Elizabeth Device was the daughter of Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, and mother to Alizon, James and Jennet Device, placing her at the very centre of the family whose troubles would eventually engulf the entire Pendle district in 1612. After her daughter Alizon's arrest and confession in March of that year drew the whole family into Roger Nowell's widening investigation, it was Elizabeth herself who organised a gathering of family and associates at Malkin Tower on Good Friday, 10 April 1612, a meeting for which her son James stole a neighbour's sheep specifically to provide food for everyone attending.
That gathering, an ordinary enough family meal by any innocent reading of the evidence, was treated by the magistrate Roger Nowell as nothing less than a witches' sabbath, deliberately convened to plot both murder and the destruction of Lancaster Castle itself, and it became the central piece of evidence used to widen the entire case from a local family dispute into a mass prosecution involving ten eventual executions.
Elizabeth herself was tried at Lancaster Assizes in August 1612, convicted very largely on the testimony of her own nine-year-old daughter Jennet, a child who had, by every indication, been carefully coached to give evidence against her own mother and siblings in open court. Contemporary accounts record that Elizabeth had to be forcibly removed from the courtroom after cursing and screaming directly at Jennet as the girl testified against her, a mother's raw fury at watching her own child condemn her captured, however briefly, in the surviving record. She was hanged at Gallows Hill outside Lancaster on 20 August 1612, one of the ten people put to death in the same round of trials her own family gathering had helped set in motion.
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