Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill

P e r s e c u t i o n, P o l i t i c s a n d M u r d e r

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ISBN 978-1-78076-062-9

he pedlar was a pitiful sight, a ‘lamentable spectacle’ as he staggered into the Court of Assizes in Lancaster Castle on the

afternoon of Wednesday 16th August 1612. His face was deformed, his speech unintelligible; he could barely walk; his arms were all but useless and his hands twisted. Just five months before, the pedlar – one John Law – had been ‘a goodlie man of Stature’. Now he was lame, and his body wasted and consumed. He was there to give evidence against Alizon Device, who had been indicted ‘for that she feloniously had practiced, exercised, and used her Devillish and wicked Arts, called Witchcrafts, Inchantments, Charmes, and Sorceries’ upon Law himself. The story of Alizon’s trial, and that of at least eighteen other alleged witches, is known to us because it was, recorded for posterity by clerk of the court Thomas Potts in his Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in London four months after the end of the assizes in November 1612. It is the most famous of all accounts made of English witchcraft.

In the febrile religious and political climate of late sixteenth-century England, when the grip of the Reformation was as yet fragile and insecure, and underground papism still perceived to be rife, Lancashire was felt by the Protestant authorities to be a sinister corner of superstition, lawlessness and popery. And it was around Pendle Hill, a sombre ridge looming over the intersecting pastures, meadows and moorland of the Ribble Valley, that their suspicions took fateful and dangerous shape. The arraignment of the Lancashire witches in the assizes of 1612 remains England’s most notorious witch-trial. The women who lived in the vicinity of Pendle, who were accused, convicted and hanged alongside the so-called ‘Salmesbury Witches’, were more than just wicked sorcerers whose malign incantations caused others harm. They were reputed to be part of a dense network of devilry and mischief that revealed itself as much in hidden celebration of the Mass as in malevolent magic. They had to be eliminated to set an example to others.

continued on back flap…

…continued from front flap

In this remarkable and authoritative treatment, published to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of the case of the trials and executions, Philip C. Almond evokes all the fear, drama and paranoia of those volatile times: the bleak story of the storm over Pendle.

P h i l i P c. a l M o n dis Professor Emeritus of Religion at the University of Queensland, and is internationally respected for his work on religion and the history of ideas, especially during the English Enlightenment. His nine previous books include The Witches of Warboys and England’s First Demonologist (both I.B.Tauris), The British Discovery of Buddhism, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, and Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought.

J a c k e t i M a g e :

Pendle Hill and stone circle © Nigel Flory, 2009

J a c k e t d e s i g n :

Graham Robert Ward

Philip C. Almond is Professor Emeritus of Religion at the University of Queensland, and is internationally respected for his work on religion and the history of ideas, especially during the English Enlightenment. His nine previous books include The Witches of Warboys and England’s First Demonologist (both I.B.Tauris), The British Discovery of Buddhism, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, and Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought.

FM.indd iFM.indd i 6/18/2012 10:55:16 AM6/18/2012 10:55:16 AM

LancashireWitches

A CHRONICLE of SORCERY and DEATH on PENDLE HILL

T h e

P H I L I P C . A L M O N D

FM.indd iiiFM.indd iii 6/18/2012 10:55:17 AM6/18/2012 10:55:17 AM

Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 2012 Philip C. Almond

The right of Philip C. Almond to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 062 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryA full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB

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12

C H A P T E R O N E

A W i t c h H u n t B e g i n s

The Witch Hunter

In the annals of seventeenth-century witchcraft, it is Matthew Hopkins who is most remembered as the witch-fi nder, responsi-

ble for the hunting and executing of some sixty witches in the year 1645.1 Roger Nowell’s tally of witches discovered was much lower. Nonetheless, it was he whose carefully constructed interrogations and examinations of suspects and witnesses appeared to lay bare a thick network of witches and witchcraft in Pendle Forest and its sur-rounds in the spring of 1612. Certainly Thomas Potts saw his activities as crucial. ‘In the end,’ he declared, ‘Roger Nowell Esquire, one of his Majesties Justices in these partes, a very religious honest Gentleman, painefull in the service of his Countrey: whose fame for this great ser-vice to his Countrey shall live after him, tooke upon him to enter into the particular examination of these suspected persons: And to the honour of God, and the great comfort of all his Countrey, made such a discovery of them in order, as the like hath not been heard of.’2

Potts was right. Outside of the East Anglian witch hunt in 1645 associated with Matthew Hopkins, the execution of ten persons in Lancashire, together with some eight found innocent, was unusual within the history of English witch trials. England was one of those parts of Europe, as James Sharpe notes, ‘where witchcraft was an endemic rather than an epidemic problem, where witch trials were sporadic and few, where accusations were usually levelled against

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13

individuals or groups of three or four suspects, and where the acquit-tal rate was high in witchcraft cases’.3 Thus, the nineteen persons tried at the Lancaster Assizes in August 1612 constituted the largest num-ber of witches to be tried at one Assize in England up until that time. The ten executions that resulted are of numerical signifi cance among the estimated fi ve hundred executions for witchcraft that took place in England over the period from the passing of the fi rst witchcraft statute in 1542 to the repeal of all witchcraft statutes in 1736.4 The ten executed were accused, during the course of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, of having murdered some nineteen persons.

