THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES OF 1633-4.
Sir Wm. Pelham writes, May 16, 1634, to Lord Conway:—"The greatest news from the country is of a huge pack of witches, which are lately discovered in Lancashire, whereof, 'tis said, 19 are condemned, and that there are at least 60 already discovered, and yet daily there are more revealed: there are divers of them of good ability, and they have done much harm. I hear it is suspected that they had a hand in raising the great storm, wherein his Majesty [Charles I.] was in so great danger at sea in Scotland." The original is in the State Paper Office.[131]
LANCASHIRE WITCH-FINDERS.
Dr. Webster, in his "Display of Witchcraft," depicts the consternation and alarm amongst the old and decrepit, from the machinations of the witch-finders. Of the boy Robinson, who was a witness on several trials of witches, he says—"This said boy was brought into the church at Kildwick [in Yorkshire, on the confines of Lancashire], a large parish church, where I, being then curate there, was preaching in the afternoon, and was set upon a stool to look about him, which moved some little disturbance in the congregation for a while. After prayers, I enquired what the matter was: the people told me that it was the boy that discovered witches; upon which I went to the house where he was to stay all night, and here I found him and two very unlikely persons, that did conduct him and manage the business. I desired to have some discourse with the boy in private, but that they utterly refused. Then, in the presence of a great many people, I took the boy near me and said: 'Good boy, tell me truly and in earnest, didst thou see and hear such strange things at the meeting of witches as is reported by many thou didst relate?' But the two men, not giving the boy leave to answer, did pluck him from me, and said he had been examined by two able justices of the peace, and they did never ask him such a question. To whom I replied, the persons accused had therefore the more wrong." Dr. Webster subsequently adds, that "The boy Robinson, in more mature years, acknowledged that he had been instructed and suborned to make these accusations against the accused persons, by his father and others, and that, of course, the whole was a fraud. By such wicked means and unchristian practices, divers innocent persons lost their lives; and these wicked rogues wanted not greater persons (even of the ministry too) that did authorise and encourage them in their diabolical courses; and the like in my time happened here in Lancashire, where divers, both men and women, were accused of supposed witchcraft, and were so unchristianly and inhumanly handled, as to be stript stark naked, and laid upon tables and beds to be searched for their supposed witch-marks; so barbarous and cruel acts doth diabolical instigation, working upon ignorance and superstition, produce."
THE FOREST OF PENDLE—THE HAUNT OF THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES.
The Forest of Pendle is a portion of the greater one of "Blackburnshire," and is so called from the celebrated mountain of that name, over the declivity of which it extends, and stretches in a long but interrupted descent of five miles to the Water of Pendle, a barren and dreary tract. Dr. Whitaker observes of this and the neighbouring forests, and the remark even yet holds good, "that they still bear the marks of original barrenness and recent cultivation; that they are still distinguished from the ancient freehold tracts around them, by want of old houses, old woods, high fences (for these were forbidden by the forest laws); by peculiarities of dialect and manners in their inhabitants; and lastly, by a general air of poverty which all the opulence of manufactures cannot remove." He considers that "at an uncertain period during the occupancy of the Lacies, the first principle of population (in these forests) commenced;" it was found that these wilds, bleak and barren as they were, might be occupied to some advantage in breeding young and depasturing lean "cattle, which were afterwards fattened in the lower domain. Vaccaries, or great upland pastures, were laid out for this purpose; booths or mansions erected upon them for the residence of herdsmen; and at the same time that herds of deer were permitted to range at large as heretofore, lawnds, by which are meant parks within a forest, were enclosed, in order to chase them with greater facility, or by confinement to produce fatter venison. Of these lawnds Pendle had New and Old Lawnd, with the contiguous Park of Ightenhill." In the early part of the 17th century the inhabitants of this district must have been, with few exceptions, a wretchedly poor and uncultivated race, having little communication with the occupants of the more fertile regions around them, and in whose minds superstition, even yet unextinguished, must have had absolute and uncontrollable domination. Under the disenchanting influence of steam, still much of the old character of its population remains. The "parting genius" of superstition still clings to the hoary hill tops and rugged slopes and mossy water sides, along which the old forest stretched its length, and the voices of ancestral tradition are still heard to speak from the depth of its quiet hollows, and along the course of its gurgling streams. He who visits Pendle will find that charms are yet generally resorted to amongst the lower classes; that there are hares which, in their persuasion, never can be caught, and which survive only to baffle and confound the huntsman; that each small hamlet has its peculiar and gifted personage, whom it is dangerous to offend; that the wise man and woman (the white witches of our ancestors) still continue their investigations of truth, undisturbed by the rural police or the progress of the schoolmaster; that each locality has its haunted house; that apparitions still walk their ghostly rounds,—and little would his reputation for piety avail that clergyman in the eyes of his parishioners, who should refuse to lay those "extravagant and erring spirits," when requested, by those liturgic ceremonies which the orthodoxy of tradition requires. In the early part of the reign of James I., and at the period when his execrable statute against witchcraft might have been sharpening its appetite by a temporary fast for the full meal of blood by which it was eventually glutted—for as yet it could count no recorded victims—two wretched old women with their families resided in the Forest of Pendle. Their names were Elizabeth Southernes and Ann Whittle, better known, perhaps, in the chronicles of witchcraft by the appellations of Old Demdike and Old Chattox [perhaps, Chadwick]. Both had attained, or reached the verge of the advanced age of eighty, and were evidently in a state of extreme poverty, subsisting with their families by occasional employment, by mendicancy, but principally, perhaps, by the assumption of that unlawful power which commerce with spirits of evil was supposed to procure, and of which their sex, life, appearance, and peculiarities might seem to the prejudiced neighbourhood in the Forest to render them not unsuitable depositaries.[132]
[For the details of the witchcraft alleged to be practised by these old crones and their families, with their trials and fate, see an article (page [185] suprâ) in the present volume, entitled "The Lancashire Witches of 1612.">[
PENDLE HILL AND ITS WITCHES.
(From Rev. Richard James's Iter Lancastrense.)