Lancashire has always had a reputation. It’s a county of moorland and steep valleys, of communities that kept their own counsel and held tight to older ways long after the rest of England had been told to let go of them. In the early 17th century, it was a place that the authorities in London viewed with considerable suspicion. The roads were poor, the population was scattered across a largely remote landscape, Catholic sympathies ran deep in many of the old families, and folk custom had survived here with a stubbornness that the Protestant establishment found uncomfortable. None of that was lost on the people in power when a chain of events beginning on a road in Pendle Forest in the spring of 1612 set in motion one of the most documented, most studied, and most devastating witch trial episodes in English history.
To understand what happened in 1612, you have to understand the world those people were actually living in, because taking it out of context makes it easy to reduce it to something almost cartoonish, old women confessing to Devil’s pacts and a terrified community tearing itself apart. The reality is considerably more complicated and considerably more human than that, and it begins not with superstition but with politics. It’s also worth being clear from the outset that the people who died in this story were not all women, and they weren’t all old. Among the 10 hanged at Gallows Hill were men, teenagers, and people caught up in circumstances largely beyond their control, and the story deserves to be told with all of them in it, not just the figures who have become famous.
England in 1612 was 9 years into the reign of King James I, who had come to the throne in 1603 following the death of Elizabeth I. James was not a relaxed man on the subject of witchcraft. He had, back in 1597 while he was still James VI of Scotland, written a book called Daemonologie, a detailed theological and intellectual argument for the reality of witches, the validity of their pact with the Devil, and the absolute necessity of prosecuting them wherever they were found. He had written it from personal conviction, not abstract theory. In 1590, a group of people from East Lothian became known as the North Berwick witches after being accused of using magic to create storms aimed at sinking the royal ship, with the ultimate goal of killing the king. James didn’t merely observe the proceedings from a distance. He attended the trials personally and conducted his own interrogations of the accused, getting directly involved in a way that was unusual for a reigning monarch. The experience lodged itself in him and never left. By 1597 he had turned that obsession into a published treatise, and when he became King of England in 1603 he brought that treatise with him, having it republished for an English audience. In 1604, Parliament passed a new Witchcraft Act that sharpened the penalties significantly, making it a capital offence punishable by death to invoke evil spirits, cause harm through magical means, or keep a familiar spirit. That legal framework is the ground the 1612 trials stood on. King James I also re-translated the Bible and changed one very famous line… The line now reads “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” but, in the original Hebrew texts this line actually says “thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live”. You now see how small changes create hysteria and manic amongst towns and villages. If God has said a witch should be condemned to death then that must be the way to go correct? No, God said no such thing until King James I changed that line in his own version of the bible, which many churches still use today, sadly.
At the same time, folk magic was not remotely unusual in the communities of rural Lancashire, and it hadn’t been for centuries. People like Elizabeth Southerns and Anne Whittle, who would become known to history as Old Demdike and Mother Chattox, were practising a tradition that stretched back well before anyone had thought to legislate against it. They were wise women (probably, they may have just been foragers, we don’t know), village healers, the people you went to when a doctor was an unaffordable luxury, when your cattle were sick, when you needed a charm for protection or a remedy for a child running a fever that wouldn’t break. This tradition wasn’t exclusively female either. Cunning men operated across the same communities, equally respected, equally relied upon, and equally vulnerable to accusation when the political wind changed. In early 17th century England, medicine for the poor was simply not accessible. Physicians were expensive beyond the reach of working people and the peasantry, and even when you could afford them, the treatments they offered were often more dangerous than the illness itself. Your local wise woman or cunning man with their herbs, their charms, and their knowledge passed down through generations was genuinely useful in a way a physician was not, and the demand for their services was constant across every level of rural society. Folk magic in this period was so embedded in everyday life that the historian Owen Davies has documented how widespread and normalised it remained well into the early modern period. People from every walk of life used the services of cunning folk, and while what they did was technically illegal under the Witchcraft Act, the demand was so great and the practice so accepted that prosecutions were rare. It was simply how things worked.