Born in 1551, Roger Nowell was about sixty-two years of age when he began his hunt for witches. Of a staunchly Protestant heri-tage, he had succeeded his father in 1591 to the family estate in Read, Lancashire, in the neighbourhood of Pendle. We do not know what drove his understanding of demonology or witchcraft, though he was always more interested in criminal law than demonological lore. There is no sign in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches that he had read, for example, classic Catholic demonologies such as the Malleus Malefi carum, or English Protestant variants such as George Gifford’s A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerors (1587), his A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593), or William Perkins’s Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608). Nor do we know whether he was familiar with King James’s Daemonologie.5 What we can say with certainty is that he was familiar with the Witchcraft Act of 1604. As a magistrate, we would expect him to be, but more than this, it formed the intellectual framework which underpinned all his activities, and his interrogations and examina-tions were driven by it.

The Witchcraft Act of 1604 superseded the Elizabethan version of 1563. In that earlier version, ‘against Conjurations, Enchantments, and Witchcrafts’, the penalty for damage caused to persons or their property by witchcraft was one year’s imprisonment, and being pil-loried for six hours once in every quarter of that year for the fi rst offence. For any subsequent infraction, an offender faced the death


T h e L a n c a s h i r e W i t c h e s

14

sentence. Treasure seeking, the restoration of lost or stolen property, or provoking any person to unlawful love by witchcraft met the same penalties for a fi rst offence. For a further offence, the punishment was the forfeiture of all goods to the Crown, and life imprisonment. The penalty was harsher for murder by means of witchcraft. The invoca-tion of any evil and wicked spirits for any purpose whatsoever, or the use of any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery to cause the death of any person, warranted the death sentence.

The 1604 Act, ‘for the better restraining of said offences, and more severe punishing the same’ signifi cantly modifi ed the earlier statute. Now, not only the invocation or convocation of evil and wicked spirits was forbidden, but the death sentence was mandatory for any person who ‘shall consult, covenant with, entertaine, imploy, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose’. The death penalty was also the punishment for taking up ‘any dead man, woman, or child, out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth; or the skin, bone, or any other part of the dead person, to be imployed, or used in any manner of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Charme, or Inchantment’. The death sentence for killing persons by witchcraft was extended to any witchcraft in which a person is ‘Wasted, Consumed, Pined, or Lamed, in His or Her body, or any part thereof’. The penalty for a second offence in treasure hunt-ing, fi nding lost or stolen goods, or love magic was increased beyond forfeiture of goods and life imprisonment to death.6

Roger Nowell and his fellow justices of the peace, therefore, knew what they were looking for; and, as we will see, for the most part, they found it. Still, if Nowell and his Lancashire colleagues took up the new legislation, it was not similarly taken up at the Lancaster Assizes. Rather surprisingly, although there was plenty of evidence to support such charges, none of the indictments for witchcraft in the Lancashire trials were for consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding spirits; and Potts, in his editorialis-ing, made little of it. Even though the legislation allowed for charges that amounted to heresy, the indictments in The Wonderfull Discoverie



15

of Witches stayed focused on crimes – murdering and harming people and animals.7

The Satanic CovenantHowever, for Roger Nowell, if not for Thomas Potts and Judges Bromley and Altham, the satanic compact or, perhaps better for the Protestant Nowell, the Presbyterian version embedded in the legisla-tion – the satanic covenant – was the core of witchcraft. In English witchcraft cases, torture was not used to extract information or con-fessions. We do not know what enticements or threats, if any, Nowell might have used to persuade Alizon Device to confess to having lamed John Law through witchcraft in his examination of her on 30 March. She had, after all, at least according to Abraham Law, con-fessed the day before. He was no doubt a skillful interrogator; and, as Lyndal Roper has pointed out, the role of the interrogator was especially important. Particularly crucial was his capacity to create a relationship with the suspect, albeit one that was ambivalent and unbalanced. ‘It was a brutally unequal relationship,’ writes Lyndal Roper. ‘The interrogators shaped the story that the witch confessed, even if they did not consciously believe themselves to be doing so; the witch, though she provided the substance and detail of the mate-rial was not free to provide any narrative she liked. Consciously or unconsciously, she learned what she had to say.’8

Having extracted a confession from Alizon Device, we can imag-ine Roger Nowell moving excitedly to his next question, ‘How did you become a witch?’, and leading Alizon through a series of ques-tions which elicited from her just how she had done so. No doubt, her account of how she became a witch came later in his interrogation of her, but it was with her account of this Satanic covenant that Nowell began his report of her confession:

She saith, That about two years agone, her Grandmother, called Elizabeth Sothernes, alias Dembdike, did (sundry times in going or walking together, as they went beg-ging) perswade and advise this Examinate to let a



