Jane Southworth, a widow, and Jennet and Ellen Bierley, a grandmother and aunt, all connected to the prominent Catholic Southworth family of Samlesbury Hall, were tried for witchcraft at the Lancaster Assizes on 19 August 1612, in the very same sessions that produced the far more famous Pendle convictions. The accusation against them came from fourteen-year-old Grace Sowerbutts, who testified in vivid and horrifying detail that the three women had transformed into dogs, carried her bodily through the air, forced her toward suicide by drowning, and taken part in child murder and cannibalism at secret sabbats.
The trial judge, Sir Edward Bromley, grew suspicious of the girl's account partway through proceedings and ordered her examined separately by two magistrates away from the courtroom. Under that closer questioning, Grace admitted the entire story had been fabricated, and that a Catholic priest living in hiding, Christopher Southworth, who used the alias Thompson and was himself a relative of the accused women, had coached her specifically to give false testimony against them. The likely motive, historians have suggested, was retaliation for the family's return to outward Protestant conformity, a betrayal of the old faith that the hidden priest wanted punished. Bromley directed the jury to acquit, reportedly telling the three women, 'God hath delivered you beyond expectation.'
The case is widely read today as a piece of internal anti-Catholic manoeuvring within a genuinely Catholic recusant family and community, using the machinery of a witchcraft prosecution as a weapon of intimidation, rather than as a straightforward witch-belief case of the kind that condemned the Pendle defendants tried in those same assizes. Samlesbury Hall's own long-standing ghost lore separately includes a pale female apparition, traditionally named Dorothy Southworth, said to haunt the grounds where a lover of hers was reputedly killed by her own family for the crime of being Protestant; that story is a distinct, later piece of local haunting tradition rather than a record of the 1612 trial itself, though the two have become genuinely entangled in popular retellings of the hall's history over the years.
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