The Pendle Witch Child

It's 1612 and a woman is in a courtroom.

She's accused of killing three men through witchcraft.

She's presented with a confession that she denies.

But then a girl is brought to testify against her.

The girl bursts into tears

as the woman screams at her desperately.

And the woman is removed back to the dungeons.

Once the girl has her audience, she jumps up onto a table,

and calmly denounces the woman as a witch.

She's the woman's own daughter, and she's nine years old.

Jennet Device was a key witness in a trial

that would lead to the execution of 10 people,

including all members of her own family.

But 20 years later, Jennet herself would come to be

standing in the dock, charged with the same offense.

Jennet, a nine year old beggar, was part of a bigger story,

of justices, clerics and physicians, even the King himself.

Someone who would have long been lost to history

has lived on because of her chilling role

in one of the most disturbing witch trials on record.

This is a story about fear, politics and religion,

science and magic.

But, to me, as a poet,

it's also about words and stories,

and just how powerful they can be.

The two trials that shaped the life of this little girl

are emblematic of a much bigger story,

the transition between a pre-modern world

and our supposed age of reason.

And yet our fear of evil has never really gone away.

Neither, some say, has evil itself.

Fear of evil was endemic in England 400 years ago,

when King James I was on the throne.

James was living in fear of Catholic rebellion

in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.

Recently arrived from Scotland,

he was on the throne in a strange land.

And some parts of his new kingdom

were particularly troubling.

Lancashire was a long way from London in many ways.

Described by somebody at the time

as a dark corner of the land,

it had a reputation for disobedience,

full of troublemakers and subversives.

And this area, not far from where I live,

dominated by the strange brooding presence of Pendle Hill,

was almost beyond the back of beyond.

Today it's established an odd niche

by trading on its dark past.

In 1612 the nine-year-old Jennet Device

lived in obscurity at her grandmother's house, Malkin Tower.

Malkin Tower.

It sounds grand, but it really wasn't.

Malkin was actually a 17th century word

meaning slattern or slut

and it was still being used in these parts

in the 20th century.

The house was also, and even less grandly,

referred to as Mocking Tower,

and according to some people,

and not to put too fine a point on it,

mocking is a local word for shit.

Nobody knows for sure where the house would have stood,

but recent research suggests it may have been on this site.

Jennet and her family survived mainly by begging,

and by doing odd jobs for neighbors.

But the family did have one other source of income,

and I suppose a kind of power.

Jennet's grandmother was well-known locally

as a cunning woman.

And everyone knew her as Old Demdike.

The role of the cunning woman

is an incredibly valuable one,

especially for poor people

who don't have recourse, say, to doctors.

And there's all sorts of modern roles rolled up into one,

social worker and policewoman, and doctor,

all those things that give people

a kind of security about their otherwise anxious lives.

But it's rather an ambiguous role

because to be a cunning woman

the authorities would call it witchcraft really.

So cunning women can get into trouble with the law

if they fall out with their clients.

To Jennet and her family, it was a fact of life

that a person might have the power to heal

or harm through the use of charms, or spells.

To them it wasn't mumbo-jumbo.

It was real.

It happened.

Witches are people who do bad things,

cunning women are people who do good things.

Cunning women cure you and find your lost stuff.

Witches steal stuff from you and make you sick or kill you.

At Malkin Tower, Jennet lived with her grandmother,

her mother Elizabeth,

and her elder sister and brother, Alizon and James.

There were no adult men.

Elizabeth's husband had died 11 years earlier

and nine-year-old Jennet wasn't his child.

She grew up knowing that she was the runt of the litter

and the bastard daughter of the house.

I think that would have made her feel

isolated and different.

Even cursed.

In the later investigations, it became clear

that Jennet's world was populated by demons.

Jennet's grandmother was not the only cunning woman

in the neighborhood.

Old Chattox, the head of a nearby household,

was a rival for her business,

and the Devices believed her to be a witch.

For some years, Elizabeth's husband

had been making payments of oatmeal to Chattox.

The year the payment was not made, he died.

At most times in history,

such family squabbles would have passed by unnoticed.

But these weren't usual times.

England around 1600 is a country

in the grip of conversion experience.

Officially it had turned Protestant

about 40 years before,

but it had taken two generations for that really to sink in.

So round about 1600 a lot of the English are in the grip

of enthusiastic Protestantism for the first time.

And now that England was Protestant,

Catholics were increasingly feared as seditious and evil.

The idea that there are people out in Lancashire

who are adhering to old religious ways

can be transferred quite easily

to the idea that these people

are actually dangerous dissenters who need to be suppressed.

To devout English Protestants,

the Bible brackets idolaters, heathens, sorcerers together.

And so Catholicism, which is itself to Protestants

a demonic religion,

can come to look very closely related to witchcraft.

These were nervy, apprehensive times at court

and throughout the country.

And in that climate of fear,

it didn't take much to arouse suspicion.

On March 18th, 1612, Jennet's teenage sister, Alizon Device,

was out and about, walking down a lane.

Along the way, she met a peddler.

And being a beggar, she asked the peddler for some pins,

but he wouldn't open his pack and he walked on.

For Alizon, this would have been an everyday experience.

Probably several times a week,

people would brush past her, or ignore her.

And she probably responded to their rudeness

by cursing them.

On March 18th, she cursed the peddler.

And the curse seemed to work because he fell to the floor,

and unable to speak or move

he was eventually carried to a local inn.

And Alizon was terrified

because she knew she had bewitched him.

She rushed to his bedside and begged for his forgiveness.

From the legal records, we have a very detailed description

of the peddler's condition following his collapse.

"His head is drawn awry, his eyes and face deformed,

"his speech not well to be understood,

"his arms lame, especially the left side."

What would you say that was a description of?

I think there's very little doubt that those symptoms

reflect the fact that he has had a stroke.

The face being awry, the left arm not working,

I mean something coming on that suddenly

really can only be a stroke.

Alizon seemed convinced that she had caused this stroke

through bewitching him,

and blamed herself and agonized over it.

Is there any logic in that?

From the description, it does sound as though

the two events were significantly linked.

Looking at it as a scientist, yes, the curse,

causing him to become very upset,

and to put the blood pressure up,

and to cause him to have a stroke.

Exactly the same situation these days could happen

as a result of road rage, or an argument,

or some devastating piece of medical information

being given to somebody,

can result in people having a stroke.

What's so striking for me is that Alizon was in no doubt

that she'd nearly killed a man and perhaps she really had.

It was her fear and her own contrition

that would directly lead to her downfall

and that of all her family as well.

The consequences of Alizon's curse spiraled out of control

when the peddler's outraged son reported the incident

to an ambitious local magistrate, Roger Nowell.

England has Justices of the Peace

dotted all over the place

and they are the men who dispense the law.

Some of them are not very good, some of them are very lazy,

some of them are extremely zealous indeed.

Roger Nowell is one of those zealous types.

He's ambitious, he's a Protestant,

and he sees that actually his route to success