Pendle Hill Witches
The chief witness against the Pendle accused was Jennet Device, who was 9 years old. Her evidence helped convict her own mother, brother, and sister. Nine of the accused were hanged together at Lancaster on August 20, 1612.
Field Guide Entry
The trials
Twelve people from the country around Pendle Hill were accused of witchcraft in 1612. Ten were executed. Nine of them were hanged at Lancaster on August 20 after trials at the summer assizes; one, Jennet Preston, had already been tried and hanged at York. One of the accused died in prison before the trial and one was acquitted.
The child witness
Jennet Device was 9. In an ordinary English capital trial a child that young could not have given evidence at all. Witchcraft prosecutions were treated as the exception, on reasoning that ran back to James I's own book on the subject, and so she was allowed to testify.
She gave evidence against her mother Elizabeth, her brother James, and her sister Alizon. Her mother had to be taken out of the courtroom.
The book
Thomas Potts, a clerk of the court, published his account in 1613 as The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. It is the reason this case is documented in far more detail than most English witch trials, and it is also a partisan document, written up for a king with a stated interest in the subject. Almost everything anyone knows about Pendle passes through it.
What is not in the record
Malkin Tower, where the accused were said to have met on Good Friday, has never been located. Sites have been proposed, including a farmhouse uncovered in 2011, and none has been accepted.
The hill itself does not appear in the trial as a place where anything happened. It became the symbol of the case afterward.
Visiting Information
Pendle Hill is open access land and free to walk. Most routes start from the car park at Barley, which has a cafe and toilets and fills early on clear weekends. The summit is marked by a trig point known as Big End, and the round trip takes most walkers about 2 hours.
The Pendle Sculpture Trail in Aitken Wood is a separate and much shorter walk from the same car park, roughly 20 minutes each way, with about 25 carved and cast pieces set through the woodland.
The villages named in the trial record, among them Barley, Newchurch in Pendle, and Roughlee, sit within a few minutes of each other by road.
The weather on the hill turns quickly and the top is exposed, with no shelter and no water once you leave the village.
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