The Pendle witch trials of 1612 stand as the best documented and most consequential witchcraft prosecution in the whole of English history, accounting on their own for a genuinely significant share of all executions for witchcraft carried out anywhere in England between the fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The case began on 21 March 1612 when Alizon Device, from a poor family living near Pendle Hill, asked a pedlar named John Law for pins and, after he refused her request, cursed him directly; Law suffered what looks, in retrospect, unmistakably like a stroke and collapsed on the spot, left partially paralysed. Alizon herself genuinely came to believe she had bewitched him, and confessed as much the moment she was questioned about the encounter.
That single confession, taken down by the local magistrate Roger Nowell of Read Hall, opened an investigation that widened with remarkable speed to take in Alizon's entire family and their long-standing rivals, the Chattox family, two households already carrying a well-established local reputation for cunning-craft and cursing. A meeting of family and associates at Malkin Tower, the Devices' own home, on Good Friday 1612, was construed by Nowell as a genuine witches' sabbath, convened specifically to plot the murder of a gaoler and the blowing-up of Lancaster Castle itself, and the list of the accused grew rapidly to twelve.
Ten of those twelve stood trial at Lancaster Assizes on 18 to 19 August 1612 before Sir Edward Bromley, convicted very largely on the evidence of nine-year-old Jennet Device testifying directly against her own mother, brother and sister, and were hanged the following day at Gallows Hill outside Lancaster. An eleventh, Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, died in Lancaster Gaol before she could even be brought to trial; a twelfth, Alice Grey, was acquitted outright. A related case, that of Jennet Preston of Gisburn, was tried separately at York and is properly considered part of the same wider affair. The trial's own clerk, Thomas Potts, published an official account, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, in 1613, making Pendle by far the best-recorded of all English witch trials, and the very reason the case is still taught and retold four full centuries later.
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