Old Demdike, whose real name was Elizabeth Southerns, had been known as a cunning woman in the Pendle area for over 50 years by the time the trials came. By 1612 she was an elderly widow, probably somewhere in her 80s, nearly blind, and living in poverty with her daughter Elizabeth Device and Elizabeth’s children at a place called Malkin Tower in the Forest of Pendle. Those children were James, who was probably around 19 or 20 years old, Alizon, who was around 17, and the youngest, 9 year old Jennet. Malkin Tower was a rough and tumbledown cottage rather than anything grand, and the name itself carried older English connotations of an untidy or disreputable woman, which gives you a sense of how the family were viewed by some of their neighbours. The Device family scraped a living from a combination of odd jobs, begging, and the income Demdike brought in through her practice. It was a household of women, children, and young people living right at the edge of survival, and that poverty would prove to be one of the things that made them so vulnerable when the accusations started.
Demdike made no secret of what she was. When she was eventually brought before a magistrate and questioned, she described her familiar spirit without hesitation and in considerable detail. She called it Tibb, and she said it had first appeared to her at a quarry at twilight, taking the form of a young man with golden hair wearing a coat that was half black and half brown. He had offered to teach her the ways of magic. She told the magistrate she had resisted for 6 years before accepting, but that she had eventually given in because she was tired of poverty and powerlessness. She then worked with Tibb for the rest of her long life, and she described him as able to take other forms too, appearing sometimes as a hare, sometimes as a black cat, sometimes as a brown dog. This account of a familiar spirit moving between human and animal form fits very naturally within the broader tradition of British folk magic, where the familiar was understood as an otherworldly helper essential to the cunning person’s practice. Scholars like Emma Wilby, in her work Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, have documented how widespread this understanding of the familiar was across British magical tradition, and in Lancashire itself John Webster, writing in 1677 in The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, recorded a local cunning man who claimed his familiar was none other than the Queen of Elfhame, which speaks to the way fairy belief and folk magic tradition overlapped in this part of the country.
The other great matriarch of this story was Anne Whittle, known as Old Chattox or Mother Chattox, who was Demdike’s contemporary and, crucially, her rival. Both women were widows, both were elderly, both were practitioners in the same tradition, and both were working the same community of people who needed what they offered. The bad blood between their families ran deep and had been building for years. In around 1601, a member of the Chattox family had broken into Malkin Tower and stolen goods worth around a pound, which was a genuinely significant sum to people as poor as the Devices. John Device, Alizon’s father, had died blaming Chattox for his illness, believing she had cursed the family after threatening them with harm unless they paid her an annual protection fee. Chattox had also been accused of desecrating graves at the 16th century church of St Mary’s in Newchurch in Pendle, taking skulls and teeth for use in her practice. The mutual enmity between these 2 families, hardened into genuine hostility over years of competition and grievance, would prove to be one of the reasons the accusations spread as fast and as far as they did once the legal machinery started moving. Because when people are already angry at each other and frightened for their own lives, they point fingers at whoever they’ve been pointing fingers at for years. And just because a couple of them said they were witches, that doesn’t mean that all 10 that were condemned were. We have no proof of this, they could have just been caught up in everything.
The event that started everything happened on the 21st of March, 1612. Alizon Device, Demdike’s teenage granddaughter, was on the road to Trawden Forest near Colne when she met a pedlar named John Law, who was travelling on business from Halifax. Alizon asked him for pins. Pins were a small but meaningful item in that world, used in everyday life and also in folk magical practice, and Alizon had no money to pay for them. Law refused, apparently unwilling to open his pack for someone who couldn’t pay. Alizon cursed him. Precisely what happened next and exactly when it happened is not entirely clear from the sources, but shortly after their encounter John Law suffered what we would now recognise as a stroke. He was paralysed down one side, he lost the use of his speech, his face drooped. Modern neurologists who have examined the surviving descriptions from the court records are broadly agreed that acute cardiovascular failure is the most straightforward explanation for what happened to Law that day. But in 1612 Alizon believed she had done it herself, and that belief, combined with the guilt she felt about it, drove her to visit Law at the inn where he was recovering and ask his forgiveness. Law’s son Abraham, furious on his father’s behalf, took Alizon’s confession to the local magistrate.