16

Divell or a Familiar appeare to her, and that shee, this Examinate would let him suck at some part of her; and she might have and doe what shee would. And so not long after these perswasions, this Examinate being walking towards the Rough-Lee, in a Close of one John Robinsons, there appeared unto her a thing like unto a Blacke Dogge: speaking unto her, this Examinate, and desiring her to give him her Soule, and he would give her power to doe any thing she would: whereupon this Examinate being therewithall inticed, and setting her downe; the said Blacke-Dogge did with his mouth (as this Examinate then thought) sucke at her breast, a little below her Paps, which place did remaine blew halfe a yeare next after.9

She had never seen the black dog again, she went on to say, until that fateful day of 18 March when, having had her argument with the pedlar, it appeared again to her and offered to lame John Law. There were here neither charms, nor potions, nor spells, nor images – the usual accom-paniments of witchcraft. The laming of John Law was, in Nowell’s account, the direct consequence of the spirit’s offer to Alizon. We can assume too, that at some time on the same day, John Law was asked by Roger Nowell about the black dog. He remembered a fi erce black dog, and Alizon shortly afterwards, appearing in his room in the ale house, as he lay in great pain unable to move. Roger Nowell wove it into his written account. Nevertheless, Alizon was not indicted for covenant-ing with spirits, but, in accordance with the 1604 Act, only for having lamed John Law as Potts, in his customary formally legal way, put it ‘so that his bodie wasted and consumed, &c. Contra Formam Statuti, &c’.10 Alizon was held for trial at the Lancaster Assizes in August.

Nowell now had another inquiry to initiate, for he had ‘turned’ Alizon. She had implicated her grandmother, Elizabeth Sowtherns, alias Demdike, in her initiation into witchcraft. According to Thomas Potts, Demdike (or Dembdike), was an old woman of eighty years of age. She had been a witch for fi fty years, though her daughter said forty, and she herself was to admit to only twenty. Potts was never



17

to lay eyes on her, nor, though for different reasons, she on him, for she was both lame and blind. Apart from this, we have no physical description of her from him or any of the other sources. Potts, to his credit, resisted inventing one. She was a widow, but we know noth-ing of her husband. She was the ‘Sincke of villanie and mischiefe’ from which it all began.11 She lived in the forest of Pendle, ‘a vaste place, fi tte for her profession’,12 at Malkin Tower, close to the home of her widowed daughter Elizabeth Device, and her grandchildren Alizon, James, and Jennet Device.13 She was a powerful matriarch.

The location of Malkin Tower is disputed,14 but no doubt it was within sight of Pendle Hill, the sombre ridge that brooded over the intersecting pastures, meadows, and moorland of the Ribble Valley as the events of 1612 unfolded. William Harrison Ainsworth in his The Witches of Lancashire in 1849 described the landscape in terms that evoke the dire social and economic situation faced by the inhabit-ants of Pendle at that time. ‘Dreary was the prospect on all sides,’ he wrote, ‘Black moor, bleak fell, straggling forest, intersected with sullen streams as black as ink, with here and there a small tarn, or moss-pool, with waters of the same hue – these constituted the chief features of the scene.’ Apart from occasional signs of human habita-tion, ‘All else was heathy waste, morass, and wood’.15

John Swain has recently informed us that substantial popula-tion growth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Pendle region had put severe pressure on the local economy, primarily based on cattle rearing and woollen cloth making. There seems to have been a number of families in Pendle who were forced to rent or squat in cottages with very little land, in spite of an Act of 1589 prohibiting the use of cottages with fewer than four acres attached to them. Malkin Tower was probably one of these.16 Demdike and her family would have lived on the edge of dire poverty, hence their involvement in begging as a necessary supplement to any other cottage industry in which they were engaged. The other major cunning family in this story, that of Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, also lived on the edge of penury as small tenant farmers.17



18

Demdike was also a professional ‘cunning woman’. The ‘cun-ning’ or ‘wise’ folk were practitioners of benefi cent magic. They used herbal and magical medicine to heal the sick and the bewitched, fi nd buried treasure, identify thieves, tell fortunes, induce love, and undo malevolent magic.18 They were prolifi c in early modern England, and popular: ‘they attaine such credit,’ declared Reginald Scot in 1584, ‘as I have heard (to my greefe) some of the ministerie affi rme, that they have had in their parish at one instant, xvii. or xviii. witches: meaning such as could worke miracles supernaturallie’.19

Reginald Scot, like most Protestant theologians, did not distin-guish the cunning folk from practitioners of malevolent witchcraft. Both had made compacts with the Devil, if only tacit ones in the case of the cunning folk. Indeed, William Perkins saw cunning or wise folk, the ‘unbinding’ witches, as more abhorrent than the ‘binding’ ones. ‘The good witch,’ he declared, ‘is he or shee that by consent in a league with the devill, doth use his helpe, for the doing of good onely. This cannot hurt, torment, curse, or kill, but onely heale and cure the hurts infl icted upon men or cattell, by badde Witches . . . Now howso-ever both these be evil, yet of the two, the more horrible & detestable Monster is the good Witch: for look in what place soever there be any bad Witches that hurt onely, there also the devil hath his good ones, who are better knowne then the bad, being commonly called Wisemen, or Wise-women.’20

No doubt Perkins found the good witch more threatening because he or she was in direct competition with the clergy. As Leland Estes points out, for the Puritan clergy, in their competition for the favour of the populace, ‘no weapon proved more serviceable than the charge that the opposition was in league with the Devil’.21 We can say the same of Protestant gentry such as Roger Nowell.

