In this episode, Brittany from History, Bitches! and I teamed up again to create a second Halloween-themed episode on Witches and Witchcraft. A history of witchcraft scares and trials, as well as profiling some of the earliest witchcraft trials.
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Episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to a very special, ghoulish spooky edition of the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko. And for the second time this week, this is an episode jointly produced with me and Brittany of History, Bitches!. Our first episode was on ghosts, and this one is on another Halloween theme – Witches and Witchcraft. So I really hope you enjoy the show. It’s mostly a conversation where we share the research that we did on witches and witchcraft.
And just a couple of reminders first, this podcast is brought to you by Bigworld Tours. So I have to give a plug for my company that I’m starting in partnership with a good friend of mine. We’re designing tours that allow you to travel and dive into your passions and interests through travel. So our first tour is England at the end of April 2016. For nine days, we’re calling it Cathedrals and Choirs, and we’re focusing on the musical history of the English choral tradition, visiting and hearing music in places like King’s College, Cambridge, Bath, and Winchester. It’s going to be an amazing trip! And I really hope you will consider coming. To learn more, you can go to bigworld.com. That’s www.bigworld.com. Big world, travel your passions.
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So hi, everybody! This is Heather from the Renaissance English History Podcast. And I’m here with a very special guest.
Brittany:
Oh, you’re so sweet.
Heather:
You’re special. You’re very special.
Brittany:
Thank you. Hi, guys, my name is Brittany and I am the host of the podcast History, Bitches! And hopefully, you remember me because you listened to our previous podcast on ghosts. So I’m back–
Heather:
And hopefully, they’ll remember me if they were History, Bitches!
Brittany:
Absolutely. And so we’re back for round two. And today we’re going to be covering witches.
Heather:
Witches, yeah! So as we get started, I guess how this is going to go for people is we’re going to have a conversation about witchcraft. Because we’re in October, and it’s Halloween, and we just did ghosts, and so witches are the next logical place.
So we’re going to give a little bit of a background of witchcraft and how the fear of witches got started, and kind of snowballed into these witchcraft trials that of course, in the US, we had Salem, but we’re going to talk about witchcraft trials mostly in England and in Ireland. So we’re going to give a little bit of a background on witchcraft in general, and then we’re each going to talk about a couple of witches that we found. Then we’re going to talk about pretty much the most famous witchcraft trial in English history – the Pendle Witches from 1612. So does that sound right, Brittany?
Brittany:
Yeah, that sounds absolutely perfect. Are there owls in the background?
Heather:
It sounds like it doesn’t it?
Brittany:
And this is perfect.
Heather:
I’m sitting outside because my daughter’s up and nobody wants to hear my daughter talking in the background. So you get owls instead, which really adds to the ambiance, and maybe people can listen to this in the dark as well.
Brittany:
I was a little spooked out. And I’m sitting in my office, and it’s daylight outside and I’m figuring out where that noise was coming from. Now that’s perfect. That’s like just the right amount of ambiance. I love it.
Heather:
Very cool. Yeah, when we’re talking about witchcraft, I think it’s kind of ironic that it’s really in the Renaissance, that there’s like this emphasis on learning than ever before. And with that came this renewed interest in witchcraft and persecuting witches. I just think it’s interesting that as you come into a more modern period, suddenly witchcraft becomes a thing that people are afraid of. And there’s witch hunts. And apparently, part of that is because of the printing press. Some of the earliest books that were printed were biblical tracts and Bibles, which promoted the ideas about witches and witchcraft and led to a kind of renewed interest in witch hunts.
And before the Renaissance, it was kind of accepted that there could be sort of healing wise women who administered potions to cure illnesses. And sometimes they might say an incantation over you, and that was just kind of accepted in village life, when these witches were often considered good. But one of the things that’s interesting is, with the Black Death, there was this huge catastrophe where a third of the population dies. There wasn’t any place to put blame with that. It’s before the scientific revolutions, before people have any kind of concept of germs or anything like that. You just have entire villages wiped out, and how do you try and explain that? People started looking towards witches as a way to sort of explain when things like the Black Death happened.
Anger and confusion had to be directed somewhere, and witches were this really obvious place to turn. When you have things like crops failing, or children dying, or any kind of tragic act like that happening, witches are the obvious people to blame. When crops went bad, it just was devastating to people. It’s not like people had insurance for that kind of stuff. So if you lost your crop, or if your house burned down, it was just devastating. You had to have a place to really kind of place blame to try and understand it for yourself.