That magistrate was Roger Nowell, a Justice of the Peace based at Read Hall near Burnley, and it’s worth thinking about who he was and what he wanted, because the trials didn’t happen in a vacuum of honest law enforcement. In early 1612, every Justice of the Peace in Lancashire had received orders to compile a register of recusants in their area, meaning Catholics who refused to attend Protestant church services. Lancashire had a higher than average concentration of Catholic sympathisers and old Catholic families, and following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a group of Catholic conspirators had attempted to blow up Parliament and kill the king, the atmosphere around Catholicism and religious nonconformity was charged with official suspicion. Witchcraft was intellectually associated with Catholicism in the Protestant legal and religious establishment of the day, and a successful prosecution for witchcraft would have put Nowell in an extremely favourable light with a king who had written an entire book about the subject. When Alizon Device’s confession landed in front of him and she began implicating not just herself but her grandmother and members of the rival Chattox family, Nowell had far more to work with than he could have anticipated.
He summoned Alizon, her mother Elizabeth Device, and her brother James. Note that James Device, a young man of around 19 or 20, was pulled into this from the very start, not as a bystander but as a person of interest in his own right. Then on the 2nd of April Nowell travelled to the house of a local gentleman named James Wilsey at Fence near Burnley, where he interviewed both Demdike and Chattox directly. Both women were remarkably forthcoming. Demdike described Tibb. Chattox described her own familiar, a creature she called Fancy, who had appeared to her as a man and had offered her his service in exchange for her soul. Both women admitted to things that, under the 1604 Act, amounted to capital offences. Whether they were genuinely confessing, whether they were confused by the questioning, whether they believed their own accounts, or whether some combination of fear and the magistrate’s interpretive framing shaped what ended up on the record, it’s very difficult to say at this distance. What we know is that by early April 1612, Demdike, Chattox, Alizon Device, and Anne Redferne, who was Chattox’s daughter, had been committed to Lancaster Castle to await trial at the next assizes. Demdike was already in very poor health and she never made it to trial. She died in Lancaster Castle before the August hearings.
The affair expanded dramatically because of what happened on Good Friday, the 10th of April. Elizabeth Device, Alizon’s mother, organised a gathering at Malkin Tower. The people who came were friends and neighbours sympathetic to the family’s situation, and they came to offer support. James Device, the young man who was already under suspicion and whose family was falling apart around him, stole a neighbour’s sheep to feed the gathering. That act, stealing food to feed a grieving and frightened group of people, would be used as evidence against him. When Roger Nowell heard about the meeting, the interpretation he chose to put on it was that it had been a witches’ sabbath, a conspiratorial assembly in which the group had planned to blow up Lancaster Castle and kill the gaoler to free their imprisoned family members. The actual purpose of the meeting is, as historians have debated for centuries, almost certainly far simpler and far sadder than that. It looks, in its bones, like a desperate family council, frightened people gathering around each other in a crisis. But Nowell treated it as criminal conspiracy, and on the 27th of April, following a formal inquiry conducted jointly with another magistrate, Nicholas Bannister, 8 more people who had been present at the gathering were arrested and committed to Lancaster Gaol. They included Elizabeth Device, James Device, and several of their neighbours and connections, among them a man named John Bulcock and his mother Jane, and a woman named Alice Nutter whose presence in this story would become one of its most enduring mysteries.
