The belief that demons or evil spirits took possession of human beings is of very great antiquity, and the popular mind had firmly taken hold of this; whenever a case of this kind occurred, the priest was called in to exorcise the devil, and the Puritan divines were not slow in asserting that if a Roman Catholic could perform a miracle, they at least could turn out an evil spirit, and thus the superstition appears to have been rather fostered than rebuked. One of these demoniac cases[124] took place at an old half–timbered house called Cleworth Hall[125] (in the parish of Leigh), where there lived Nicholas, the eldest son of Edmund Starkie of Huntroyd (near Burnley); he had issue a son John and a daughter Ann, who, with five others, were said to have become “possessed,” when John Darrell was called in to exorcise the evil spirit. This Darrell was a graduate of one of the Universities, and was subsequently domestic chaplain to Archbishop Whitgift, and Rector of St. Mary’s, Nottingham.
An account of this singular instance of ignorance and credulity was written by Darrell and secretly printed in 1600. The various symptoms described are not incompatible with many diseases now known to the medical profession, and need not be described; to cure the patients, however, a conjurer of the name of Hartley was called in, who for his services was to receive 40s. a year and bed and board; but this did not satisfy him long, and on being refused additional pay, in the shape of a house and the land it stood on, he so affected the possessed ones that (as Darrell puts it) they “sent forth such a strange supernatural and fearful noyse and loud whupping as the like was neuer hard at Cleworth nor in England.”
Mr. Starkie was naturally not satisfied with the treatment, and having applied to a Manchester physician in vain, he went to the famous Dr. Dee, then Warden of Manchester, who advised him to consult “some godly preachers” and get them to call a public or private fast day. The eldest son’s vagaries were certainly peculiar: he would at times act like a madman or a mad dog, and he and his sisters, we are told (by Darrell), would howl and bark and join in a chorus “like a ring of five bells.” The whole affair was doubtless a fraud, but, nevertheless, it shows in a marked degree the dense ignorance even of some of the well–to–do classes at that time: for we find that Mr. Starkie, after his futile appeal to the Manchester physician, Dr. Dee, and others, could only resort to the justices of the peace, who in their wisdom sent Hartley to the Lancaster assizes, where he was in solemn manner tried, condemned and hanged, not for the evident imposition and fraud, but for witchcraft, the strongest evidence against him being that he had on several occasions “drawn magic circles.” But perhaps the most curious circumstance about the case is that at his execution the rope broke, whereupon, probably thinking to save his neck, he confessed that he was guilty; the plea, however, failed, and he was quietly hung up a second time. After Hartley’s execution, John Darrell and the pastor of Calke, in Derbyshire, were called to Cleworth (in 1596), and they with thirty others spent a day in fasting and prayer, the result being (so we are told) that the whole seven were dispossessed, the devil coming out of their mouths in various forms, as a crow’s head, a hedgehog, a toad, etc.
This and other impostures practised by Darrell and his associates led to a prolonged controversy, in which several pamphlets were printed in London, the author of one of them being Samuel Harsnett, who was afterwards Archbishop of York. Not very long after this, King James issued his “Dæmonologie,” in which he advocated the putting to death of all witches.