So it was kind of an obvious place then to look and say, “Well, maybe it was this particular person who might not be a really popular part of our community, maybe she’s seen talking to herself sometimes, and maybe she’s the one who did it.” I think it’s interesting though, that there were a lot more witch hunts and executions in mainland Europe and in Scotland. In England, England was pretty mild by comparison to the witch hunts on the continent.
Interestingly with witches, of course, it was women who are most often accused of being witches. And in the Elizabethan witchcraft trial, I think there were 270 witchcraft trials, and 247 of them were women, and only 23 were men. So this was largely a phenomenon that was a woman-centric sort of thing. You were at risk if you were a woman. There’s a couple of things that made women at risk as well. That would be if they were maybe old, or poor, or unprotected, if they didn’t have the protection of their families, and also if they would have had animals that would maybe be considered their familiars.
It’s really sad, because if you look at people, like maybe old widows who don’t have any family around them, and they would want to have animals because dogs make great friends. So why wouldn’t you want to have cat and dogs like that? That could then come back and, and make people think that you were a witch.
One of the things that I just am really interested in is the importance of the role of community with witches. Like the role of having a community for protection. I think it’s interesting that people didn’t travel much in this time. There’s always like this stereotype that people didn’t go further than a couple miles from their house and you didn’t really move and pick up roots and start in new places. A lot of that was because it was so important to have this community that you grew up with that knew you. If you were at all different, if you were a woman who you might now be considered like a free spirit, or somebody who’s just unique at the Renaissance England and pre-Enlightenment period, if something happened, and you were this kind of woman, you might be at risk of being blamed.
As somebody who’s always been sort of doing my own thing, and being somebody unique, that kind of touches home to me, because I just think it’d be really hard to try and be myself back then, if you’re suddenly then are accused of witchcraft when something bad happens. So yeah, it’s really sad to think about some of these people who were targeted.
And it is interesting though, that in like I said, in England, women weren’t usually killed for witchcraft and burned at the stake like in other countries. A lot of times maybe they’d be bullied in their village, but they weren’t necessarily killed in the same rates and burned at the stake in the same rates as in other countries. And then, of course, as the Enlightenment thoughts spread gradually, the fear of witches subsided because suddenly there were scientific reasons behind things like crop failures and diseases and things like that.
So looking at Renaissance England, Henry VIII had passed a Witchcraft Act in 1542 and that had defined witchcraft as a felony, which was a crime that was punishable by death and forfeiting your goods. And it laid out the law of defining a witch and the actions included were:
“… use devise practise or exercise, or cause to be devysed practised or exercised, any Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries to thentent to fynde money or treasure or to waste consume or destroy any persone in his bodie membres, or to pvoke [provoke] any persone to unlawfull love, or for any other unlawfull intente or purpose …”
I thought that was interesting, because as Henry VIII was trying to get rid of his second wife Anne Boleyn, there were a lot of rumors that were spread that she was a witch, and she had bewitched him, and that was something that he had been worried about. I think it’s interesting that in his Witchcraft Act, he said “to provoke any person to unlawful love or for any other unlawful intent.” So maybe he was in part thinking about Anne bewitching him, to have him fall in love with her at that point.
Something else that’s interesting is up until this point for laws like this, they called this law benefit of clergy where if you could read any verse from the Bible, you were rescued from being hanged. So a lot of clergy who could read would be able to read a verse from the Bible, and that would save their lives. That was called “benefit of clergy”. These Witchcraft Act took out benefit of clergy. So that was kind of a really big deal too, so it meant that even if you were in the clergy, even if you were educated, that wasn’t going to save you, which it had before.
Then Queen Elizabeth passed another witchcraft act 20 years later, it was similar to Henry’s, but it was actually slightly less strict, and it only demanded the death penalty where harm had been caused. If you did something, a lesser offense that didn’t have harm, it was just punished through imprisonment. So yeah, it also took out benefit of clergy as well. So that’s kind of the backdrop of what was going on with witchcraft and the laws around witchcraft at the time.
Dame Alice Kyteler
Heather:
So now we’re going to talk about some early famous witches. And the first one is Dame Alice Kyteler, and she was actually said to be the earliest person accused and condemned for witchcraft in Ireland. She was born around 1280. And her trials, all the accusations against her took place in the mid 1320’s. And she had fled the country so she wasn’t actually burned for witchcraft. But her servant was flogged and burned to death at the stake in 1324. So Alice had been born into a Flemish family of merchants in Ireland, and she was married four times
And early on at one point in 1302, she and her second husband were actually briefly accused of killing her first husband, but the charges didn’t stick. And she had a lot of wealth and she was also involved in money lending, which at the time, that was considered really not a cool thing to be doing. It was something like taking advantage of people if you were in money lending and charging interest, it wasn’t something that was smiled on and so I think there might have been a lot of resentment towards her in the community as well.