It’s worth pausing here to note who was now in custody, because the popular retelling of the Pendle trials often reduces it to a story of old women, and that’s only part of the picture. Of those eventually tried and executed, 2 were men: James Device and John Bulcock. James was a young man barely out of adolescence, caught up in a catastrophe that began with his grandmother and sister long before he had any real agency over it. John Bulcock was tried alongside his mother Jane, the 2 of them condemned together. Alizon Device was around 17 years old, a teenager, the girl whose guilt-ridden encounter with a pedlar on a country road had set the entire machine in motion. These weren’t all ancient crones with decades of magical practice behind them. Some of them were young people from a desperately poor family who simply had no way out once the accusations started.
Alice Nutter was, unlike almost everyone else caught up in these events, not poor. She was a wealthy widow from the respectable and landed Nutter family, owner of property in Roughlee, educated and of a completely different social class to the Device and Chattox families. Her presence at Malkin Tower on Good Friday was never satisfactorily explained, and she never tried to explain it. Throughout her trial she said almost nothing at all beyond pleading not guilty, and she maintained that silence even when it was killing her. The theory that has gained the most traction among historians is that Alice Nutter was a Catholic, and that what she had actually been doing on Good Friday was attending a prohibited Catholic mass with fellow recusants, which was exactly the kind of illegal gathering that the current political climate was designed to hunt down. The Nutter family had established Catholic connections; 2 relatives of her husband, the priests John and Robert Nutter, had been executed as Catholic martyrs in 1584 and 1600 respectively. If Alice had explained her real whereabouts and her real purpose on that Good Friday, she would have brought the law down on everyone who had been at that mass with her. Her silence was protective, and it cost her everything. There is also a persistent tradition recorded by Potts himself that Nowell harboured a personal grudge against Alice Nutter over a long disputed boundary between their lands, which would have given him an additional motive beyond the political when it came to pressing charges against her. She went to her death without having said anything to save herself, and she was buried in the Nutter family plot at Newchurch in Pendle.
The trial itself ran over 2 days, the 18th and 19th of August 1612, at Lancaster Assizes in Lancaster Castle, before judges Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. The conditions for the accused were appalling by any standard, even the standards of the time. They were denied legal counsel entirely, so there was no one to speak in their defence or to challenge the evidence against them. They weren’t permitted to call witnesses. The primary evidence for the prosecution consisted of confessions obtained under magistrate questioning, statements made by other accused people under the same conditions, and the extraordinary testimony of one witness who should not, under the normal rules of the law, have been permitted to give evidence at all: 9 year old Jennet Device.
Jennet was Alizon’s younger sister and Elizabeth Device’s youngest child, and her involvement in these events is one of the most troubling threads running through the whole story. Under the common law principles of the time, a child of 9 years had no standing to give testimony in a capital trial. But King James’s Daemonologie had argued that the diabolical nature of witchcraft warranted suspension of normal evidential protections, and this became the position adopted at Lancaster. Jennet was brought into the courtroom and she climbed onto a table. What happened next was witnessed by everyone present and recorded by the court clerk. Her mother Elizabeth Device, who was also on trial, saw her youngest child preparing to give evidence against her and lost control of herself entirely. She screamed and cursed at Jennet from across the room and had to be forcibly removed before Jennet could speak. Then, in the now empty space where her mother had stood, Jennet listed the names of those who had been at the Malkin Tower meeting. She testified against Elizabeth. She testified against her brother James. She testified against her sister Alizon. She identified Alice Nutter and others. To put that plainly: a 9 year old child gave evidence that sent her own mother, brother, and sister to the gallows. Historians have debated for generations why she did it. The most widely held view is that she was coached and directed by Nowell, possibly with some better future held out to her in exchange, given the total destitution of her circumstances. Others argue she acted entirely out of self-preservation, understanding that as the one Device not yet arrested she needed to align herself with the authorities or risk being swept up herself. A third reading is some combination of both. What can’t be stated as settled fact is which version is true, because everything we know comes filtered through Potts’s account, and Potts had his own agenda. What is less contested is that the courtroom handling of this case would go on to have consequences well beyond Lancashire. The use of Jennet Device’s testimony at Lancaster was cited, 80 years later, in a magistrates’ handbook used at the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692 as a model for the use of child witnesses in capital witchcraft cases. The horror of Salem has a direct line running through Lancaster Castle.
