Jennet Device was around nine years old at the time of the Pendle witch trials in 1612, and it was her testimony, given as the prosecution's chief witness, that ultimately convicted her own mother Elizabeth, her brother James, and her sister Alizon, among several others caught up in the same case. English law at the time did not normally permit child evidence to be heard in criminal trials at all, but the presiding judge, Sir Edward Bromley, made a deliberate exception for her, and Jennet's account of seeing familiar spirits and attending the Malkin Tower gathering proved decisive in securing several of the eventual convictions. Her own mother had to be forcibly removed from the courtroom after cursing and screaming directly at her as she gave evidence against her own family.
Jennet's later life is far more obscure than her dramatic role in the events of 1612. Court records suggest that a woman of the same name was herself brought before the Lancaster assizes in 1634, more than twenty years later, this time as one of the accused in a further Lancashire witchcraft panic, apparently on evidence given by a child witness whose own testimony had been modelled, whether deliberately or not, on Jennet's earlier example.
That later case eventually collapsed after the supposed child witness admitted to fabricating his entire story, but Jennet appears to have remained in Lancaster Gaol regardless of the collapse, and is generally believed by historians to have died there, an unwitting victim, by one telling, of exactly the kind of prosecution she herself had helped bring about as a nine-year-old child more than two decades earlier.
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