Her fourth husband, he got ill, he got sick in 1325. He expressed the suspicion that he was being poisoned. After his death, his children and those of her previous three husbands all got together, and they accused her of using poison and sorcery against their father, and favoring her firstborn son, William Outlaw.
It’s interesting that as soon as she became unprotected when her husband died, suddenly everybody comes out, and seems to come out at once, and say she’s favoring her firstborn son, and she’s a sorceress. Maybe she did, they did really think she was a witch, maybe they were just trying to get even for perceived slights throughout the years. That was kind of the weapon that they pulled out. She was also accused of denying the faith of Christ in the church and cutting up animals to sacrifice to demons, and holding secret meetings in churches to perform black magic, and using sorcery and possession of a familiar, and the murder of her husbands.
Also she’s interesting. She’s the first person ever accused of having sexual relations with a demon, with an incubus, which is something that later on would come out a lot. She was the first person that was accused of that. And so there was all this drama with her. The local bishop, he was obsessed with the laws of church and morality. And when the case was first presented, he jumped on it to make a statement about witchcraft. And Alice then, she still had some powerful friends. So she called on their assistance and the bishop actually was sent to jail. Then he was released, and he had this vendetta. There was all the kind of back and forth, and in the end, she left the country, she fled, probably to England, and she doesn’t appear in the records anywhere else after that.
So nobody really knows what happened to her. But the bishop continued to pursue the people who were associated with her, and like I said, her servant was flogged and burned at the stake. And the favored son, William Outlaw was also accused of heresy, usury, perjury, and adultery, and he recanted and was ordered to hear mass, three masses a year, and to feed the poor.
And so Alice’s case is significant. It was one of the earliest European witchcraft trials. And like I said, it was also the first time of which it was claimed that a witch had sexual relations with an incubus. So that’s an interesting theme.
Brittany:
I find that story just so horrifying, because he was accused by her children and knowing sort of what the punishment could potentially be. You said her servant was flogged and burned at the stake. I can’t imagine putting your own mother in a situation where that could be her fate.
Heather:
Yeah, you just really have to wonder what their Christmas dinner was like.
Brittany:
Christmas dinner is just dinner around the table in general.
Heather:
Right? Like “Hey, kids. Yeah, you just told the bishop I’m a witch, thanks.”
Brittany:
“And accused me of having sex with an incubus.”
Heather:
I know, it’s terrible. I just really wonder what the dynamics are. And I think it’s so interesting that all happened as soon as her husband died then, I could see maybe his kids coming out and saying she poisoned him, but then the other three husbands’ children all coming out at once? And I just I really wonder what was going on? Did she not give them money when they wanted?
Brittany:
And even her children by birth, correct?
Heather:
Some of them yeah, some of them were.
Brittany:
Okay. I can understand the stepchild angle, but if this is your biological mother, wow, you might need to go to therapy.
Heather:
Well, yeah, I think probably, but you’re going to talk about that later with the Pendle Witches too. Look foreshadowing. So another witch that I think is really interesting, there’s a dog barking, you see the ambiance here? I’m doing this all on purpose for you guys. I hope people enjoy that.
Mother Shipton (Ursula Southeil)
Heather:
So another famous one was Mother Shipton and her name is actually Ursula Southeil. She was born in 1488 in a cave in Yorkshire, and so it’s now called Mother Shipton’s Cave. Her mother had been considered a witch as well. So her own mother had fled the town and given birth to her daughter in this, can you hear that dog barking?
Brittany:
Yeah.
Heather:
Okay, should we just wait for–
Brittany:
No, it’s somebody’s familiar.
Heather:
What? Somebody’s familiar? (Laugh) Awesome. All right, well, maybe he’ll stop. So sorry if people are bothered by this, so I’ll just start.
Another famous which that I found was actually the daughter of a witch. And they actually fit every criteria of witches in the Middle Ages. And so her name was Ursula Southeil. She was born in 1488 in a cave in Yorkshire, which is now called Mother Shipton’s Cave. That’s because she became known as Mother Shipton, clever. So her own mother was accused of being a witch and fled the town to give birth to her daughter in the cave. She actually died during the baby’s birth, during Ursula’s birth. But Ursula survived and was raised by a neighbor.