10 people were found guilty and sentenced to death. Alice Grey was found not guilty. Margaret Pearson, known as the Padiham Witch and facing her third witchcraft prosecution, was convicted of lesser offences and escaped the death penalty, receiving instead a sentence of standing in the pillory on 4 consecutive market days in Padiham, Clitheroe, Whalley, and Lancaster, followed by a year’s imprisonment. On the 20th of August 1612, the condemned were taken in a cart from Lancaster Castle to Gallows Hill, which lay on the moors outside Lancaster’s southern gate on land that is now Williamson’s Park, and they were hanged. The 10 who died that day were Anne Whittle, known as Old Chattox; Anne Redferne, her daughter; Elizabeth Device; Alizon Device, who was around 17 years old; James Device, who was around 19 or 20; Alice Nutter; Katherine Hewitt, known as Mould-Heels; Jane Bulcock; John Bulcock, her son; and Isabel Robey from Windle near St Helens. Of those 10, 2 were men. Several were young. Collectively they had been accused of causing 17 deaths through witchcraft, many of them stretching back decades. Old Demdike had already died in Lancaster Castle before the trial began. The burial places of those who were executed have never been found.
It’s something that gets glossed over in most retellings, but the Pendle trials were not exclusively or even primarily a story about elderly women. Yes, Demdike and Chattox were the figures at the centre of the folk magical tradition that gave the whole affair its shape, but the net that Nowell cast pulled in men and teenagers alongside them. James Device was barely more than a boy. John Bulcock was tried alongside his mother, the 2 of them condemned together. Alizon Device was a teenager whose guilt over what she believed she’d done to a pedlar started a catastrophe she could never have imagined. The story gets told most often through the lens of the old cunning women, and the injustice done to them is real and profound, but reducing it to that erases the young men and the young women who died with them, and it erases the fact that Jennet Device, the child who gave the testimony that condemned her family, was herself only 9 years old. The Lancashire witch trials took the old and the young, men and women, the practiced and the barely aware of what was happening. That breadth is part of what makes them so devastating, and the full picture deserves to be told.
The trials running simultaneously at Lancaster that August were not confined to the Pendle cases, and it’s worth knowing about the second group because their story ended very differently. The Samlesbury witch trials involved 3 women from the village of Samlesbury, Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley, and Ellen Bierley, who had been accused of witchcraft by a 14 year old girl named Grace Sowerbutts. The charges were extreme, including claims of infanticide and cannibalism. Grace’s testimony unravelled under interrogation when it became clear that her evidence had been fabricated and coached by a Jesuit priest named Christopher Southworth. Judge Bromley exposed the manipulation, the testimony fell apart, and all 3 Samlesbury women were acquitted. Their story stands as a reminder that even in the pressure cooker of 1612 there were moments when the mechanism of prosecution hit a wall, though as the Pendle cases show, those moments were tragically the exception.
The document that has shaped everything written about these events ever since is Thomas Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613. Potts was the clerk of the Lancaster Assizes and he was commissioned to write his account by the 2 trial judges, Altham and Bromley, who reviewed and corrected it before it went to publication. Bromley in particular oversaw the writing very closely, and the historian Stephen Pumfrey has made a compelling case that both judges worked with Potts specifically to shape the account in ways that protected and advanced their own careers and curried favour with a witch-obsessed king. The parallels between Potts’s account and the framework laid out in James’s Daemonologie are striking enough that some historians have wondered whether the king himself had some hand in directing the prosecutions, though there is no evidence he was personally involved or ever attended. What the parallels more probably reflect is that the book was deliberately written to flatter royal opinion and demonstrate that the Lancashire trials were exactly the kind of righteous witch prosecution the king had described as necessary. Potts took the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower, which was almost certainly a desperate family welfare meeting, and wrote it up as a diabolical conspiracy to commit political violence. He took the confessions of frightened, impoverished people and shaped them into a narrative that matched the theological template James had provided. The book worked in terms of what it was trying to do. It also became the only primary source for the events it described, which means every account of the Pendle trials that has ever been written has had to pass through a document written with a specific political purpose in mind.