If among the Protestant elite, the boundary between cunning folk and witches, white and black magic was blurred in principle, it was blurred in practice among the middling and lower classes. Cunning folk could cross the boundary between good and evil, and when they did so, their powers were to be feared. This was no doubt a useful



19

reputation to have when you went begging. ‘Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes,’ wrote Potts, ‘no man escaped her, or her Furies, that ever gave them any occasion of offence, or denyed them any thing they stood need of: And certain it is, no man neere them, was secure or free from danger.’22 Cunning practices ran in families, so there is no need to doubt Potts’s claim that Demdike had instructed her children and grandchildren in their particular form of cottage industry.

The Mark of the DevilHaving extracted a confession of covenanting with a spirit from Alizon, Roger Nowell turned his attention to asking her about her grandmother, Demdike.23 Potts grouped all the documents relevant to particular suspects together within his text. So we fi nd Nowell’s account of his questioning of Alizon about her grandmother located among other materials relevant to Demdike’s case.

Reading the document, we can see that Nowell was adopting the role of curious and interested inquirer after Demdike’s business practices, for Alizon appears to have had no qualms in admitting that her grandmother was a cunning woman. She was, for exam-ple, called on to heal sick animals. Once, said Alizon, John Nutter of the Bull Hole in Pendle had a cow that was sick, and sent for Demdike to heal it. Her grandmother said that she would; and so, about ten o’clock one evening, Alizon led her to Nutter’s farm. She stayed about half an hour with the animal, and then Alizon took her home again. Alizon did not know what Demdike had done during that time. It was not until the next morning that she heard that the cow had died during the night. We might conclude that Demdike’s benevolent magic had not worked, but Nowell probably suggested to Alizon that it was not benevolent but malevolent. ‘Do you think that your grandmother might have bewitched the cow?’ ‘Perhaps,’ Alizon might have said. And Nowell later wrote it up: ‘this Examinate verily thinketh, that her sayd Graund-mother did bewitch the sayd Cow to death’.24



20

Demdike could also magically make butter. About two years ago, Alizon informed Nowell, she had been out begging and had returned with a pail of milk. Half an hour later, there was a quarter of a pound of butter in the milk. There was just as much milk as there was before, and her grandmother was in bed all the time.

With such scant evidence, Nowell probed further. He may well have heard or read of stories of revenge by witches for requests refused, insults given, and arguments had. As he was hunting for motives to murder, or at least to injuries, so he may well have asked Alizon whether Demdike had any enemies. Alizon remembered an argument between her grandmother and Richard Baldwin of Wheathead in Pendle Forest several years before, the result of which was that Baldwin denied Demdike access to his land. About four or fi ve days later, around ten o’clock one evening, she recalled, Demdike had asked her to take her outside. Demdike was away for about an hour, before Alizon’s sister, probably Jennet, fetched her in again. The next morning, Alizon heard that a daughter of Richard Baldwin had fallen ill. The child had languished for about a year, and then died. This child was probably Ellena, the daughter of Richard Baldwin, who is recorded as having been buried at Colne on 8 September 1610.25 Nowell asked Alizon the same kind of leading question as he had used previously. He probably received the same sort of answer and wrote it up later in the same form of words: ‘this Examinate ver-ily thinketh, that her said Graund-mother did bewitch the sayd Child to death’.26

We can assume that Alizon’s mother, Elizabeth Device, accompa-nied Alizon to this interrogation, for Potts included a document con-cerning Elizabeth Device’s examination on that day. Nowell extracted little from her, or at least little that was worth reporting, but she did make one statement of signifi cance that led to a physical examination of Demdike. ‘The said Elizabeth Device the Examinate, sayth, that the sayd Elizabeth Sowtherns, alias Demdike, hath had a place on her left side by the space of fourty years, in such sort, as was to be seene at this Examinates Examination taking, at this present time.’27



21

Potts offered his readers no explanation of what this ‘place on her left side’ might have meant, nor did he give any indication that Nowell organised a female search committee to examine her.28 Readers of Protestant demonologies, or of Catholic ones, would however have known straightaway what he was hinting at. Demdike had the mark of the Devil upon her, a visible sign that she had made a pact with the Devil, sealed by the Devil marking the witch either with his teeth or his claws. This suggested that she had been in league with Satan for half of her lifetime. As the Protestant Lambert Daneau had suggested in his Les Sorciers in 1574, it was a mark that the witch

