner is still a convicted one, which changes what a sheriff's list of prisoners "remaining" would mean two years later.

The Lancaster Witches: examinations of Margaret Johnson, Mary Spencer, and Frances Dickenson, 15 June, 1634. Catalogue reference: SP 16/269 f.174

That list is the other half of the popular story. In 1636 William Ffarington of Worden became High Sheriff of Lancashire, and a calendar was drawn up of the prisoners then in the gaol and castle at Lancaster. Mildred Tonge, who saw the printed volume (the Chetham Society's Ffarington papers, around page 27 on her reckoning), quotes its heading and names three of the women on it: Mary Spencer, Jennet Hargreaves and Frances Dickenson. All three were among the four sent to London in June 1634. So the list is at least partly the 1634 group, and a "Jennett Device" on it looks, on the most natural reading, as though she belongs to that group too. I do not blame anyone for taking the step from there to the castle.

The step after that is where I got stuck. A list of prisoners remaining is a stock-take. It says a woman of that name was there on 22 August 1636. Whether she died there goes unrecorded in everything I could reach.

One sentence in Potts

Thomas Potts's Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) prints the examination of Elizabeth Device, and for most of it she confesses nothing. It is her own daughter Jennet, "a witness unexpected", whose statement breaks her down. When she does confess, she gives a reason for the killing of a Robinson of Barley: he had "chidden and becalled her for having a bastard-child with one Seller".

Thomas Potts's Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613)

I had read that sentence before without stopping on it. This time I stopped, because the arithmetic is awkward. Alizon Device told Roger Nowell that her father, John Device, died in 1601. Potts gives Jennet's age as about nine in August 1612, which puts her birth in 1602 or 1603. Potts names three children in the household, Alizon, James and Jennet, and the only one he shows arriving after 1601 is Jennet.

I am not the first person to read the sentence that way. The local historian John Clayton reads the bastard child as Jennet, according to Sarah King's 2016 essay for the Dangerous Women Project at Edinburgh. I have not seen Clayton's book, only King's account of it. On Clayton's reconstruction Jennet was born about 1600, which makes her a little older than Potts allows, and King observes that it is at least mathematically possible for her to have been John's child after all. The neighbours, she says, seem to have thought not.

What I could not find anyone doing was taking the name in that sentence, Seller, and going to look for it in the parish register.

The register

The Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerks have transcribed the register of St Mary's, Newchurch in Pendle, from a microfilm of the original. For Device, Devis, Devys and their obvious variants I searched the transcription's baptisms, marriages and burials, and then the baptisms of Colne, the next chapelry along.

The Sellers are there. A John Seller had children baptised at Newchurch: William on 8 November 1607, Jenet on 18 September 1625, Richardus on 30 January 1630/1. A Seller family was living in the chapelry from at least 1607, which is the kind of household in which "one Seller" could plausibly have lived.

The Devices are not there. No Device, Devis or Devys in the baptism index, none in the marriages of 1599 to 1704, none in the Colne baptisms. In the burial index, which runs to 2016, the surname Devis appears exactly once. On 22 December 1635 the register records the burial of Jennet Seller alias Devis, and the index files her under Devis. As transcribed, the entry gives the name and the alias and nothing else: no parent, no husband, no age. In the online indexes, she is the only person of that surname at Newchurch in more than four centuries.

That absence proves less than it looks. The transcription is patchy in the very years that matter. The marriages leap from 12 December 1602 to 30 April 1607, then from January 1611 to April 1617, then from October 1621 to June 1625, and the early baptisms are thin. A baptism around 1603 would fall inside a gap. So the missing Device children prove nothing, and the Bishop's Transcripts and the Lancashire Parish Register Society's Newchurch volume, which might fill some of the holes, are on my list and not yet read.

I also lost most of an afternoon to the forename. Three Jennets were baptised at Newchurch in 1625 alone (a Hargreaves in May, a Seller in September, a Robinson in December), and if you have ever tried to identify one woman called Jennet in seventeenth-century Lancashire you will know the feeling.

