Malking Tower

In the summer of 1612, a woman named Alice Nutter walked to her death. She was not like the others who stood beside her on the gallows, gaunt women worn hollow by poverty. Alice Nutter was a woman of property in Lancashire, a woman of standing, and—most damningly—a woman who did not easily bow her head. This episode brings you a story of fear, injustice, and resistance in early modern England: the story of the Pendle witch trials.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:07 Intro
• 1:12 Alizon
• 8:13 Alice
• 14:01 Echoes of Pendle
• 19:19 Conclusion
• 21:44 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
In the summer of 1612, when the air still hung heavy over the Lancashire hills, a woman named Alice Nutter walked to her death. She was not like the others who stood beside her on the gallows, gaunt women worn hollow by poverty, by rumor, by a lifetime of surviving at the brittle edge of their community’s suspicion. No, Alice Nutter was something far rarer in the dark drama of witch trials: a woman of property, of standing, and—perhaps most damningly—a woman who did not easily bow her head.

In this episode, I bring you a story of fear, injustice, and resistance in early modern England: the story of the Pendle witch trials.

Alizon
This story begins with two families living on the edge of society: the Demdikes and the Chattoxes. These families had long practiced what they called “healing” but what others whispered was witchcraft. In truth, they existed in a grey area between folk tradition and feared sorcery, offering charms and curses for coin in an economy where formal medicine was all but unavailable. Old Demdike, whose true name was Elizabeth Southerns, was widely reputed to be a witch of formidable power, and her rival, Anne Whittle (known as Chattox) was no less feared. The two matriarchs maintained a tense, uneasy balance until the ambitions and grievances of their kin began to pull them into open conflict.

The spark that ignited the fire came from a perfectly ordinary incident. In March of 1612, Alizon Device, Demdike’s granddaughter, was out walking when she crossed paths with John Law, a pedlar. Law told his story of this meeting in his deposition, saying:

That about the eighteenth of March last past, he being a Pedler, went with his pack of wares at his back through Colne-field, where unluckily he met with Alizon Device, now Prisoner at the Barre, who was very earnest with him for pins, but he would give her none, whereupon she seemed to be very angry, and when he was past her, he fell down lame in great extremity, and afterwards by means got into an alehouse in Colne, near unto the place where he was first bewitched, and as he lay there in great pain, not able to stir either hand or foot, he saw a great Black Dog stand by him, with very fearful firey eyes, great teeth, and a terrible countenance, looking him in the face, whereat he was very sore afraid, and immediately after came in the said Alizon Device, who stayed not long there, but looked on him and went away. After which time he was tormented both day and night… which with weeping tears in great passion turned to the Prisoner, in the hearing of all the Court he said to her, This thou knowest to be too true… and upon her knees with weeping tears, humbly prayed him to forgive her that wicked offence, which he very freely and voluntarily did.”

It was Law’s son who brought the matter before the local magistrate, Roger Nowell, a man eager to root out sedition and sin in equal measure. Nowell’s inquiry quickly expanded beyond Alizon. Under questioning, she confessed and implicated not only herself but also Old Demdike, Chattox, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redferne. In a few short weeks, a tangled web of accusations spun outward, ensnaring neighbors, family, and acquaintances. In April, a gathering at Malkin Tower, home of the Demdikes, provided Nowell with the evidence he needed to deepen the investigation. When news of the gathering reached the authorities, it was portrayed not as a simple meeting but as a witches’ Sabbath and a conspiracy against the realm itself. Those who had gathered were swiftly arrested, more confessions were extracted, and accusations multiplied.

By the time the trials began in earnest in August 1612 at Lancaster Castle, twelve individuals stood accused. The proceedings, recorded meticulously by court recorder Thomas Potts and later published in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, offer a chilling glimpse into the mechanisms of fear and justice in Jacobean England. Potts’s account, though polished for royal eyes, reveals how flimsy the evidence often was, consisting largely of hearsay, confessions extracted under duress, and the testimony of children.

One of the most haunting aspects of the trials was the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device, Alizon’s younger sister. In a time when children were not usually considered credible witnesses, Jennet testified against her own mother, Elizabeth Device, in a moment of courtroom theatre so potent that it reduced the accused woman to a screaming, cursing spectacle. As Potts tells it:

The said Jennet Device, being a young Maid, about the age of nine years, and commanded to stand up to give evidence against her Mother, Prisoner at the Barre: Her Mother, according to her accustomed manner, outrageously cursing, cried out against the child in such fearful manner, as all the Court did not a little wonder at her, and so amazed the child, as with weeping tears she cried out unto my Lord the Judge, and told him, she was not able to speak in the presence of her Mother… In the end, when no means would serve, his Lordship commanded the Prisoner to be taken away, and the Maid to be set upon the Table in the presence of the whole Court, who delivered her evidence in that Honorable assembly, to the Gentlemen of the Jury of life and death, as followeth: Jennet Device… confesseth and sayeth, that her said Mother is a Witch, and that this she knoweth to be true, for she hath seen her Sprit sundry times come unto her said Mother in her own house, called Malking Tower, in the likeness of a brown Dog, which she called Ball; and at one time amongst others, the said Ball did ask [her] Mother what she would have him to do; and [her] Mother answered, that she would have the said Ball to help her to kill John Robinson of Barley, alias Swyre, by help of which said Ball, the said Swyer was killed by witchcraft accordingly.

