Witches still cast a spell

One of the more shameful chapters of British justice opened in Halifax in the spring of 1612 when a local pedlar called John Law set out westward with his pack on his back.

He must have been a familiar face to his customers eking out a poor living in the isolated settlements on the hilly Yorkshire-Lancashire border. The poor don’t leave many records but their world seems to have been a place of backward communities, in-breeding and family feuds.

Think of families like the chaotic Gallaghers in the Shameless television series living in hovels rather than on a council estate and you may have an idea of what low life was like in John Law’s sales territory.

The pedlar took his wares round a clutch of villages that cling to the bottom of Pendle Hill where the more marginalised families who relied on begging and “healing” for survival also dabbled in potions and spells. Here he came across one of these local witches called Alizon Device.

Alizon may have known the pedlar because she asked for some pins, possibly begging for them. When he declined to co-operate, she put a curse on him and shortly after he collapsed. Some days later he had recovered sufficiently to report the encounter to a Justice of the Peace.

This was the first push at a door that within four months opened up this obscure corner of the country and revealed to the nation the shocking facts of the 12 Witches of Pendle Forest.

A total of 10 were promptly executed, one at York and the rest at Lancaster on August 18, 1612.

It made a cracking story – the words were specially commissioned from the clerk of the Lancaster court – except that it was mostly fantasy.

The entire family of Alizon Device for example were hanged on the evidence of her nine-year-old sister called Jennet. And she had probably been put up to it and coached by an ambitious Justice of the Peace who believed that securing convictions would help his career.

It seems bizarre today that credence was given in court to this evidence. But these were credulous times and popular fear of the occult had been whipped into hysteria by the personal convictions of a paranoid Scotsman, King James I.

He was gunning for two targets which to his mind were linked – Catholics and witches. The Gunpowder plot of 1605 may have been a put-up job to assist the persecution of the former – a significant number of whom were known to be active in the Pendle area.

The fate of the latter James I took into his own hands.

He personally supervised the torture of women accused as witches and he wrote a book called Demonology suggesting they were everywhere. On a practical level he brought in a law allowing the execution of anyone who caused harm by the use of magic.

The fevered witch-hunting spirit of those times is best revealed today in a play which opened the year before John Law set out on his fateful sales trip from Halifax. It was written by a man who enjoyed the King’s patronage and who may have drawn on his Demonology book for ideas.

Macbeth presents a soldier-statesman, a man of destiny on the threshold of great things, whose moral compass is lost after an encounter with three witches. Instead of reason, Macbeth allows the prophesy of three weird sisters to decide the course of his life with calamitous consequences.

That’s the social context for the Pendle witches. The geographical one also helps to explain how things turned out. Pendle Hill is just 173ft short of being classed as a mountain and the eye is drawn to its long imposing plateau as you drive west on the A59 after Skipton.

Bronze Age people buried their dead on the summit and George Fox had a religious vision here which became one of the formative events in the history of the Quakers.

In modern times, crowds have made their way up the hill to mark Halloween but brought the procession into disrepute by drink and vandalising the stone walls.

In the villages where the witches once lived they say that if you can see Pendle Hill it’s going to rain, and if you can’t it already is.

The hill creates a micro climate which tends towards the damp and gloomy. When the forest of Pendle still existed it must have seemed a creepy sort of place, even for the most experienced pedlars with a living to make.

There’s a feeling of being hemmed-in as you drive around its narrow, twisty lanes up and down the steep contours. Old stone-built properties have been gentrified and present a prosperous face to the world, even under a typically weeping sky. One that is currently up for sale is a splendid Jacobean manor.

It’s reputed to have been the home of one of the hanged witches, Alice Nutter.

Alice was not one of the dirt-poor who lived in the woods and she may have had little to do with the occult.

But she certainly was a Catholic. Alice was at a meeting at a venue now vanished called Malkin Tower on Good Friday 1612 where witches were allegedly present and it’s that which seems to have condemned her. She declined to answer the charges when read to her in court in Lancaster and she paid the penalty.