So that right there is just so tragic because I’ve been through childbirth and I can’t imagine. Like you’re so ostracized from the community, and you have to go give birth in a cave and you die giving birth to your child. And like who knows? You’re probably worried what’s going to happen to your child as well. And it’s just this whole calling people “witches” and ostracizing them just breaks my heart.
But anyway, so Ursula is rescued by a neighbor and she’s raised by this neighbor and she becomes known as Mother Shipton because she marries Toby Shipton, a local carpenter, near York in 1512.
She became a soothsayer and a prophet. And the first publication of her prophecies didn’t appear until 1641, which is almost 80 years after her death. And in 1684, there was another edition of her prophecies that was published, and it gives a lot of details about her life. It claims that she was really hideously ugly. So that’s interesting, and she married Toby Shipton, and she made predictions all through her life.
And interestingly, the diary of Samuel Pepys records that while the royal family were serving the damage to London during the Great Fire of London, they were actually heard talking about Mother Shipton’s prophecy of the fire. So even the royal family knew about Mother Shipton and that she had perhaps prophesized this fire that was going to come.
The cave where she was born, which is now known as Mother Shipton’s Cave, opened as a visitor attraction in 1613. It’s one of England’s oldest tourist attractions.
Really, not very much is known about who she was, or even what she said. But she became this legend whose name was linked with all kinds of tragedies and unexplainable events all over the world. So in the UK, and Australia, and in North America, all the way through the 19th century, people would talk about “Oh, that happened, because Mother Shipton said.” And the Victorians became really obsessed with her as well, and started reprinting all of her stuff, all of her different prophecies that she supposedly said. And so that’s why it’s kind of even hard to know what exactly she did say, because there’s been so many printings of her books, and each person adds a little bit more.
But it’s interesting that she was one of these witches that was just kind of part of the village, she was never charged with witchcraft. Even though her mother had been ostracized from the community, she was still able to be part of it, and to stay safe. She was more considered to be kind of one of the good kinds of wise women that would tell your fortune, and maybe heal you if she could, and those kinds of women had existed through the generations. So she was sort of an example of that.
Wise Wife of Keith (Agnes Sampson)
Brittany:
So I’m gonna be talking about a purported witch called Agnes Sampson, and like Mother Shipton, she was initially considered to be a wise woman, one of these sorts of outlier than the community that was accepted because her presence was a necessity. She knew things about taking a woman through childbirth, or how to heal the sick, or things like that. So she was a Scottish healer, and she was known as the “Wise Wife of Keith”. But unfortunately, unlike Mother Shipton, the community turned pretty quickly on her. And so like I said, initially, she had acted as a midwife.
And her story sort of picks up in the spring of 1590. When James VI was returning from Oslo after marrying Anne of Denmark, and on that particular voyage, their ship was really beset by storms. And Danish witches were initially blamed and several women in Denmark were burned as witches, because they were held responsible for this really terrible storm that had followed the wedding party back to England. Now, when James heard about this, he decided that maybe it would be a good idea to set up his own tribunal now that he was back in the UK, to look for maybe English or Scottish witches that have also played a part in the storm.
And what I find really interesting about this particular set of witch trials is that many of the accused witches were actually questioned by James himself. He was very hands-on in terms of these witch trials. And he actually went on to write a book about what you’d call Daemonologie. But the particular witch trial that Agnes Sampson got caught up in was the North Berwick witch trials. They ran for two years between 1590 which is sort of that start date when James was returning from marrying Anne of Denmark to 1592, and implicated 70 people.
Initially, the Scottish witches were linked to the storms by this maid named Gillis Duncan. She worked for a man named David Seaton and she had been forced into making a confession under torture. During her confession, she also implicated other people in being involved in this storm that led to the ship caught in the storm, and one of the women that she named, of course, was Agnes Sampson.
The story that is sort of carried down through history is that initially, sorry, my little familiar is clawing my leg right now. Sorry, I have to shoo her away. But the story I was told is that Agnes initially, absolutely denied these charges, that she attended the witches’ coven on Halloween night that created the storm, but she was tortured, and after being tortured, and after being denied sleep, and these other horrible things that were inflicted on this poor woman, she confessed.
And initially, the king wasn’t quite sure about her confession. He thought that maybe they were brought on by this torture and sleep deprivation. But apparently, she said something in her last confession that convinced James of her guilt. And she was taken to the scaffold on Castlehill, where she was garroted, and that means she was strangled. And then she was burnt at the stake.
