My Mother Is a Witch and This I Know to Be True: The Voices of Pendle

During the Lancaster Assizes in August 1612, a nine-year-old girl is ushered into the courtroom, placed high on a table so that all who had gathered there can see her, and from this position, she denounces her mother as a witch.
Jennet Device was a star witness in the most notorious English witch trials of all time: The Lancashire Witch Trials. Twenty people living in Pendle Hill’s shadow were accused of using charms, effigies, and familiar spirits to harm and even murder their enemies. It is said that many of the accused also confessed to selling their souls to the Devil.
Jennet’s own family and seven of the other alleged witches were found guilty, condemned, and hanged publicly on Gallows Hill. The magistrates (turned witch-hunters) who arrested and prosecuted them congratulated themselves for a job well done; King James I (a monarch hellbent on persecuting witches) was bound to be impressed by their endeavours to cleanse the land of evil. Justice had been served. But of course, it hadn’t …