What the people on Gallows Hill actually were, when you strip away the propaganda and the politics, were practitioners and family members of a living British folk magical tradition that had been part of that community for as long as anyone could remember. Demdike had been the local cunning woman for over 50 years. Chattox had been doing the same work across the same stretch of land for almost as long. James Device had grown up in a household where magic was ordinary, where his grandmother was the person the community came to for help, where what they did was entirely normal until it suddenly wasn’t. Alizon Device had grown up in the same household and believed entirely in the power of the curse she had laid on John Law. What they knew about herbs, about charms, about healing and protection and the small practical magics of everyday rural life had not come from nowhere and had not been invented for personal profit. It was knowledge passed down through generations in exactly the way that folk knowledge always is, from person to person, in practice, in observation, in the informal education of watching someone who knows what they’re doing and learning from them. The familiar spirits they described to Nowell fit within a British tradition documented by scholars across multiple sources. The charms they used and the services they provided were the services their community had always needed them to provide, and had come to them because there was no one else.
What changed was not these people. What changed was the political climate. The Witchcraft Act of 1604 turned what had been the normal practice of village life into a capital crime. A king who had written a book about the necessity of executing witches sat on the throne. A local magistrate with something to prove and possibly personal grudges to settle saw an opportunity in a teenager’s guilt-ridden confession about a pedlar’s stroke. A family feud that had been festering for years meant that once accusations started flowing, they flowed in multiple directions at once. And a 9 year old child was put on a table in a courtroom and gave testimony that sent her own family to the gallows, whether she was coached by Nowell, acting to save herself, or some desperate mixture of both, something no historian has been able to settle.
The story of the Pendle accused also resists easy categorisation when it comes to gender and social power, because it’s tempting but inaccurate to frame it simply as the persecution of women by men. Women were the majority of the accused, yes. Old Demdike and Chattox were women whose independence and authority outside conventional female roles made them visible targets. But men were accused and executed too. Men were part of the families swept up in the accusations. A boy barely out of his teens died on Gallows Hill because he stole a sheep to feed people in mourning. The machinery of the law in 1612 was not exclusively targeting women. It was targeting people who were poor, Catholic, nonconformist, strange, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that included men and young people as readily as it included old women.
The story did not end on Gallows Hill in August 1612. The shadow of the Pendle trials lingered over that community for decades. Jennet Device, the child whose testimony had sent her family to their deaths, disappears from the historical record after the trials and does not reappear until 1633, when a boy named Edmund Robinson, about 10 years old and from Wheatley Lane in Newchurch in Pendle, began making accusations of his own. Edmund claimed to have been carried off by witches to a gathering at a house called Hoarstones where he had witnessed a great assembly of witches, wizards, and warlocks. He identified around 20 local people as attendees. His father, apparently sensing a lucrative opportunity in his son’s newly discovered talent, began taking Edmund on a tour of the local churches and charging people to watch him perform as a witch finder. In February 1634 the story reached the local justices and a new round of arrests followed. Among those accused was a woman named Jennet Davies or Device, which is thought almost certainly to be the same Jennet who had stood on that table as a 9 year old and named her family. The machinery she had helped set in motion in 1612 had turned around to catch her. This time, however, the Privy Council in London intervened, something that had not happened in 1612. 7 of the accused were brought to London for examination, the Privy Council investigated, and Edmund Robinson eventually confessed that the whole thing had been fabricated for financial gain. His father was arrested as a result. All those accused were acquitted and in some cases pardoned. But the happy ending didn’t fully materialise. Many of those acquitted couldn’t pay the debts they had accumulated during their imprisonment and remained in gaol regardless. The last surviving record of Jennet Device mentions her being held in Lancaster Castle as recently as the 22nd of August 1636. There are no further records after that date. It is widely believed she died there.