One of the things that makes her trial really unique is that we have a lot of information about it, because the Edinburgh Burgh treasurer itemize how much it was to have her execution, which took place on the 16th day of January 1591. When all is said and done, her execution costs six pounds, eight shillings and 10 ducats, I think, is that what that d stands?
Heather:
Yeah, yeah.
That’s what I thought. Ducat. And so that’s really terrible. And then I want to say that her ghost is still sort of rolling around, her spirit is a bit restless, because of all of the terrible things that happened to her. So she’s supposed to haunt the Palace of Holyroodhouse on the Royal Mile. And apparently her naked ghost, she’s been stripped and tortured, sort of roamed back and forth, sort of seeking justice. So I thought that was pretty sad. Yeah, pretty sad and pretty scary.
Heather:
Yeah, both, that is. I think it’s interesting that James was so interested in witches and also making sure that he got it right kind of thing. He seems very scientific about it, really interested in wanting to make sure that he did the questioning himself sometimes and stuff like that, right?
Brittany:
Yeah. But there’s something that also doesn’t sort of sit right with me. I think there’s an element of wanting to be right. But there’s also sort of a dangerous sort of obsession there, that just sort of lends a real spookiness to the whole thing, but he was so hands-on. And it could be because even people’s lives were at stake, but I also get something a bit more sinister in that as well.
Heather:
Yeah. Like it was just kind of his pet project.
Brittany:
Exactly. He wrote a book on it.
Heather:
Right, right. And people didn’t really write books as much. Yeah, interesting.
Pendle witches
Heather:
So just a couple of years after that, like 20 years after that was actually one of the most famous witchcraft trials in England. And the executions from that trial actually made up like 2% of England’s total witchcraft execution.
Brittany:
I saw that. That statistic gets blew my mind.
Heather:
Yeah. And it reminds me so much to being sort of a similar story to Salem in the US, where there was different families and these sort of deep-seated resentments that all came kind of spewing out at once and turning into this giant witchcraft mess. And, yeah, it’s really interesting to look at. So we’re going to be talking about that together, because it is so interesting.
So six of the witches who were part of this came from two families, and each of those families was headed up by a woman in her 80’s. Just to set the back, kind of backdrop of this is, the outbreak occurred in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire. It was an area known as being really wild and lawless. There had been an abbey nearby in Whalley which was dissolved in 1537, and the abbot had been executed. Maybe despite or maybe even because of this, the area remained really strongly Catholic.
Of course, in Elizabeth’s reign, Protestantism was becoming the victorious religion, and many people around the area still can continue to celebrate the mass in secret. A lot of the names on the lists of sort of recusant Catholics were from this area. So it was an area that was kind of lawless, was kind of doing its own thing, and was sort of already just saying to the government, “We’re doing our own thing and stay out.”
And also, a year after James acceded to the English throne, he enacted another law about witchcraft, because he was so obsessed, which impose the death penalty in cases where it was proven that harm had been caused through the use of magic, or if corpses had been examined for magical purposes. So that’s kind of sort of the backdrop of what was going on at this time.
So in early 1612, every justice of the peace in Lancashire was ordered to make a list of all of the recusant Catholics in their district. And recusant Catholics were people who absolutely refused to go to any Church of England service, so they wouldn’t even go, and some people would go and cross their fingers behind their backs and things like that, if they didn’t believe what the vicar was saying. But the recusants wouldn’t even go, and they would often pay fines. And so they were just like, “Yeah, we’re officially not doing this.”
And so there was sort of this kind of background of investigating all of these nonconformists that the justice of peace for Pendle, Roger Nowell, he made an investigation into the family of John Law. John Law was a peddler who claimed to have been injured by a witch. And a lot of those who became involved in the trial actually did sort of consider themselves witches. But in the way that Mother Shipton had been a witch, sort of like a wise women who maybe uttered incantations and helped cure sicknesses, and were accepted part of the village, and had been for a long time.
And the judges who were charged with hearing the evidence and running the trial, they’re actually funny ones too. They kind of found themselves in a pickle, because one of them was hoping for a promotion, and the other one had been recently accused of a miscarriage of justice in York, which had resulted in a woman being hanged for witchcraft that shouldn’t have actually happened. And so there was a lot of publicity around what was being investigated here, and around these trials. And also because it was so big, they knew that the king was going to be watching.
