Alice Nutter does not fit the pattern of the other Pendle witches. Where the Device and Whittle families accused alongside her were poor and already locally notorious as cunning-folk before 1612 ever began, Nutter came from a comparatively wealthy, land-owning Catholic recusant family, a background that sets her apart from almost every other name attached to the case. How she came to be named at all remains genuinely unclear. Her connection to the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower that April is uncertain, and one persistent theory holds that she was simply travelling through the area, perhaps on her way to an illegal Catholic Mass, when she was placed there largely on the strength of testimony from the child witness Jennet Device, with little else ever offered to tie her more directly to the rest of the accused.
What makes her case still more striking is her silence. Unlike most of her co-accused, who spoke at length in their own defence, often to little effect, Nutter said almost nothing at her trial. Some later writers have read that silence as deliberate, a calculated choice to protect tenants or associates who could have supplied her with an alibi only at the cost of exposing their own illegal Catholic practice, a trade she may have judged not worth making even to save her own life. She was convicted regardless, and hanged at Gallows Hill outside Lancaster on 20 August 1612, alongside the others condemned in the same trial.
Her family has traditionally been linked to Roughlee Old Hall, though more recent research has cast doubt on whether Alice herself actually lived there, pointing instead to a nearby house on the Crowtrees estate as the more likely family home. A statue commemorating her now stands in Roughlee village. Among the ten people executed after the Pendle trials, Nutter remains the one whose documented wealth, faith and near-total silence at trial sit most uneasily with the popular image of the poor, quarrelling cunning-woman that the case as a whole is usually remembered for.
Comments