The Pendle Witches

n 1612, a dozen people were accused of using witchcraft to murder ten of their neighbors. Two men and nine women, from the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire, eventually went to trial, and of these eleven, ten were eventually found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Although there were certainly other witchcraft trials taking place in Englandduring the fifteenth to eighteenth century, it was rare for so many people to be accused and tried at once, and even more unusual for so many people to be sentenced to execution.

Of the five hundred or so people executed for witchcraft in England over three hundred years, ten were the Pendle witches. Although one of the accused, Elizabeth Southerns, or Demdike, had been known in the area as a witch for a long time, it’s entirely possible that the accusations which led up to formal charges and the trial…