[A]lwayes beareth aboute him, some under theyr eye liddes, others betwene their buttockes, some in the roofe of their mouth, and in other places where it may be hid & concealed from us . . . yet may I say thus more certenly and truely, that there is none of them upon whom he hath not set some note or token of his power & preroga-tive over them: which to thintent [sic] the judges and such as are set in aucthoritie of life and death . . . let them specially provide, that when any of these shalbe con-vented before them, to poulie [polle] and shave them where occasion shall serve, al the body over, least haply the marke may lurke under the heare in any place.29

Within Protestant Geneva from 1537 onwards, the Devil’s mark became part of every witchcraft confession, and by 1548 those sus-pected of witchcraft were being routinely and systematically searched for it. Daneau would no doubt have been familiar with the practice of searching for the Devil’s mark from his time in Protestant Geneva from 1560 to 1562, and again from 1572 to 1581. The Scottish reformer, John Knox, had also learnt not only his theology but also his demonology from Calvinist Geneva. It is thus not surprising that the Devil’s mark, as evidence of the demonic pact, often accompanied by the ‘prick-ing’ of the witch in search of a mark insensible to pain that did not bleed, was a common feature of witchcraft in Reformation Scotland (as it was in parts of Protestant Europe) from the late sixteenth to



22

the early eighteenth century.30 Potts’s intended royal reader would not have missed the silent reference to the satanic compact, for James declared that the Devil ‘gives them his marke upon some secreit place of their bodie, which remains soare unhealed, while his next meeting with them, and thereafter ever insensible, how soever it be nipped or pricked by any, as is dailie proved, to give them a proofe thereby, that as in that doing, hee could hurte and heale them; so all their ill and well doing thereafter, must depende upon him’.31

Alizon was held in custody. Nowell, we can assume, continued to make further inquiries and gather further evidence, for within three days, he had Demdike arrested for questioning and held at Fence, a village in the middle of Pendle Forest, about half way between Read and Demdike’s home at Malkin Tower. Alizon had also implicated two other women, Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, and her daughter Anne Redfearne, and they too were brought in. Their examinations took place on 2 April.

As in the case of Alizon’s ‘confession’, Nowell begins his tell-ing of Demdike’s with her compact with Satan. According to Nowell, some twenty years earlier, near a stonepit in Gouldshey in the Forest of Pendle, Demdike was coming home from begging when she met ‘a Spirit or Devill in the shape of a Boy’,32 wearing a coat half black and half brown. The spirit said to her that, if she would give him her soul, she could have whatever she asked. Demdike asked the spirit his name, to which he replied ‘Tibb’. In hope of gaining what he promised, Demdike gave her soul to the spirit. For the next fi ve or six years afterwards, the spirit appeared to her often, at sunset, asking her what she would have him do. Demdike, wanting nothing, always replied, ‘nothing yet’. Tibb was a shape-shifter, and he crossed the boundaries between the animal and the human. For, about six years after she had made her agreement with him, he appeared one Sunday morning in the likeness of a brown dog. At the time, Demdike was dozing while nursing a small child. Wearing nothing but her smock, she was unable to prevent him sucking blood from under her left arm. She woke up and said, ‘Jesus save my child,’ but had no power



23

to say ‘Jesus save me’. On awakening, the brown dog disappeared from her sight. For the next eight weeks, she reported, she was almost stark raving mad.

A similar story emerges in Nowell’s account of the confession of Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, probably taken on the same day as that of Demdike. According to this, about fourteen or fi fteen years previ-ously, ‘a thing like a Christian man’,33 over the space of four years, came to her many times asking for her soul. In the end, the thing came to her in her own house, in the forest of Pendle, and she consented. ‘The Devill then in the shape of a Man’ told her ‘Thou shalt want nothing; and be revenged of whom thou list’. 34 He told her his name was Fancie, and if she wanted anything, or wanted revenge on any-one, she should call on him.

English readers would have felt quite at home with this account, for they would have been far more likely to read the mark on Demdike as a sign, not (or not only) of a compact with the Devil so much, as a place where she fed her familiar spirit(s). In England, where malefi -cium was more the focus of persecution than heresy, the notion of the demonic pact was less marked; and consequently the belief in the demonic mark as key evidence of it was marginalised. The demonic mark subtly changed its meaning in England as a result of that dis-tinctive feature of English witchcraft, the keeping of familiar spirits.