Jennet’s evidence would seal the fates of many, including her mother, brother James, and sister Alizon. The accused were charged with various acts of witchcraft: murder by magic, bewitching livestock, conspiring with familiars, and plotting to blow up Lancaster Castle. Justice moved swiftly. Of the accused, ten were found guilty. Nine were hanged in Lancaster and one in York. Old Demdike escaped the noose only by dying in her cell before the trial.

Alice
When the witch panic surged through Pendle that year, it moved first through the poor: the Demdikes, the Chattoxes, their names already thick with suspicion. But the net cast by the authorities was wide and ruthless. When news broke of the now-infamous gathering at Malkin Tower, the event was spun into a conspiracy of treason and witchcraft.

Alice Nutter was said to have been there.

The details of Alice’s life before its infamous end are half-lost to time. She was likely born into a family of landowners, and by the early seventeenth century, Alice was a widow, mistress of her own affairs, living at Roughlee Hall, a modest manor nestled in the Lancashire countryside. In a world that prized women for their obedience and invisibility, Alice’s independence was both admired and feared. The fact that she was Catholic or at least Catholic enough to draw the wary eye of Protestant magistrates welcomed yet more suspicion. Lancashire, even in 1612, was stubborn in its faith, a place where recusant priests moved in secret and Mass was whispered behind shuttered windows. To be Catholic was to stand against the tide of the kingdom, and to be a wealthy Catholic was an even more dangerous thing: it meant you could shelter the wrong people, finance the wrong cause, or foment rebellion in the name of the old faith.

To believe the charges against Alice is to believe a woman of property and reputation abandoned caution to plot the death of the king’s men with hedge witches and beggars. To believe the charges is to imagine that she, clad perhaps in the sober but well-made garments of her class, trafficked with familiars and demons. Such a picture might have strained credulity in ordinary times, but in 1612, amid fear and political convenience, credulity was stretched until it snapped.

What little survives of Alice’s voice reaches us filtered through the records of her trial. Unlike many of her fellow accused, she did not confess. She did not weep, or howl, or abase herself. Her defense was quiet, dignified, and ultimately futile. In a trial where confession was almost a prerequisite for survival, her refusal to submit may have sealed her fate.

The record of Alice Nutter’s arraignment states that she “feloniously had practiced, exercised, and used her devilish and wicked Arts, called Witchcrafts, Enchantments, Charms, and Sorceries, in and upon Henry Mitton, and him the said Henry Mitton, by force of the same Witchcrafts, feloniously did kill and murder.” James Device, son of Elizabeth Device and brother of Alizon and Jennet and Alice’s cousin, testified that Alice had killed Mitton when he refused to give Old Demdike a penny she had begged of him.

Once again, the most damning evidence came from nine-year-old Jennet Device, who testified that Alice Nutter was present at the Good Friday gathering at Malking Tower and that all those present were witches. Perhaps because of Alice’s status, the judge was especially suspicious. The record reads: “After these Examinations were openly read, his Lordship being very suspicious of the accusation of this young wench Jennet Device, commanded one to take her away into the upper Hall, intending in the meantime to make Trial of her Evidence, and the Accusation especially against this woman…” The judge then lined up a number of prisoners to see if Jennet could pick out the women who were at Malking Tower, “whereupon in the presence of this great Audience, in open Court, she went and took Alice Nutter, this prisoner, by the hand, and accused her to be one.” In his account, Thomas Potts wrote, “This could be no forged or false Accusation, but the very Act of God to discover her.”

There is no clear evidence that Alice Nutter was a witch. No credible accusation of spellwork, no damning discovery of dolls or poppets, no tales of familiars creeping to her bed at night. What she had was land, wealth, and a faith out of step with her time. She had independence and the quiet strength of a woman accustomed to making her own way in a world that punished such audacity. And so, in August of 1612, she was hanged alongside the others, her name forever entangled in the folklore of Pendle Hill. In the years that followed, tales would grow around her: Alice as noble martyr, Alice as secret sorceress, Alice as tragic heroine undone by forces beyond her control. But strip away the embroidery of myth, and what remains is a woman caught between two worlds: the old faith and the new order, status and suspicion. She is a reminder that witch hunts were never only about witches. They were about power and fear, about enforcing conformity, and about punishing those who stood too proudly alone.