So the events leading up to the trial were simple enough. One of the matriarchs, her name was Elizabeth Southerns, or Demdike, Elizabeth Demdike, had been she’d been regarded as a witch for like 50 years. But the events that sort of triggered the investigation happened in the spring of 1612, when her granddaughter Alizon Device met John Law, the peddler and asked him for some pins. Metal pins at the time were handmade and really expensive. And they were often used for magical purposes, and perhaps for healing, or maybe also for sort of love spells. And so John Law was reluctant to sell these pins to her. Maybe he was worried about what she was going to do with them. Maybe he just didn’t want to open up his peddler pack for such a small transaction, for such a small sale. Or maybe she was begging for them, which is what his son had said, but for whatever reason, he didn’t sell or give them to her.
And then a few minutes after they met Alizon saw Law stumble and fall, and some people think that he might have had a stroke but he managed to get up, and make it to a nearby inn, and he never accused her. But Alizon herself seems to think that she was actually guilty of hurting him. And when Law’s son took her to visit his father a few days later, she confessed and asked for his forgiveness. So then Alizon and her mother Elizabeth, and her brother James were summoned to appear before Nowell on the 30th of March in 1612. Alizon confessed that she had sold her soul to the devil, and she had told him to lame John Law after he had called her a thief. Her brother James stated that his sister had also confessed to bewitching a local child.
When questioned about Anne Whittle (Chanttox), the matriarch of the other family involved in witchcraft around Pendle, Alizon might have seen an opportunity for some revenge, because there had been some bad blood between the two families dating from around 1601. So for like 10 or 11 years, when a member of the Chattox’s family broke into the home of the Devices, and stole some goods. It wasn’t a lot, equivalent to about 100 pounds in modern money.
So Alizon accused Chattox of murdering four men by witchcraft and of killing her father John Device who had died in 1601. She claimed that her father had been so frightened of old lady Chattox that he had agreed to give her eight pounds of oatmeal each year in return for her promise not to hurt his family. Apparently, the oatmeal was handed over annually until the year before John’s death. On his deathbed, John claimed that his sickness had been caused by Chattox because he had not paid for his protection that year. So that’s kind of how things got started. And do you want to take it up from there?
Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, and Elizabeth Demdike
Brittany:
Yeah. So what I’ll do is I’m going to pick up with the trials. And we had a conversation about this when we were sort of discussing the flow of the podcast, and we decided we weren’t going to go into sort of each individual trial, because as you can probably tell, there’s a lot of he said, she said in the story. There’s also a lot of so and so the accused of spoiling a batch of somebody’s beer. So what I decided to really focus on is the trials of the Demdike family, and sort of really focus in on a few specific people. But what I wanted to say first is that the Pendle witches, they were also tried with a group of women called the Samlesbury witches.
A woman named Margaret Pearson, who was the Padiham witch, and unfortunately for this poor woman, it was her third trial for witchcraft. This time it was for killing a horse. And then a woman named Isabel Robey. So the two trials are the trials that I’m really going to focus on is the trial of Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, and Demdike. Those trials were really interesting for me, because as we sort of mentioned at the start of the podcast, you get these sort of situations where you have family members that turn against one another.
So Elizabeth Device was charged with the murder of James and John Robinson, and she had been accused of committing those murders, along with Alice Nutter and Demdike. Demdike had also been accused of murdering a man named Henry Mitton, and the main witness against Elizabeth device with actually her nine-year-old daughter, Jennet.
Heather:
So messed up.
Brittany:
I know. This was also in addition to being really messed up, a strange sort of situation because during this particular time period, it would have been really unusual for somebody that young to present evidence on a case, but as I mentioned before, King James had written this book called Daemonologie. He said that under extenuating circumstances, children, women, and liars can be witnesses over high tried treason against God.
So, with that sort of clearing in the past for Jennet, she was presented as this sort of star witness against her mother. When she was asked to come in and give evidence against her mother, Elizabeth, Elizabeth just started to scream and curse her daughter to the extent that she was forced out of the courtroom. One of the ways that I’ve seen this written, and I think it’s just even creepier, is that once Elizabeth began screaming, Jennet asked her mother to be taken out of the courtroom.
And there’s something just so sort of creepy about saying, “Get that woman out of here.” So once she left, she was either placed on a table or again, you see some accounts of the story, have her sort of striding up boldly, and then standing up on the table herself. And she, in her testimony, these are her exact words. She said,
“My mother is a witch and that I know to be true. I have seen her spirit in the likeness of a brown dog, which she calls Ball. The dog did ask what she would have him do, and she answered that she would have him help her to kill.”
So in addition to that, she sort of mentioned that there was a gathering. And she said that “At 12 noon about 20 people came to our house – my mother told me they were all witches.” So she accused her mother or identified her mother as being a witch. She identified the people who were at the Malkin Tower Meeting.