The keeping and nurturing of familiars in animal or human form became in England one of the decisive features of witchcraft. As Michael Dalton put it in his The Countrey Justice in 1618, witches ordi-narily have a familiar or spirit ‘which appears to them, sometimes in one shape, sometimes in another; as in the shape of a man, woman, boy, dog, cat, foal, hare, rat, toad, &c. And to these their spirits they give names’.35 Witches paid a price for their familiars. They had to be fed bread, milk, animals – even the witch’s own blood. Thus the European Devil’s mark was supplemented in England by the witch’s mark – a super-numinary nipple or teat by which the English witch fed her familiars. Where European witches were demonic lovers, English witches were demonic mothers; or perhaps rather, in the



24

English context, the sexual, the maternal, and the demonic were com-plexly interwoven. Hence the nipple was often sought for in the geni-tal region. In the case of Alice Samuel, one of the witches of Warboys, the gaoler stripped her after her execution, and found on the body of Alice a small lump of fl esh ‘sticking out, as if it had been a teate to the length of halfe an inch’. Initially, the gaoler and his wife intended to say nothing, ‘because it was adjoyning to so secrete a place which was not decent to be seene’. In the end, they decided to show it to the forty people present there. The gaoler’s wife squeezed the teat. From it there came ‘beesenings’, a mixture of yellow milk and water, then a liquid like clear milk, and fi nally blood.36 It was the post-mortem proof of her guilt. Thus, the European search for the sign of the demonic pact was transformed in England into the search for the place from which the familiar was nurtured by the witch’s ‘milk’ (blood), and the mean-ing of the marks became fl uid and ambiguous.

The two ideas continued to run parallel for another hundred years. Thus, for example, in the 1697 edition of Michael Dalton’s The Countrey Justice, judges were encouraged to look for both nipples and marks – the former evidence of their having familiar spirits, the latter of their having made a bargain with the Devil. The witch, he declared,

[H]ath some big or little Teat upon their Body, and in some secret place, where he sucketh them. And besides their sucking, the Devil leaveth other marks upon their body, sometimes like a blew spot or red spot, like a fl ea-biting . . . And these the Devils marks be insensible and being pricked will not bleed, and be often in their secretest parts, and therefore require diligent and care-ful search.37

The marks on Demdike’s body were then either maternal or erotic, or both. This peculiarly English hybrid of the Devil’s mark was no doubt the consequence of the introduction of the European Devil’s mark into England by a Scottish king, who as both James VI of Scotland and James I of England was something of a hybrid himself.



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But what are we to make of these three accounts by Alizon, Demdike, and Chattox of how they became witches? All of them have a similar form – the approach by a spirit in human or animal form, the description of it as a (or the) devil by the texts, the feeding and naming of the spirits (or their telling of their names), the exchange of the soul for the fulfi lment of wishes and desires. Where do we draw the line between the suggestions of the examining magistrate and the stories told by the suspects? That cunning persons had the assistance of spirits that required to be fed may well refl ect popular and not elite beliefs. Think of how John Law linked the appearance of a great black dog standing by him ‘with very fearefull fi rie eyes, great teeth, and a terrible countenance’ with the entrance of Alizon Device into his room moments afterwards.38

Still, far from being by nature evil and therefore essentially demonic, the Lancashire spirits seem to be morally ambivalent, will-ing to do both good and bad, depending on the needs of the witch; or perhaps better, in Rudolf Otto’s terms, they are numinous entities and therefore outside of the moral realm.39 In this way, they were not unlike fairies in the early modern world. They too were morally ambiguous, capable of doing good, but just as likely to do harm. They offered to help, but they could also demand your soul, and parts of your body, in return. Little surprise then that both fairies and famil-iars could be melded into the satanic. What were tutelary spirits for the cunning person were, for the witch hunter, the witch’s demonic pets.40

Moreover, there was no good demonological reason to invent familiars. In fact, that the Devil presented himself in such forms – cats, dogs, mice, toads, weasels, and so on – itself required an explanation, one most often given in the form of Satan’s subtlety, his guile, or his use of lower order demons to satisfy the lower orders of people.41 we might reasonably conclude therefore that familiars were not an invention of the persecuting authorities.

It is of course another question altogether whether those who practised magic did themselves have extraordinary preternatural



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experiences in which they entered into agreements with animal spir-its (or believed that they had). This is a question that we could answer affi rmatively, without having to embrace those kinds of grand theo-ries that would see such experiences as local variants of phenomena as widespread as Native American traditions, Siberian shamanism, or pre-Christian shamanistic visionary traditions more generally.42 Thus, we could argue that the preternatural experiences of familiars that such witches had were themselves highly contextualised, were themselves shaped by the culture of witch beliefs that were incorpo-rated into the experiences, and not indicative of forms of religious experience that transcend their specifi c contexts.43

Perhaps even this is a step too far, at least on the basis of the evidence that we have, and a simpler hypothesis can be put forward, though one not necessarily inconsistent with the former. This would go to its being a part of local (English) magical lore, known by both witches and their clients, that witches made agreements with tutelary spirits. Consequently, regardless of whether they had preternatural experiences of such spirits or not, witches declared their relations with familiars to consolidate their own status within the community as men and women of magical power, to be both feared and respected, hence their willingness, without compulsion, to tell their ‘familiar’ stories.