The alias is what held my attention, and the same register turned out to help me read it. Three weeks before the burial, on 29 November 1635, the clerk entered a baptism as "Jana Dodgson als Husband, filia illigit Luce Dodgson als Husband": an illegitimate daughter, written down under a double name. So the word was in live use at Newchurch that winter for exactly the kind of child Potts's sentence describes. I should not oversell it. The baptisms of 1635 also include Maria Hargreves als Lomaston and Ellena Hartley als Stacke, both legitimate daughters of fathers who carried the same double name, so in this register an alias could just as easily be a family by-name handed down. What I can say is that the convention covered illegitimate children, and that a clerk in 1635 had no trouble writing one. Which sense applies to Jennet is a separate question. Read as a child known by both parents' names, "Seller alias Devis" is a woman born to a Seller father and a Devis mother. Read as a married woman's maiden name, it is a Seller wife who was born a Devis, which would need a Devis marriage, and the marriage register shows none, though it has its holes. Either of those, like the stepfather's-name reading, rests on my general knowledge of the period and not on a source I can cite, and I would still welcome a palaeographer's view.

There is a rival candidate. The Jenet Seller baptised in September 1625 would have been ten in December 1635. A ten-year-old daughter of John Seller might turn up in the burials as plain Jennet Seller. Nothing I have found explains why a clerk would write Devis beside her.

The list that will not fit

If the burial belongs to the witness, the Jennett Device of the 1636 calendar cannot be her. She would have been eight months in her grave.

I can see three ways out. The first is that the prisoner of 1636 was a different woman of the same surname, tried in 1634 in her own right. The boy's lists were built from names the whole district knew, and more than one Device or Devis woman could have been on them. The second is that the entry is stale: a name copied forward from an earlier list and not struck out. A calendar drawn up for a new sheriff, describing prisoners "remaining", could easily have been compiled from the year before. The third is that a woman tried in 1634 was released before the end of 1635, went home to Newchurch and was buried there, so that the calendar is out of date by the time the ink dried. The alternative to all three is that the burial is somebody else's altogether, the ten-year-old for instance, and the Lancaster prisoner is the witness after all.

Two other records complicate the picture, and I do not want to skip them. Edmund Robinson's re-examination of 16 July 1634 (SP 16/271, folio 227, which I read in the National Archives transcript) names a Jennet Devys and a William Devys, "her half brother". And Rachel Hasted, as reported at second hand, records a charge against Jennet Device at the March 1634 assizes over the death of Isabel Nutter; I have not seen the state paper for that, SP 16/268, folio 22. The half brother is interesting because it is testable. If Jennet was born after John Device's death, a half brother William could be an elder son of John and Elizabeth Device, baptised in the 1590s. I can find nobody who has reported looking.

The Lancaster Witches: certificate of surgeons and midwives, 2 July 1634. Catalogue reference: SP 16/271 f.15

So there are two claims folded into the popular story, and they stand on different ground. That a Jennet Device was accused in 1634 has some support, and I think it probable that she was the child of 1612, though not certain. That she died in Lancaster Castle has none that I can find.

What I think, and how sure I am

I think the woman buried at Newchurch on 22 December 1635 as Jennet Seller alias Devis was probably the girl who gave evidence in 1612. I put it at about two chances in three. That is a judgement call, and no measurement lies behind it.

Three things carry it. Potts records Elizabeth Device herself saying she bore a child to a man called Seller. The same register was writing an illegitimate child under an alias three weeks before the burial. And Devis appears nowhere else at Newchurch in the online indexes. The rival reading, that the witness died in Lancaster, has to treat all three as coincidence, and in return it offers a calendar I have not seen.

Against that, I have read the burial only in transcription. Potts does not say which child was the bastard, and if it was William and not Jennet the whole Seller link belongs to a boy. And Seller is not a rare name. Then there is a habit of mind I try to keep in check. This case has been collecting stories that fit too well for four centuries, and I have just written another one. I would rather tell you that one reading is more likely than the other than tell you the matter is closed.

