The Lancashire Witches

THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES Title page to Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES HISTORIES AND STORIES edited by Robert Poole MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Manchester University Press 2002 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6203 9 hardback 0 7190 6204 7 paperback First published 2002 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton iv Contents Notes on contributors vii Preface x Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction: the Lancashire witches in historical context James Sharpe 1 PART I THE TRIALS OF 1612 19 2 Potts, plots and politics: James I’s Daemonologie and The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches Stephen Pumfrey 22 3 Thomas Potts’s ‘dusty memory’: reconstructing justice in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches Marion Gibson 42 4 ‘Those to whom evil is done’: family dynamics in the Pendle witch trials Jonathan Lumby 58 PART II CONTEXTS: SOCIETY, ECONOMY, RELIGION AND MAGIC 71 5 Witchcraft, economy and society in the forest of Pendle John Swain 73 6 The Reformation in the parish of Whalley Michael Mullett 88 7 Beyond Pendle: the ‘lost’ Lancashire witches Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell 105 v CONTENTS PART III REWRITING THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES 123 8 The pilot’s thumb: Macbeth and the Jesuits Richard Wilson 126 9 Sexual and spiritual politics in the events of 1633–34 and The Late Lancashire Witches Alison Findlay 146 10 The ‘Lancashire novelist’ and the Lancashire witches Jeffrey Richards 166 11 Wicca, Paganism and history: contemporary witchcraft and the Lancashire witches Joanne Pearson 188 Bibliography 204 Index 219 vi Notes on contributors Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell is Lecturer in History at the University of Wol- verhampton and the University of Nottingham and is also a holistic therapist. Her Ph.D. thesis, ‘“Death by divelishe demonstracion”: witchcraft beliefs, gender and popular religion in the early modern midlands and north of Eng- land’ (Nottingham Trent University, 1999) focused on popular witchcraft beliefs in early modern England. Alison Findlay is Senior Lecturer in English at Lancaster University. She has written extensively on women in Renaissance drama and on Shakespeare. Her publications include Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1998) and (as co- author) Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (2000). She is co-direc- tor of a practical research project on early modern women’s drama, and an editor of the Lancastrian Shakespeare volumes (2003). Marion Gibson is Lecturer in English at Exeter University and Truro College, Cornwall. Her research interests include Renaissance literature, biography, and British and American representations of the supernatural, including on film. She is the author of Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (1999) and Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contempo- rary Writing (2000). Jonathan Lumby read Theology at Cambridge and subsequently studied at both Oxford and London universities. He has taught in Zimbabwe and Eng- land, is a former Vicar of Gisburn, and is now Rector of Eccleston, Chester. He is the author of The Lancashire Witch-Craze: Jennet Preston and the Lancashire Witches (1995). Michael Mullett is Professor of Cultural and Religious History at the University of Lancaster, where he has taught for over thirty years, his current teaching vii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS concerns being popular culture and popular protest, the history of the Jews in Europe, and Luther and the European Reformation. His most recent books are John Bunyan in Context (1996), Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558– 1829 (1998) and The Catholic Reformation (1999). He is currently working on a life of Martin Luther. Joanne Pearson is Lecturer at the Department of Religious and Theological Studies, Cardiff University. She is the author of A Popular Dictionary of Paganism (2002), and of Wicca: Magic, Spirituality and the ‘Mystic Other’ (2003), a revised version of her Lancaster University Ph.D. thesis. She was the organiser of a 1996 conference on modern paganism at Lancaster University, whose papers were published as Nature Religion Today (1998). Robert Poole is Reader in History at St Martin’s College, Lancaster, where he teaches early modern and modern British history, and was the organiser of the 1999 weekend conference on ‘The Lancashire Witches: History, Heritage and Representation 1612–1999’ which gave rise to this book. His publications include Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (1998) and The Diaries of Samuel Bamford (with Martin Hewitt) (2000). Stephen Pumfrey is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Lancaster. He has written on the history of science and ideas in early modern England, editing and contributing to Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renais- sance Europe (1991). His book Latitude and the Magnetic Earth was published in 2002. Jeffrey Richards is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Lancaster and has written and broadcast extensively on both medieval history and nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural history. He is the author of a number of books, including The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages (1979), Sex, Dissidence and Damnation (1991) and Imperialism and Music (2001). James Sharpe is Professor of History at York University. He has written extensively on the social history of early modern England, particularly crime and witchcraft. His publications include Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1750 (1987), Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550– 1750 (1996), The Bewitching of Anne Gunther: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (1999) and Witchcraft in Early Modern England (2001). John Swain teaches history at Nottingham High School. He is author of ‘The Lancashire witch trials of 1612 and 1634 and the economics of witchcraft’ (Northern History, 1994), Industry Before the Industrial Revolution: North- East Lancashire c. 1500–1640 (1986) and ‘Capital formation by clothiers in north-east Lancashire c. 1550–1640’ (Northern History, 1997). viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Richard Wilson is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Lancaster and Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the Sorbonne University (Paris III). He was co-organiser of the 1999 Lancastrian Shake- speare conference and is Academic Adviser to the planned Hoghton Tower Shakespeare Centre. He has edited volumes on New Historicism and Renais- sance Drama (1993), Christopher Marlowe (1999), Julius Caesar (2001) and Lancastrian Shakespeare (2003). His publications include Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (1993) and Secret Shakespeare (2003). ix Preface If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. (Richard Feynman1) Sometimes the Lancashire witches seem very close. The well tower at Lancas- ter Castle where they were imprisoned, centuries old even then, looms over the city. Inside are rusty iron fittings. Water still drips into hidden wells, and as the ancient studded oak door closes the darkness is that of another age. The cobbled Roman road along which the witches travelled on their final journey to the gallows passes a fine Jacobean residence, used as lodgings for later generations of Assize judges. In front is a memorial to Thomas Covell, the witches’ gaoler. Across the city centre the road begins its climb to the moor at the Golden Lion, the site of a pub since 1612 – the year of the witches. The moor itself remains green, occupied now by a playing field, a fine Edwardian park, and St Martin’s College. There, generations of history students have learned about the trial of the Lancashire witches, within sight of the castle and close to the spot, now unknown, where those same witches were hanged nearly four centuries before. In another sense, the Lancashire witches are far away. We (or most of us) no longer believe, as both they and their persecutors believed, that witchcraft is possible. The mental world of the seventeenth century is almost as alien to us as that of the Incas. It was the imaginative study of such alien phenomena as witchcraft that helped fuel the social and cultural history renaissance of the last third of the twentieth century. Many of those scholars have had connec- tions with Lancaster’s two higher education institutions, Lancaster University and St Martin’s College, although specialist knowledge of the Lancashire witch trials is by no means confined to academics. All this work is under- pinned by an unquenchable public interest in this most famous and best- documented of all English witch trials. x PREFACE Thus it was that a two-day event entitled ‘The Lancashire Witches: His- tory, Heritage and Representation 1612–1999’ came to be held on 23–24 April 1999. Organised jointly by the Centre for North West Regional Studies, Lancaster University, and St Martin’s College, it took place at the College, on what used to be part of the moor, a few hundred yards from an ancient row of cottages whose name preserves the memory of a place of execution: Golgotha.

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