What is imposed from above and what is derived from below is often opaque, and we must be wary of assuming too readily a distinc-tion between elite and popular beliefs; especially where, in the con-text of witchcraft depositions, the two continually interweave. What is clear however is that familiar spirits and fairies are demonised by the elites. In the 1604 Act, the familiar of popular belief is simply an ‘evil and wicked spirit’. For Nowell then, the familiar is demonic: Alizon’s black dog and the Devil are indistinguishable, Demdike’s shape- shifting boy called Tibb is an evil spirit, Chattox’s ‘thing’ called Fancie is Satan in human form, and only a devil by the name of Dandye would ask James to give him his soul. Alizon, Demdike, James, and Chattox might have been less willing to show their witchcraft creden-tials, had they known that they would be satanically read.



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A Malevolent MatriarchAlizon, we recall, had implicated her grandmother Demdike in the death of a child of Richard Baldwin several years earlier, subsequent to her having been banned from Baldwin’s land. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was probably here that Nowell began his interrogation of Demdike. She did not deny that there was bad blood between her and Richard Baldwin, the owner of a mill at Wheathead. We can assume that Demdike was confused about the date when she and Baldwin fell out, for according to her, in contrast to Alizon who remembered it as several years before, it was in 1611, only a short time before the previ-ous Christmas. At that time, Elizabeth Device, Demdike’s daughter, had been working for the Baldwins at the mill. Demdike believed that she had been underpaid for her work, so she set off, with Alizon lead-ing her, to talk to Baldwin. Shortly before she reached his house, she came across him. Demdike made it clear that she was the victim of a verbal assault: ‘[G]et out of my ground Whores and Witches, I will burne the one of you, and hang the other’. To this attack, Demdike replied, ‘I care not for thee, hang thy selfe’.44

At that point, Nowell left the matter; however, having extracted from Demdike the story of her relationship with Tibb, he later returned to the matter of what happened after she told Baldwin to go and hang himself. ‘At this Examinates going over the next hedge,’ we read in Nowell’s report, ‘the said Spirit or Divell called Tibb, appeared unto this Examinat, and said, Revenge thee of him. To whom, this Examinate sayd againe to the said Spirit. Revenge thee eyther of him, or his. And so the said Spirit vanished out of her sight, and she never saw him since.’45

To the reader, it appears that Demdike is confessing to using the assistance of Tibb to have her revenge on Baldwin or one of his family, a revenge that we are soon to learn from Alizon’s account, resulted in the death of a child of Baldwin. Certainly, it would appear that this is the way that Nowell is interpreting her words; however, we can read them quite differently, not as a confession to sending Tibb to do harm to Baldwin or his family, but as a rejection of the



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revenge offer made by Tibb, and a consequent severing of their rela-tionship. She tells Tibb that she wants nothing to do with it, it’s up to him. Demdike is not denying that Baldwin or his kin might come to harm from Tibb, but rather that, if they had, she had anything to do with it. After this, she never sees Tibb again. So, far from having sold her soul to the Devil, Demdike’s contact with the Spirit is one that can be broken by her when she will not seek the revenge that Tibb wants. What is written up as a confession of malefi cium by Demdike may well have been quite the opposite.

Nowell was, however, able to extract from Demdike some incriminating circumstantial evidence, for she certainly was familiar with the use of image magic to maim or kill somebody:

[T]his Examinate confesseth, and sayth, that the speedi-est way to take a mans life away by Witchcraft, is to make a Picture of Clay, like unto the shape of the person whom they meane to kill, & dry it thorowly: and when they would have them to be ill in any one place more then an other; then take a Thorne or Pinne, and pricke it in that part of the Picture you would so have to be ill: and when they would have any part of the Body to consume away, then take that part of the Picture, and burne it. And when they would have the whole body to consume away, then take the remnant of the sayd Picture, and burne it: and so thereupon by that meanes, the body shall die.46

Demdike knew how image magic worked, but Nowell was not able to extract from her any admission that she herself had used such magic to harm or kill. Additionally, she vehemently denied having ever done so on one occasion when the opportunity arose. Her familiar Tibb had tried to involve her in image magic, but she resisted. Her account of her resistance became part of the evidence that was to be used against Anne Whittle.

In incriminating Anne Whittle, Demdike had to go back eighteen years to mid-summer 1594 when she went to the house of Thomas Redfearne. Thomas Redfearne lived with his wife Anne, and her mother Anne Whittle, nicknamed Chattox, at Greenhead, within



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Pendle Forest, some fi ve miles from Demdike’s home at Malkin Tower. There, within three yards of the east end of the house, she saw Chattox and Anne Redfearne with two pictures made of clay lying by them, and both of them busy making a third. As she went by a black cat appeared; it was Tibb. ‘Turn back and do as they do,’ he said to her. ‘What are they doing?’ she asked. ‘They are making three pictures,’ replied the spirit. ‘Whose pictures are they? she inquired. ‘They are the pictures of Christopher Nutter, Robert Nutter, and Marie, his wife,’ answered Tibb.

The spirit’s attempt to involve her in image magic with Chattox and Anne was rejected by Demdike, much to the fury of Tibb who pushed her into a ditch, spilling the milk that she had been carry-ing in a can. The black cat then disappeared. Soon after, Demdike reported, the spirit reappeared in the form of a hare and went with her a quarter of a mile. It said nothing to her, nor she to it.