In addition to that, she also gave testimony against her brother James. James have been accused of murder by witchcraft of two people named Anna Townley and John Duckworth. What I find to be really surprising and sort of tragic, if James probably in a bid to save himself from the scaffold also accused his mother, but Jennet, she turned on him, and she said that he had been a witch for three years, and that she had seen his spirit kill three people.
Her testimony over this sort of two-day trial was so convincing that I want to say most of her family members and her neighbors were accused, or sorry, four were found guilty. So of the nine accused, Allison Device, Elizabeth device, James device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock, and Jane Bulcock, they were all found guilty and hanged. Mainly because of the testimony of this nine-year-old girl on Gallows Hill and Lancaster on the 20th of August 1612. Another woman who had been accused, Elizabeth Southerns died while awaiting trial, and only one, Alice Grey was found not guilty.
And so we have so much information about this particular incident, the Pendle witch trials because the court of the clerk Thomas Potts wrote a book sort of recounting everything that happened during this trial, and it was called “The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster”. And what’s really sad is that, like you said, some of these witches, like Alizon genuinely did sort of believed in her own guilt. But many of these women, they weren’t just women who, like you said, had been sort of wise women, they had been sort of accepted members of the community. It was sort of this family feud that turned everything so sour.
Sort of another note on Jennet, is that once you had her testimony, and her testimony or the story of her testimony has sort of been spread in this book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, it became more common to have children testify in trials. Like you said, we have the Salem witch trials in America, and in that, there was a lot of evidence that were given by people, and those trials resulted in 19 people being hanged.
Janette sort of did get hers in the end because in 1633, she was accused by a 10-year-old boy named Edmund Robinson of being a witch. I believe she was acquitted, and she went on to live her life. But I’m sure that during that particular moment in her life when she was being accused by that 10-year-old boy, just a year older than she was when she had accused these members of her family, including her mother and brother of witchcraft, she was sort of thinking that he was getting her just desserts.
Heather:
Yeah, you know, I really wonder around about the psychology of that. Like for kids who don’t yet know what’s real from what’s imaginary. If you hear all this stuff about witches all the time, and if you hear it in church, if you hear it, it’s just like part of your culture is that there’s witches, and how it might have actually been kind of like a game to them, to these kids. I just wonder how much of it was like them being sort of evil versus them kind of thinking that it was just like, almost a fun sort of imaginary game they were playing or so. And I’d be really interested if somebody wants to do a study of the psychology of kids who testified against their parents in witchcraft trials.
Brittany:
You also sort of wonder if they really fully comprehend the consequences of what you’re doing, because with Alice Kyteler, her children were adults when they were accusing her. But with Jennet, she was just nine years old. And it’s interesting that you said that, you wonder about sort of how much of it was her sort of thinking that it was a game, sort of versus her being this evil child. And if you look up Jennet Device, just do a google image search of her, you get these sort of drawings of her as this really creepy little goblin child. So that’s sort of the image that gets projected onto her today.
And speaking of her being sort of sinister, I just read a newspaper article that someone oh gosh, I closed the article. But someone in a church, I believe it was St. Mary’s and Lancashire, had seen her wandering around a cemetery, and they were absolutely positive that it was the ghost of Jennet because she had been this sort of sinister figure, and she was still sort of lurking around. But if her ghost hypothetically is sort of still sticking around, you wonder how much of it is because she was the evil little girl, versus the guilt for what she did to her family. So I think either way you look at it, it’s just a really, really sad story.
Heather:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Helen Duncan
Brittany:
So I’m going to end things on a sad and a strange note with Helen Duncan. And she is popularly known as one of the last people to be imprisoned under the British Witchcraft act of 1735. And I’ll talk about this a little bit later, she wasn’t actually the last person, she was the second to last. But that other person sort of gets forgotten in history, and she’s popularly called the last person. And she was a Scottish medium. And she was really famous for sort of holding these séances in which she would sort of spew ectoplasm out of her mouth. Some tests on the ectoplasm really proved that this was of course not ectoplasm and it was actually cheesecloth.
But so she was this clairvoyant. And she would hold these séances in which she would claim to be able to summon the spirits of these people who had recently died. And like I said, in summoning these spirits, she would emit this sort of plasm from her mouth. You should really look at pictures on the internet, because once you see the pictures you have to wonder how anybody could have been fooled.