In Pendle Forest, in the parish of Whalley, in a small cottage near Malkin Tower, lived in the beginning of the century a woman known as “Old Demdike,” and her daughter; the mother’s real name was Elizabeth Southerns, her daughter was Elizabeth Device alias young Demdike. Old Demdike, who was over eighty years of age, was supposed to have made her house into a meeting–place for all the witches in the neighbourhood, and this led to a score of suspected persons (most of them women) being arrested and tried at Lancaster. Eight of these were known as the Witches of Samlesbury, the rest being associated with Pendle Forest. This trial created so much interest in the county that Thomas Potts, the clerk of the court, was ordered by the judges to collect and publish the particulars of the case. From this scarce book[126] may be obtained the full details of this notorious trial; for our present purpose a few particulars must suffice. The wretched old crone, Elizabeth Southerns, died in prison before the trial took place, having first made a confession to the effect that the devil had twenty years before appeared to her, and to him she had sold her soul, and had thus obtained her power; she also described the well–known method of taking away a man’s life by means of the insertion of pins into a “picture of clay like unto the shape of the person” upon whom the revenge was sought. Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, before the assizes not only admitted that she was a witch, but gave the names of many persons whom she had “bewitched to death,” and several of the others made similar confessions. It seems somewhat strange that these prisoners should so easily be led to condemn themselves, and the reason may be either that they expected by so doing to escape capital punishment, or, what is equally likely, that they, having so long lived by the profession of witchcraft, really did imagine that they had the power they claimed to possess.
The whole trial appears to have partaken far more of the nature of persecution than an attempt to ascertain the truth. The leader of this persecution was Roger Nowell, of Read Hall, who, according to the clerk of the court, was “one of his Majesty’s Justices in these parts, a very religious, honest gentleman, painful in the service of his country.” Another agent against the Samlesbury prisoners was a priest called Thompson, who tutored the principal witness, Grace Sowerbutts, a girl of fourteen years of age, to accuse three of the prisoners of having bewitched her. To strengthen the evidence for the prosecution, Roger Nowell produced the deposition taken before him at his house, and it appears that he did not scruple to make the sons and daughters condemn their parents, and thus make them instruments for their destruction.
On the indictment against Anne Whittle being read, she pleaded not guilty, whereupon “Mr. Nowell, the best instructed of any man of all these particular poyntes of evidence against her and her fellows,” requested that the prisoner’s own confession made before him should now be “published against her,” and this was forthwith done. Of the character of the evidence given by the various witnesses, the following are samples: Anne Whittle, to spite the wife of one John Moore, “called for her Deuill Fancie and bad him goe bite a browne cow of Moore’s by the head and make the cow goe madde; and the Deuill then in the likenesse of a brown dogge went to the said cow and bit her, which cow went madde accordingly and died within six weekes.” Alice Chattox “at a buriall at the new church in Pendle did take three scalpes of people which had been buried, and then cast them out of a grave, and took eight teeth out of the said scalpes,” which were afterwards used for purposes of witchcraft. They were not only accused of causing the deaths of various people and cattle by charms, but also of being the means of bringing about evil of every description. In the case of Elizabeth Device (the daughter of old Demdike), her own child, nine years of age, was “set upon the table in the presence of the whole court,” and there declared that she knew her mother to be a witch, for she had several times seen her spirit in the shape of a brown dog come to her at her house.
Another extraordinary piece of evidence was that of James Device, a son of young Demdyke’s, who first put himself out of court as a creditable witness by confessing that he had recently stolen a sheep, and then swore that he had seen a number of witches at his grandmother’s house, who first partook of the stolen mutton and then went out of doors, where they “were gotten on horsebacke, like unto foales, some one colour, some of another, and Preston’s wife was the last, and when shee got on horsebacke they all presently vanished out of sight.”
Amongst the witches was one Alice Nutter, of the Forest of Pendle, whom Potts describes as “a rich woman” with “a great estate and children of good hope, and in the opinion of the world of good temper, free from envy or malice,” and he adds, “Whether by the means of the rest of the witches or some unfortunate occasion shee was drawne to fall to this wicked course of life I know not; but hither she is now come to receive her triall both for murder and many other vile and damnable practices.” The witnesses against this prisoner were the other accused and members of their families only.
At the conclusion of the trial, Alice Whittle, Elizabeth Device, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewet, John Bulcock, Jane Bulcock, Aliza Device and Isabel Robey were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, which sentence was duly carried out. Margaret Pearson was ordered to stand in the pillory in open market at Clitheroe, Padiham, Whalley and Lancaster, on four market days; the other prisoners were acquitted.