Lancaster Castle served as both prison and courthouse for the entire 1612 Lancashire witch trials, a dual role that placed it at the very centre of one of the most notorious episodes in English legal history. The twelve people accused in the Pendle case, along with the three separate Samlesbury women tried in the very same sessions, were all held together in the castle's own dungeons, in conditions contemporary accounts describe as genuinely filthy and severely overcrowded, for months before the assizes finally opened on 18 August 1612 under the presiding judges Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, died within the castle gaol itself before she could ever actually be brought to trial alongside the rest of her own accused family.
Ten of those tried in the Pendle case were ultimately convicted and hanged at Gallows Hill, standing just outside the castle walls, on 20 August 1612: Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Anne Whittle, known as Chattox, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock and Jane Bulcock, along with Isobel Robey, who was tried in the very same sessions on a separate and entirely unrelated accusation originating from Windle.
The three Samlesbury women, Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley and Ellen Bierley, tried in the same assizes on a quite different and, as it later emerged, ultimately fabricated accusation, were acquitted outright and walked free from the very same castle that had condemned the other ten to death. The castle itself continued serving as a working prison right up until 2011, and it later held other, considerably less well-documented witch trials over the decades that followed, giving Lancaster Castle a genuine, credible claim to having tried and executed more people for witchcraft than any other single English building in the nation's history.
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