But in 1941 she spoke again, if you didn’t catch that date, that was 1941. And she spoke to a deceased sailor who had been aboard the HMS Barham and he revealed when she raised his spirit, that the ship had been sunk in the Mediterranean. And this turned out to be a pretty big deal because the War Office, this is during World War II. They hadn’t officially released the fact that the ship had been sunk, and they wouldn’t release the fact until several months later.
So she seemed to have some sort of information that was coming from a secret source. The government had really been trying to hide this because it had been sunk by this German u-boat, and 861 British lives have been lost. So after sort of hearing about this woman who seemed to have information about this ship that sunk that hadn’t yet been released to the public, the government became very suspicious of her.
So a few years later, on the 19th of January in 1944, one of her séances was raided by the police, and she was arrested. She was brought to trial initially under an act that was related to fortune-telling, and astrology, and spiritualism. But it was considered a pretty petty charge that really only had a fine associated with it. But because the government was afraid that she had access to government secrets somehow, they decided to resurrect the Witchcraft Act of 1735. And it hadn’t been used for more than a century.
So they were really sort of desperate to get this woman on something that would get her some jail time, hopefully in an effort to keep her from releasing any more of these sort of government secrets that she might somehow be privy to. So she was brought to court at the Old Bailey, and the trial lasted for seven days. Eventually, she was sentenced to nine months in London’s Holloway prison.
Of course, as you can imagine, because they had brought out the Witchcraft Act, it ended up being this really sort of well-publicized and sensationalized trial. Eventually, the act was repealed in 1951. But she was released from prison in 1944 on September 22.
And like I said, there’s this misconception that she was the last person, but there has actually been a woman who was tried shortly after her, named Rebecca Yorke. And that didn’t get as much publicity because she was a much older woman. She was a woman in her 70’s. And consequently, she was let off with just a fine. And because she wasn’t suspected of having access to government secrets, the wartime government wasn’t so concerned with her.
But she was released from prison in 1944. And she sort of went on to live a pretty quiet life until 1956. When, again, she was holding a séance, and at that point, they arrested her, but it wasn’t because any sort of spooky prophecies or spooky information that she had access to, but rather, it was because séances were illegal, because they were considered fraudulent activity. And they didn’t bring any charges against her. But she did die that same year 1956, on December 6, and she is remembered as the woman who was the last witch. And in her obituary, she was popularly called The Last Witch.
So I thought that was a pretty interesting story, because it took place so late in the game. People were still being accused of witchcraft in the 1940s.
Heather:
Like, there was this whole thing called like “the scientific revolution”, guys.
Brittany:
Well, and that was really funny because Winston Churchill, when he actually got word about this, he was like, “What are you doing?”
Heather:
I bet he was.
Brittany:
This is the modern age. We cannot be accusing people of witchcraft. But yeah, we were still doing it in the 1940’s I guess, time of war brings out the worst in people. So that’s our episode about witchcraft.
Heather:
Yeah, so I’m so excited that we did this. So hopefully people would have listened to the ghost one. If you haven’t done that yet, you can go back and check that out. I guess we’ll each have it in our archives. I hope our listeners, I hope Renaissance English History Podcast people enjoyed this. And if you haven’t yet subscribed to History, Bitches!, you should totally do that. And that’s my plug for–
Brittany:
Yeah, History, Bitches! listeners, if you haven’t subscribed to Heather’s podcast, you should absolutely go do that, because it’s wonderful. And she has just tons and tons of episodes that relate to women’s history, if that’s your thing, and I’m assuming if you’re listening to the History, Bitches!, it is. And then she also has other podcasts that relate to other bits of English Renaissance history. So you should definitely, definitely go check it out, and subscribe, because it’s just fantastic.
Heather:
Yay! It’s a podcast loveset!
Brittany:
Thank you again for contacting me. And for doing this whole thing, because it has been very, very fun.
Heather:
It has! I’m so glad to have met you virtually and had all the talks we’ve had. It’s been really great. I’ve enjoyed doing this. So thank you so much.
Brittany:
Yeah, until next time, History, bitches!
Heather:
Thanks so much for listening to this very special ghoulish edition of the Renaissance English History Podcast. And I really want to thank Brittany again for being part of this with me and for doing this special collaboration. Hopefully, we can do more of these in the future. And just a reminder that if you go to Englandcast.com there are show notes, and lots of resources, and listening lists, podcast archives, all that kind of stuff. So again, England cast.com. And remember, if you want to call me, and leave some feedback, you can call me at 8016TEYSKO. Thanks so much. Have a great time and I will talk to you again soon.
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