Demdike then, far from confessing to any malefi cium, as Roger Nowell and Thomas Potts would have had their readers believe, vehe-mently denied any wrongdoing. She presented herself, however, as having resisted the offers by her familiar spirit to do the Baldwins or the Nutters harm. No doubt she believed her refusal to confess to any crimes, and the paucity of evidence against her, would see her released. She was probably unaware that the Act forbade any consorting with animal familiars. It was perhaps a trap into which Nowell led her. What was evidence to her of her innocence of evildoing – her refusal to succumb to the temptations of Tibb – was evidence to Nowell of her consorting with evil spirits, a crime punishable by death. As a result, she was held in custody. Chattox and Anne Redfearne were arrested along with her. On that day, 2 April 1612, or soon after, as Thomas Potts reports, Roger Nowell had Demdike, Alizon Device, Chattox, and Anne Redfearne committed for trial and he ‘sent them away to the Castle at Lancaster, there to remaine until the comming of the Kinges Majesties Justices of Assise, then to receive their tryall’.47

Roger Nowell was probably dissatisfi ed with the Demdike outcome, having failed to fi nd any evidence of malefi cium against



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Demdike. The charge of covenanting with evil spirits would stick, but he would have known that the courts would not like it. In England, it was the crime of malefi cium, not the heresy of supposed satanic cov-enants that had engaged the interest of the courts, and the charge of consulting, covenanting, entertaining, employing, feeding, or reward-ing evil spirits had yet to be tested at law. He kept looking. No doubt his hopes were high when, on 27 April, he questioned James Device at the house of James Wilsey. On this occasion, Nowell enlisted another justice of the peace, Nicholas Bannester, a near neighbour of his, from the manor house at Altham, As we will see, Bannester, perhaps encouraged by Nowell, was to fi nd witch hunting to his taste.

Though most of Nowell’s ambitions of fi nding more evidence of malefi cium against Demdike from her grandson, James Device, remained unfulfi lled, he did go looking for familiars, and he found them. He led James along a path that went from his encounter with a brown dog about a month before coming from his grandmother’s house, to children ‘Screiking and crying pittifully’48 some two or three nights later around a few hundred feet from the same place about sunset, to fi ve nights later when he heard ‘a foule yelling like unto a great number of Cattes’49 within about four hundred feet of her home. Within three nights after that, James went on to say, ‘about midnight of the same, there came a thing, and lay upon him very heavily about an houre, and went then from him out of his Chamber window, coloured blacke, and about the bignesse of a Hare or Catte’.50 Nowell had clearly tapped into the imaginary, frightening world of the early modern child in which the everyday and the supernatural continu-ally collided, and the one could be easily mistaken for the other. As Reginald Scot put it:

But in our childhood our mothers maids have so terri-fi ed us with an ouglie divell having hornes on his head, fi er in his mouth, and a taile in his breech, eies like a bason, fanges like a dog, clawes like a beare, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we heare one crie Bough [Boo]: and



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they have so fraied us with bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changlings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fi redrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes: in so much as some never feare the divell, but in a darke night.51

He did garner one apparently very strong piece of evidence from James about Demdike’s witchcraft, though surprisingly, Potts did not include it in the evidence he assembled against Demdike; rather we fi nd it amongst the materials assembled by Potts relevant to James’s own trial. There, it functions as an introductory story to his own satanic compact. Does it refl ect Demdike’s use of the bread of the Mass for magical purposes on particularly auspicious days? It may well do, but at the least, it goes to James’s awareness of the belief in the magical power inherent in the Eucharistic host. It also refl ects the way in which Catholic piety and magic intersected in the period.52

According to Nowell’s report, on Maundy Thursday, some two years before, in 1610, Demdike asked James to go to the church and receive the communion. He was told not to eat the bread that the Minister gave him, but to take it away with him and give it to what-ever should meet him on the way home. Notwithstanding her wishes, he did eat the bread. On the way home, he met ‘a thing in the shape of a Hare’ that asked him whether he had brought the bread as his Grandmother had asked him. When he answered ‘No’, ‘the said thing threatned to pull this Examinate in peeces’.53 James crossed himself, and the spirit vanished from his sight.

Again, this could be construed as evidence of Demdike’s involve-ment in magical practices. But, as to evidence of malefi cium, Nowell came up very short. We are left wondering how Demdike would have fared in court. Would evidence of covenanting with familiars and involvement in white magic have been enough to convict her?



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We will never know. Gaols in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England were notoriously cold, damp, overcrowded, unsanitary, and disease-ridden.54 It would not have been uncommon for prisoners to die before trial. Thomas Potts presented the evidence that would have been used against Demdike. But, in his list of the names of those com-mitted to Lancaster Castle, against that of Elizabeth Sowtherns alias Old Demdike, he wrote, ‘Who dyed before shee came to her tryall’.55


Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill

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Transcript of Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill