Introduction
The Trial of the Lancashire Witches, 1612, is the most famous of the English witch trials. The suspects were taken to Lancaster Castle in April 1612 and executed following the August Assizes.
The Well Dungeon can be visited and Lancaster Castle is open to visitors.
It was the first witch trial to be documented. Thomas Potts, lawyer, wrote his account: The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancashire. It is supposedly an eyewitness verbatim account, though heavily dosed with Potts’ own views on the matter. Potts was loyal to James I – the fervent Protestant King whose book, Daemonology, set the tone and the feel of a century obsessed with witchcraft, and heresy of every kind – including those loyal to the old Catholic faith.
Witchery popery popery witchery, as Potts puts it, is how the seventeenth-century English understood matters treason able and diabolical.
All of the conspirators of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot fled to Lancashire. And Lancashire remained a stronghold of the Catholic faith throughout the seventeenth century.
The story I have told follows the historical account of the witch trials and the religious background – but with necessary speculations and inventions. We do not know if Shakespeare was a tutor at Hogton Hall, but there is evidence to suggest that he might have been. The chronology of his plays, as used here, is correct. His own use of the religious, the supernatural and the macabre, is also correct.
The places are real places – Read Hall, the Rough Lee, Malkin Tower, Newchurch in Pendle, Whalley Abbey. The characters are real people, though I have taken liberties with their motives and their means. My Alice Nutter is not the Alice Nutter of history – though why that gentlewoman was tried for witchcraft along with the Demdike and Chattox riff-raff remains a mystery.
The story of Alice Nutter and Elizabeth Southern is an invention of my own and has no basis in fact. It pleases me though, that there might have been a connection with Dr John Dee, and with Manchester, London, as well as Shakespeare himself.
And Pendle Hill is still the enigma it ever was, though the Malkin Tower is long gone.