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Students of Law and Legal History
Trace how the 1604 Act and a nine-year-old’s testimony combined to dismantle ordinary evidentiary protections.
This course will not tell you what you have already heard. It will show you what actually happened, why it happened, and why a nine-year-old child was permitted to send her own mother to the gallows.
At the heart of this tragedy is Alizon Device, a seventeen-year-old girl whose alleged curse on a travelling pedlar ignited a chain of accusations that ended with ten people hanged at Lancaster.
This course deconstructs the perfect storm of 17th-century life — a region in religious flux, the crushing weight of poverty, and the obsession of King James I, whose Daemonologie provided the blueprint for the hunt. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, it applies modern forensic, legal and archaeological analysis to the surviving record.
Course Content
Five Modules.
One Forensic Reconstruction.
Module
Topics
Focus
Module 1The Perfect Storm — Political and Legal Context 3 Context View topics
- Topic 1England in 1612 — Religious Flux and Recusancy
Lancashire as a “lawless” northern frontier where Catholicism still thrived. How the closure of abbeys like Whalley stripped charity networks, leaving the poor reliant on cunning folk.
- Topic 2The Royal Influence — James I and Daemonologie
A king’s personal obsession becomes state policy. How James’s 1597 treatise served as both theological justification and practical manual for prosecution.
- Topic 3Weaponising the Law — The Witchcraft Act of 1604
The shift from the 1563 Act, which required tangible harm, to the 1604 Act, under which a mere pact with the Devil became a capital offence — without physical evidence.
Module 2The Catalyst — The Encounter on the Road 3 The Spark View topics
- Topic 1The Road to Trawden Forest — Alizon Device and John Law
21 March 1612: a request for metal pins, a refusal, a curse. The mundane confrontation that escalated into national tragedy.
- Topic 2Forensic Reality versus 17th-Century Interpretation
Why John Law’s sudden collapse was almost certainly an acute neurological stroke — hemiplegia and aphasia — read in 1612 as visible proof of dark magic.
- Topic 3The Ambitious Magistrate — Roger Nowell’s Investigation
How a local Justice of the Peace, eager for royal favour, used leading questions to expand a single confession into a sprawling family conspiracy.
Module 3Factions and Families — The Dynamics of Malkin Tower 3 The Players View topics
- Topic 1Neighbours at War — The Demdikes versus The Chattoxes
Two matriarchs in their eighties, rival cunning women, locked in a generational feud over theft, extortion, and a shrinking local market for healing.
- Topic 2The Sabbat at Malkin Tower — Conspiracy or Desperation?
A Good Friday meal of stolen mutton, framed by the state as a witches’ Sabbath plotting to blow up Lancaster Castle. The likelier truth: a council of impoverished tenants.
- Topic 3Cold Case Geolocation — The Archaeological Search
Lidar, magnetometry and resistivity surveys at Malkin Tower Farm. What modern geophysics has — and has not — recovered of the lost “fire-house” and its hawthorn.
Module 4The Judicial Theatre — The Lancaster Assizes 3 The Trial View topics
- Topic 1The Star Witness — Jennet Device, Aged Nine
How Daemonologie was used to suspend the rule barring children from testifying against kin — and how a nine-year-old became the state’s most lethal weapon.
- Topic 2Elizabeth Device and Alice Nutter — Two Convictions, One Pattern
A poor mother accused by her own daughter, set against a wealthy gentlewoman whose mere presence at Malkin Tower was enough to hang her.
- Topic 3The Record — Thomas Potts and The Wonderfull Discoverie
The 1613 court clerk’s account read for what it really is: not a transcript, but a piece of state propaganda dressed as legal record.
Module 5Global Echoes and the Path to Skepticism 3 Aftermath View topics
- Topic 1The Diagnostic Matrix — Pendle versus Samlesbury
The same court, the same judge, the same week. Why the Samlesbury accused walked free while the Pendle accused did not — and what that tells us about the politics of mercy.
- Topic 2Global Parallels — Bamberg and Salem
How the same ingredients — war, economic crisis, and child witnesses — produced mass hunts in Germany and colonial Massachusetts.
- Topic 3The End of the Craze — The Scientific Revolution
Hobbes, Locke, and the judicial scepticism of Lord Chief Justice Holt. The slow death of a paranoia that ended only with the repeal of the witchcraft laws in 1736.
Who this course is for
Built for serious readers,
not casual browsers.
Medical and Psychological Researchers
A retrospective forensic lens on John Law’s stroke, and on contemporary markers of what we would now describe as autism in Alizon Device.
Social Scientists and Economists
The course frames the trials as the criminalisation of poverty — survival tactics reclassified by the state as demonic warfare.
Archaeologists and Geo-Spatial Analysts
The Malkin Tower module reviews modern Lidar, magnetometry and resistivity work on the suspected site.
Historians and Skeptics
The arc from Jacobean superstition to Enlightenment empiricism — and the eventual repeal of the witchcraft laws in 1736.
Lancashire Residents and Heritage Visitors
For those who walk Pendle Hill or visit Lancaster Castle: the factual ground beneath the tourist folklore.
Meet the Historian
Simon Williams
Founder & Editor-in-Chief · Histories and Castles
Simon writes and teaches about medieval and early-modern Britain with a single guiding question — what really happened, and how do we know? His work cuts across folklore, legal history, archaeology and forensic re-examination, with a particular interest in cases like Pendle where the gap between popular memory and surviving evidence is at its widest.
This course brings together that approach: it treats the 1612 trials not as a ghost story to be retold, but as a cold case to be re-opened.
Begin today
Re-open the case.
The trials were not the work of dark covens. They were the work of paranoid kings, ambitious magistrates, and a legal system that bent to both. By the end of this course you will be able to read the Pendle case the way historians, lawyers and forensic analysts now read it.
- 5 modules · 15 topics
- Self-paced · lifetime access
- Mobile, tablet and desktop
- Primary sources cited throughout
- Certificate of completion
One-time payment
£27.95
Taught by Simon WilliamsFounder · Histories and Castles
Questions? Contact us.
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