For Maureen Stopforth, Alice’s fatal silence was the price she paid to protect others.

“Alice Nutter’s was a sham of a trial,” says Maureen. “Alice was an educated woman who had the wit to defend herself but she made no attempt to do so. She had two brothers who were Catholic priests and a son who was training to be a priest in France. If she had spoken she would have exposed them. So you could say she died a martyr.

“In my book the others who were hanged were not wicked or evil. They were ordinary country folk who earned a penny or two by witches’ potions.”

Maureen owns a shop and tearooms called Witches Galore on a steep gradient in the tiny village of Newchurch. It was originally the late 17th-century home of handloom weavers and then one of the village grocer’s, known as t’Top Shop, because it’s near the top of a slope.

“I had to be dragged here screaming by the hair,” she says. “I thought I’d die of boredom. But every day is different. A big percentage of visitors are overseas people who have heard of the witches’ story. I got up one morning and 40 Italian policemen were at the door. I’ve never seen as many good looking men together at one time.

“It’s not just a job, it’s a way of life. I’ve had nuns here and druids and people who think I’m a witch. I’m not.”

It’s textile art rather than dark arts which interest Maureen. An array of richly-attired witches on broomsticks hang from the ceiling of her shop. “I used to make them myself, I’ve always been a handicraft person,” she says. “After 20 years I’d had enough and I have a number of local people doing them now.”

Maureen has been here for the past 32 years and despite the international fame of the Pendle story there’s not much sign of locals climbing on to the witches’ bandwagon, even after the Harry Potter movies.

Even the programme of events to mark the 400th anniversary of the witches’ trial has been dogged by mild controversy. It includes a Guinness Book of Records attempt to create the largest gathering of people dressed as witches. Anyone who wants to take part will need to assemble for 10 minutes next weekend wearing a black hat and a black gown and bearing a broomstick on Barley Green, the most popular starting point for people climbing Pendle Hill. So far 400 have registered but they have capacity for 2,000 at the car park assembly point.

The Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Revd John Goddard, is not happy about the commemoration of the witches. He has publicly asked locals if they really want their area to be known for “the oppression of these women”.

Pendle Council was going to back an artwork for the occasion, but they withdrew their financial support when artist Philippe Hanford was commissioned to dye ‘1612’ in figures 500 feet high on the side of Pendle Hill. A local brewery has since stumped up the cash for the artwork with biodegradable paint. It will be visible for no more than a month, so needs no planning permission

A statue has already been unveiled to commemorate Alice Nutter in her home village of Roughlee, the idea of village resident Jim Starkie, a Conservative councillor on Pendle Borough Council, who did not like the original submission, so he found a different artist to try again.

“Alice Nutter is our most famous foreign export and it’s been in my mind for 40 years to do something,” says Coun Starkie. “She was hanged for something she didn’t do and the statue is just of someone who lived in 1612. It’s nothing like a witch.”

How much economic benefit do the witches bring to the area? One official figure claims the are worth £75m to the economy. “I’d say £7.5m might be closer to it,” says Coun Starkie. “In fact we’ve no idea. We know it’s worldwide. But there’s not an awful lot to see. And half don’t like the idea.”

Religious resistance is backed by landowners mindful of trouble on Halloween when their walls were knocked down. Moorhouses Brewery in Burnley, which is financing the 1612 artwork makes a Witches’ Brew beer and a bus company runs the Witch Way from Manchester to Pendle with all the buses named after each of the witches.

Julian Jordan, one of the organisers of the Witch Walk welcomes all this and thinks the Bishop of Burnley’s criticism of the commemoration is wide of the mark. He thinks it is as much a celebration of present day toleration.

Pendle does not live up to the commercial potential on the scale of that which sustains the Bronte industry at Haworth, just over the border.

But they do have a world famous story and a theme that is ageless. ‘Double double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble’. Who could resist that? Witches have been box office since 1611.

The Big Witch Event, including the Pendle Witch Walk, is on August 18. For more details visit www.pendlewitchwalk.co.uk