The official account of the 1612 trials, Thomas Potts’s Wonderfull Discoverie, was the beginning of a long cultural afterlife for the Pendle story. William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1849 novel The Lancashire Witches was enormously popular and fixed the story in the Victorian public imagination, though Ainsworth took considerable liberties with the historical record. More recently, the poet Simon Armitage made a documentary in 2012 to mark the 400th anniversary of the trials, focusing on Jennet Device’s story and bringing the human tragedy of it to a new audience. That same year, a statue of Alice Nutter was unveiled in Roughlee by the sculptor David Palmer, funded by the local Catholic community, standing beside the road near the village where she had lived and died. Lancaster University has a college named Pendle with a witch on a broomstick as its symbol. The Witch Way bus route runs through the area. The village of Newchurch in Pendle has a shop called Witches Galore and a churchyard with a stone known as the Witches’ Grave. Lancashire has been called witch county for generations and it has worn that name with something that is equal parts pride and grief.
There have been serious efforts in recent years to secure a formal pardon for the 10 who were executed. A petition was presented to the Home Secretary in 1998 and rejected. Another attempt in 2008 was also turned down. In 2012, the 400th anniversary brought fresh calls. The historian Robert Poole, professor at the University of Central Lancashire, publicly stated that the Lancashire witches were victims of a gross miscarriage of justice, convicted of an impossible crime by methods that amounted to persecution, on the basis of evidence they had no ability to contest. As of now, the government has not granted a pardon. Campaigns to secure a formal pardon have continued to grow. A petition that hit 10,000 signatures in January 2024 forced a written government response, which acknowledged the historic injustice but confirmed there are no plans to legislate a pardon. Legally speaking, the 10 people hanged at Gallows Hill on the 20th of August 1612 remain convicted. Their graves have never been found.
What you’re left with, when you sit with this story properly, is not the ghost tour version or the souvenir shop version, though those exist and they’re real and in their own way they’re a form of remembrance too I guess, but what you’re really left with is a very specific group of human beings, men and women and young people, most of them desperately poor, most of them already at the margins of their community, who were caught between a living tradition of British folk magic (or not in some cases) and a legal and political machine that had decided to make an example. Demdike was doing what her community had needed her to do for 50 years. Chattox was doing the same. Alizon Device was a guilt-ridden teenager who told the truth as she understood it and set a terrible mechanism in motion. James Device was a young man who fed the mourners at his family’s darkest moment and died for it. Alice Nutter stayed silent to protect people she loved and died for it. John Bulcock died alongside his mother in a courtroom where neither of them had anyone to speak for them. And Jennet Device, who had been 9 years old when she climbed onto that table, spent the last recorded years of her life in a Lancaster prison as an old woman, accused of the same crime she had helped prove in 1612, and most likely died there alone.
The Lancashire witches were not a legend. They were people. Men and women and teenagers and a child, living and quarrelling and scraping for survival and practising the magic their grandmothers had taught them in one of the poorest and most remote parts of 17th century England. The tradition that shaped them was old, real and rooted in the landscape of these hills long before anyone thought to call it a crime. The machinery that destroyed them was political, ambitious, and deeply unjust. What happened on Gallows Hill in Lancaster in August 1612 was not a victory over darkness. It was 10 people, not all of them were likely to be witches, not all of them old, hanged for simply existing, in a world that had decided, for reasons of its own, that witchcraft was evil.