Echoes of Pendle
But Pendle’s story is not only about the victims. It is also about the machinery that crushed them: the magistrates like Roger Nowell, eager to show vigilance to a crown that doubted the loyalty of the north, and the clerks like Thomas Potts, whose Wonderfull Discoverie was not a simple transcript of events but a crafted narrative, intended to demonstrate that justice had triumphed over chaos. Potts’s account preserved the voices of the accused, and in doing so, preserved too a glimpse of a society at war with itself. It is through Potts that we hear Old Demdike, claiming her lineage of magic; through Potts that we see nine-year-old Jennet Device, a child wielded as a weapon against her own family. To understand Pendle is to understand the fault lines of early seventeenth-century England. The Reformation had left deep scars on the country’s soul. Officially Protestant, England remained, in many corners, stubbornly Catholic, none more so than Lancashire, a county seen by the Crown as a hotbed of sedition. Here, priests moved through hidden doors and secret Masses were whispered at risk of death. To be Catholic was to live under suspicion; to be poor and Catholic was to bear that suspicion like a brand.

Layered atop these religious tensions was another, older terror: the fear of witchcraft. The reign of King James I had brought not only political consolidation but also a reignited zeal for rooting out the “unnatural” enemy. James’s 1597 treatise Daemonologie cast witches not merely as isolated figures but as soldiers in the Devil’s army, threats to church and crown alike. His Witchcraft Act of 1604 had transformed witchcraft into treason. No longer was it enough to simply suspect harmful magic; communion with the Devil became a hanging offense. Against this backdrop, the people of Pendle lived close to the bone. Disease, hunger, and misfortune were common. And where there is suffering without cause, there is always the temptation to find one.

It is tempting to view the Pendle trials as a dark anomaly, a strange incident of paranoia in an otherwise rational age. Yet to do so would be to misunderstand them. The fear of witchcraft was not irrational in the world of 1612. It was a world of grinding poverty, sudden illness, and death without explanation. In such a world, the idea that misfortune had a concrete cause offered a kind of terrible comfort. It located blame and provided a reason when life seemed cruel and arbitrary. Moreover, the trials served the political needs of the time. Demonstrating the Crown’s vigilance against both religious nonconformity and moral corruption helped reinforce authority in a fractious region. The witches of Pendle were, in many ways, convenient scapegoats for broader anxieties.

The echoes of Pendle would reverberate far beyond Lancashire. In later decades, the figure of the witch would loom even larger in the English imagination, and the mechanisms used at Pendle—children’s testimony, confession under pressure, the association of witchcraft with political and religious deviance—would be repeated with deadly effect. Yet the human cost of Pendle was borne most heavily by those least able to defend themselves: the poor, the old, the isolated women whose survival depended on the grudging charity and fearful respect of their neighbors. In the trial records, they emerge briefly, vividly: Old Demdike, blind and infirm but still feared; Alizon Device, a young woman trapped between family loyalty and her own terror; Elizabeth Device, railing against her accusers with a ferocity born of despair.

In the end, the Pendle witch trials were not about magic, nor even about crime. They were about survival in a brutal world, about the need for explanation, for justice, however cruelly misapplied, and about the terrible things people will believe, and do, when the alternative is to face a world without reason or mercy. They remind us, even now, that history’s darkest chapters are written not just by tyrants and kings, but by ordinary people, caught in the inescapable currents of their time.

Conclusion
And yet, if the Pendle witch trials were born of fear and power, their legacy would become something stranger still.

In the centuries that followed, the Pendle witches passed out of the realm of law and into the realm of legend. They became figures of folklore, villains and victims, woven into the fabric of the landscape they once walked. The bleak beauty of Pendle Hill became a place of pilgrimage, a site not just of memory but of myth-making. In the popular imagination, the witches were sometimes rebels, sometimes martyrs, sometimes monsters but always mirrors reflecting the fears and desires of those who remembered them.

Their names endure: Demdike, Chattox, Device, Nutter. They haunt books, plays, and songs. They live on in the festivals and the ghost tours, the painted murals and the quiet markers along forgotten country lanes. Yet beneath the folklore lies the bone-deep truth: the Pendle trials were not about magic, but about control: over land, over faith, and over the fragile seams of a society afraid of its own fractures.

Their legacy reminds us that the line between justice and vengeance can be frighteningly thin. It reminds us how easily the powerless become the hunted when the powerful are afraid. It reminds us that history’s darkest moments are not merely relics to be studied but warnings to be heeded.

The story of Pendle is not finished. It lives wherever fear seeks an easy target, wherever power cloaks itself in righteousness, wherever memory demands that the lost not be forgotten.

It asks of us, even now: Who do we fear—and why?

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about Alice Nutter and the Pendle witch trials, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.