Pendle: The Witch Trial That Shook England

9 year old girl hang 10 people with one sentence, welcome to the grave shift

No warm up, straight for the throat

Why waste it Oz?

I'm Frank

I'm Oz, I run the kit, the meters, the bits that beep and spike when something's actually there, or isn't?

Adam, apparently the only one who reads

Get on with it then

Right, to understand Pendle, you need to understand the king

James I, obsessed with witchcraft, wrote an entire book on it called Diamondology, a few years before any of this

A king with a hobby

A king with a hobby that got people killed Oz, because once the king's writing books about hunting witches

every magistrate in the country wants to be the one who finds some

And Lancashire already had a reputation, wild country, barely Protestant, the crown didn't trust it

So when a local magistrate called Roger Nell gets a case land on his desk in 1612, he doesn't let it go quietly

He turns it into the biggest witch trial England has seen, and it starts, like most disasters, incredibly small

A beggar called Alison Device is walking a road near Pendle Hill

A peddler called John Law won't sell her pins

The whole thing kicks off over pins

Allegedly a witch over pins, yes, she curses him under the breath as he walks off

Minutes later he collapses in the road

Never speaks properly again for the rest of his life

Or he's a man in his 60s who just walked up here in the cold

23 years on the kit and you still reach for the stroke before the curse

23 years is exactly why

Here we go, here's the bit that actually matters though

When Nell questions Alison, she doesn't deny it

No torture, no pressure that survives in the record

She just confesses straight away

And once one person confesses to being a witch

The magistrate starts asking who else might be

That's when it stops being about one woman on a road

Because there's already history on that hillside

Two families who'd hated each other for years

The dem dykes and the chattoxes

Sounds like a solicitor's firm

Sounds like my streak growing up

Both families made their living partly as what people call cunning folk, healers, charm sellers

The kind of women villages went to when the doctor was too far or too expensive

Which meant they already had reputations for having power over health and harm

Long before any trial

Old dem dyke, real name Elizabeth Sovans, was in her 80s, half blind

Practically running her own trade in it for decades

She never makes it to trial, dies in the jail waiting for it

Prison in that period wasn't somewhere you survived long, guilty or not

Chattox, real name Anne Whittle, does stand trial

So does her daughter Anne Redfern

And then it escalates again

Because there's a meeting at a place called Malkin Tower

Family, neighbors, food, drink

Sounds like Christmas

The court called it a witch's council

Planning to blow up Lancaster Castle

And free the ones already arrested

Same party, very different right up

That meeting is what turns this from two family disputes

Into a conspiracy the crown can make an example of

And here's where it gets properly dark

The testimony that seals almost everyone's fate comes from a child

Janet Device, nine years old

Testifying against her own mother, her own brother, her own sister

That's the bit that gets me

Every time

Me and all

Under the law at the time

Children weren't normally allowed to testify

Now we use there anyway

Her evidence was the only thing strong enough to hang the case together

Twelve people stood trial at Lancaster

In front of Judge Sue Edward Bromley

And one of them doesn't fit the pattern at all

Alice Nutter

Not a beggar

Not a healer

A gentry woman

With land and money

Why is she even in it then?

Nobody's ever fully explained that

Best guess is she was seen near Malkin Tower and got swept in

She said almost nothing in her own defence the entire trial

Ten of the twelve were hanged

Same afternoon, same hill

Gallows Hill

A nine-year-old's word helped end ten lives in one sitting

And here's mine to add to it

I've stood on that actual hill

Three in the morning

Record your running, meet his life

Grass moving, no wind at night

Oz checked

I did check, no wind

Here we go

Always grass, never a badger

I've got the sound Oz

Not just my word

Had it since 71

And it's never once been enough to convince me

Better take than your personality though Oz

Flat battery mate

Nothing's charging that

And you two are arguing over a field

Again

Always a field with you Frank

Because the field's always got something in it

Here's the part that still bothers historians

Four hundred years later

Nobody knows for certain why now I'll push this case so hard

Ambition, genuine belief

Pressure from London

Are we all free?

What we do know is it worked

It made his name

And the pamphlet written about the trial afterwards

Became one of the best-selling accounts of witchcraft in English history

So somebody made money off it too

Somebody always does

Full episode

Deep in full

The trial transcripts

Everything

Unless it's a badger

It's not a badger Oz

It's always not a badger until it's a badger

Alright, alright

Let's wrap this one

This is the grave shift

I'm Adam

I'm Frank

And I've been arguing with that hill since 1971

And I'm Oz

On the meters

Before we blame a ghost

Like nobody said normal

Ten people died on a nine-year-old's word

And Frank still thinks that hill's got something left to say

You are not ready for what's on that tape

Follow it