What I have not yet seen

What would settle it, and who could help

None of this needs anything exotic. It needs someone who can get to the right shelf.

• The Newchurch burial entry of 22 December 1635, in the register and in the Bishop's Transcript for that year. Does it name a parent, a husband, a status? A word such as filia or uxor that the transcription dropped would change the argument.
• Any baptism of a Jennet, described as the base daughter of Elizabeth Device, in the gap years of 1602 to 1607 (Bishop's Transcripts, or volume 154 of the Lancashire Parish Register Society, which starts in 1574).
• A bastardy examination or bond naming a Seller, from Lancashire quarter sessions or the Newchurch poor-law accounts, if either survives for that decade.
• A baptism of a William Device or Devis in the 1590s, most likely in the Whalley or Burnley registers.
• The original Ffarington calendar, and SP 16/268 folio 22, and any assize record of a Jennett Device being discharged.

If you are a local historian in the Pendle area, a genealogist with a Seller or Devis line, or an archivist at Lancashire Archives in Preston who has met any of these names, I would very much like to hear from you. This is a real open question. If a page you have handled contradicts me, that is as welcome as one that agrees. Get in touch through the contact page and tell me what you found, and I will credit you in whatever comes next.

This finding will feature in my forthcoming book on Jennet Device, working title The Witness, where it sits alongside the fuller evidence ledger.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613): the primary source for Elizabeth Device's examination and for Jennet's evidence.
• The National Archives, SP 16/269 f.172 (Bishop of Chester, 15 June 1634) and SP 16/271 f.227 (Edmund Robinson's re-examination, 16 July 1634).
• Mildred Tonge, "The Lancashire Witches: 1612 and 1634", Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (read 28 January 1932): the best account of the Robinson papers and the 1636 calendar.
• Sarah L. King, "Whores and Witches", Dangerous Women Project, University of Edinburgh (22 April 2016), for John Clayton's reconstruction of the Southerns and Device families.
• Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerks, transcriptions of the registers of St Mary's, Newchurch in Pendle, and the Colne St Bartholomew baptism index.
• Robert Poole (ed.), The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (2002).

People Also Ask

What happened to Jennet Device after the Pendle witch trials?

No document records it directly. After the hangings of August 1612 she disappears from the records for about twenty years. A Jennet Devys is named in Edmund Robinson's re-examination of July 1634, and a Jennett Device appears on a sheriff's calendar of Lancaster prisoners in August 1636. A burial at Newchurch in Pendle on 22 December 1635, of Jennet Seller alias Devis, may be hers, and I put that at about two chances in three.

Did Jennet Device die in Lancaster Castle?

Many popular accounts say so, but I found no death record to support it. The 1636 calendar shows only that a woman of that name was held at Lancaster on 22 August 1636. If the December 1635 burial at Newchurch is the witness, she was already dead by then.

Was Jennet Device accused of witchcraft in 1634?

A Jennet Device is reported as tried at the Lancaster assizes in March 1634, and a Jennet Devys appears in Robinson's statement of July that year. Whether she was the girl of 1612 is probable but unproven. The claim that she was acquitted or pardoned does not match the Bishop of Chester's letter, which describes the 1634 women as condemned and afterwards reprieved.

How old was Jennet Device?

Thomas Potts gives her age as "about the age of nine" in 1612, which puts her birth in 1602 or 1603. The local historian John Clayton, as reported by Sarah King, puts it nearer 1600.

This article is part of the Pendle Witch series.

Deepen Your Understanding

• Jennet Device: The Child Witness of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials: the trial, the table and the testimony.
• Thomas Potts and the 1612 Pendle Trials: the clerk whose book is the source for the sentence at the heart of this article.
• The Pendle Witches: The Real Story: the full account of the 1612 prosecutions.
• The 1612 Lancashire Pendle Witch Trials: aftermath: how the case was retold and commemorated for four centuries.

Regular podcasts by Histories and Castles to help you get a deep dive understanding of histories events and figures.