The Lancashire Witches

Para1The Lancashire trials are among the most famous witch trials in European history, with ten people executed together. The Lancashire trial was highly publicized, including in the 1613 pamphlet by Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster: with the Arraignment and Triall of Nineteene Notorious Witches, at the Assizes and Generall Gaol Deliverie, Holden at the Castle of Lancaster, upon Munday, the Seventeenth of August Last, 1612. This fascinating trial is an excellent example of the hysteria surrounding witch trials in 17th century England.

The Trial and Executions

Para2The trial of the Lancashire (also called Pendle) witches occurred in 1612 in the northern English county of Lancashire. Twelve individuals were accused of using witchcraft and plotting against authorities. Of the twelve accused, one was tried in York on July 27th, 1612, one died in prison before trial, and the other ten were tried in Lancashire on August 18 and 19, 1612, in a series of trials. Of the eleven accused who went to trial, nine were women and two were men. Only one person was found not guilty. It is estimated that, of the 40,000 executions of suspected witches in Europe between the 15th and mid-18th centuries, only 500 of them occurred in England. This makes the fact that so many people were executed at once following the Lancashire witch trials especially unique (Sharp 3).

Witch Trials in the Social Climate of Early Modern Europe

Para3The typical victims of witch trials in the early modern period were poor elderly women. An account of the trial by Thomas Potts has a description of Anne Whittle, one of the executed women, that illustrates the contemporary misogyny that fueled stereotypes of witches: a very old withered spent and decreped creature […] Her lippes ever chattering and walking: but no man knew what.
Para4Despite witch trails occuring throughout Europe in the period, the concept of witchcraft was not the same over all social and economic classes. Scholar Richard Horsely as found that the higher and more educated classes had a specific understanding that witchcraft involved the use of powers specifically granted by the devil. Those of the lower classes did not necessarily make that religious connection and generally used accusations of witchcraft as a way of settling local quarrels. This can be seen in peasants accusing their neighbors of practicing witchcraft but not of practicing sorcery. Horsely discusses peasants’ idea of witchcraft as related to the malicious power inherent in witches, while sorcery was a malicious power enacted through explicit and learned techniques. Therefore, he beleives that to the early modern peasant, witches were an evil separate from the devil.
Para5More learned people, like the ones who generally oversaw the trials, understood the cultural function of witch trials was linked to concepts of a Christian society. Witchcraft was the work of Satan, and witches had been seduced by Satan or his servants.
Para6To commoners, the practice of witch trials was in some ways the transformation of local concerns into formal legal procedure (Holmes 50). Witch trials provides a way to settle scores, end quarrels, and get a form of justice.

Play Adaptation: The Late Lancashire Witches

Para7The Late Lancashire Witches is a play adaptation of the Lancashire trials. The play was written by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome and published in 1639. The play ran for three days in August 1634 at the Globe Theater. A report of the play has survived in a letter that comments
and though there be not in it (to my understanding) any poetical genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state or tenet of witches (which I expected), or application to virtue, but full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible, yet in respect of the newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the end of odd passages and fopperies foolish or absurd actions to provoke laughter, and is mixed with divers songs and dances, it passeth for a merry and excellent new play.
Para8The successful play (considered so because it was performed three nights in a row) followed the events of the trial of the Pendle witches. Because of this, this play could be considered a part of the true crime genre.
Para9The public’s fascination with the trial and the success of the play when first performed can be attributed to how widely published and unusual the actual events were. Even though the play reveals the chaos surrounding witchcraft, some scholars like Meg Pearson argue that by showing this community already employing a number of traditional practices, several of which are deployed to manage local problems, the playwrights argue that this community—which includes witches—functions perfectly well. The playwrights also reveal the inherent drama in witch trials, and like today, that legal dramas made good entertainment.

Key Print Sources

Gowing, Laura. Pendle Witches Lancashire Witches (act. 1612). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 23 Sep. 2004.
Sharpe, James. The Lancashire Witches in Historical Context in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, ed. Robert Poole. Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 1–19.

Key Online Sources

Castelow, Ellen. Never Forgetting the Pendle Witches tragedy. The Lancashire Telegraph, 1 Nov. 2020, https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/18838332.never-forgetting-pendle-witches-tragedy/.
Holmes, Clive. Women: Witnesses and Witches. Past & Present, no. 140, Oxford University Press, The Past and Present Society, 1993, pp. 45–78, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/651213.
Horsley, Richard A. Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 9, no. 4, The MIT Press, 1979, pp. 689–715, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/203380.
Pearson, Meg. The Late Lancashire Witches: The Girls Next Door. Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, vol. 3, no. 1, Penn State University Press, 2014, pp. 147–67, Scholarly Publishing Collective, https://doi.org/10.5325/preternature.3.1.0147.
Poole, Robert, ed. The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories. Manchester University Press, 2002, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jb7v.
Ostovich, Helen. Textual Introduction to The Late Lancashire Witches. Richard Brome Online, Royal Holloway, University of London and University of Sheffield, 2010, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal.jsp?play=LW&type=TEXT.
Shafer, Elizabeth. Stage Histories: The Late Lancashire Witches. Richard Brome Online, Royal Holloway, University of London and University of Sheffield, 2010, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/history.jsp?play=LW.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Mackenzie Dillen

Mackenzie Dillen was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title The Lancashire Witches
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Mackenzie Dillen, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
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