Accusations and counter-accusations spread throughout the small community, often inflamed by the testimony of family members.Īlizon's own nine-year-old sister, Jennet, alleged that their mother, Elizabeth, controlled 'a thing', in the shape of a brown dog called Ball, and that Ball had murdered two men at Elizabeth's bidding. With alarming speed the Lancashire witch-hunt was launched, led by the 62-year-old magistrate Roger Nowell, a staunch Protestant eager to find the works of Satan in the Catholic-ridden villages around Pendle Hill. And as Alizon was known to come from a 'cunning' family - both her mother and grandmother used herbal and magical medicine to heal the sick, find buried treasure, tell fortunes, induce love or exact revenge - it stood to reason that she had bewitched him. To modern ears, it sounds as though he'd had a stroke, but to John and his relatives it looked like witchcraft. He was further terrified, he testified, by the arrival of a great black dog and then of Alizon herself. He managed to drag himself to the nearest alehouse, where he lay in great pain and unable to move. It was clear to him she had no intention of paying, so he refused.Īlizon grew very angry, and shortly afterwards John had a seizure and fell down. The trial was recorded in detail by the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, in his Wonderfull Discoverie Of Witches, first published in 1613.Īccording to Potts, the seeds of suspicion that the area was teeming with witches were sown when a woman called Alizon Device stopped pedlar John Law as he passed her on the road to ask for some pins. Their arraignment in the Lancaster assizes remains England's most notorious witch-trial and today provides a thriving tourist attraction in the villages around Pendle Hill. Though their crimes ranged from theft to murder, what they all had in common was being found guilty of using witchcraft to commit them.

Almost exactly 400 years ago, on Thursday August 20, 1612, ten people - eight women and two men - were hanged at Gallows Hill, on bleak moorland just outside Lancaster.

The Devil by Philip C. Almond