SAMLESBURY WITCHES, ACCUSATIONS OF 'MALEFICIUM'

Today, The Grandma has been reading about witches along history. She has remembered interesting cases like Salem in the United States and Samlesbury in England.

On a day like today in 1612, the Samlesbury witches, three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, were put on trial, accused of practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in British history.

The Samlesbury witches were three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury -Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley, and Ellen Bierley- accused by a 14-year-old girl, Grace Sowerbutts, of practising witchcraft.

Their trial at Lancaster Assizes in England on 19 August 1612 was one in a series of witch trials held there over two days, among the most famous in English history. The trials were unusual for England at that time in two respects: Thomas Potts, the clerk to the court, published the proceedings in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster; and the number of the accused found guilty and hanged was unusually high, ten at Lancaster and another at York. ll three of the Samlesbury women were acquitted.

The charges against the women included child murder and cannibalism. In contrast, the others tried at the same assizes, who included the Pendle witches, were accused of maleficium -ausing harm by witchcraft.

The case against the three women collapsed spectacularly when the chief prosecution witness, Grace Sowerbutts, was exposed by the trial judge to be the perjuring tool of a Catholic priest.

Many historians, notably Hugh Trevor-Roper, have suggested that the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries were a consequence of the religious struggles of the period, with both the Catholic and Protestant Churches determined to stamp out what they regarded as heresy.

The trial of the Samlesbury witches is perhaps one clear example of that trend; it has been described as largely a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, and even as a show-trial, to demonstrate that Lancashire, considered at that time to be a wild and lawless region, was being purged not only of witches but also of popish plotters.

King James I, who came to the English throne from Scotland in 1603, had a keen interest in witchcraft. By the early 1590s, he was convinced that Scottish witches were plotting against him.

More information: The Ibtauris Blog

His 1597 book, Daemonologie, instructed his followers that they must denounce and prosecute any supporters or practitioners of witchcraft. In 1604, the year following James's accession to the English throne, a new witchcraft law was enacted, An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits, imposing the death penalty for causing harm by the use of magic or the exhumation of corpses for magical purposes. ames was, however, sceptical of the evidence presented in witch trials, even to the extent of personally exposing discrepancies in the testimonies presented against some accused witches.

The accused witches lived in Lancashire, an English county which, at the end of the 16th century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region, fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people.

Since the death of Queen Mary and the accession to the throne of her half-sister Elizabeth in 1558, Catholic priests had been forced into hiding, but in remote areas like Lancashire they continued to celebrate mass in secret.

In early 1612, the year of the trials, each justice of the peace (JP) in Lancashire was ordered to compile a list of the recusants in their area -hose who refused to attend the services of the Church of England, a criminal offence at that time.

The 16th-century English Reformation, during which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the pope and the Catholic Church, split the Southworth family of Samlesbury Hall.

Sir John Southworth, head of the family, was a leading recusant who had been arrested several times for refusing to abandon his Catholic faith. His eldest son, also called John, did convert to the Church of England, for which he was disinherited, but the rest of the family remained staunchly Catholic.

One of the accused witches, Jane Southworth, was the widow of the disinherited son, John. Relations between John and his father do not seem to have been amicable; according to a statement made by John Singleton, in which he referred to Sir John as his old Master, Sir John refused even to pass his son's house if he could avoid it, and believed that Jane would probably kill her husband. Jane Southworth (née Sherburne) and John were married in about 1598, and the couple lived in Samlesbury Lower Hall. Jane had been widowed only a few months before her trial for witchcraft in 1612, and had seven children.

On 21 March 1612, Alizon Device, who lived just outside the Lancashire village of Fence, near Pendle Hill, encountered John Law, a pedlar from Halifax. She asked him for some pins, which he refused to give to her, and a few minutes later Law suffered a stroke, for which he blamed Alizon. Along with her mother Elizabeth and her brother James, Alizon was summoned to appear before local magistrate Roger Nowell on 30 March 1612.

Based on the evidence and confessions he obtained, Nowell committed Alizon and ten others to Lancaster Gaol to be tried at the next assizes for maleficium, causing harm by witchcraft.

Other Lancashire magistrates learned of Nowell's discovery of witchcraft in the county, and on 15 April 1612 JP Robert Holden began investigations in his own area of Samlesbury. As a result, eight individuals were committed to Lancaster Assizes, three of whom -Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley, and Ellen Bierle- were accused of practising witchcraft on Grace Sowerbutts, Jennet's granddaughter and Ellen's niece.

The trial was held on 19 August 1612 before Sir Edward Bromley, a judge seeking promotion to a circuit nearer London, and who might therefore have been keen to impress King James, the head of the judiciary.

Before the trial began, Bromley ordered the release of five of the eight defendants from Samlesbury, with a warning about their future conduct. The remainder -Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley, and Ellen Bierley- were accused of using diverse devillish and wicked Arts, called Witchcrafts, Inchauntments, Charmes, and Sorceries, in and upon one Grace Sowerbutts, to which they pleaded not guilty. Fourteen-year-old Grace was the chief prosecution witness.

More information: Lancs Live

Grace was the first to give evidence. In her statement she claimed that both her grandmother and aunt, Jennet and Ellen Bierley, were able to transform themselves into dogs and that they had haunted and vexed her for years. She further alleged that they had transported her to the top of a hayrick by her hair, and on another occasion had tried to persuade her to drown herself. According to Grace, her relatives had taken her to the house of Thomas Walshman and his wife, from whom they had stolen a baby to suck its blood. Grace claimed that the child died the following night, and that after its burial at Samlesbury Church Ellen and Jennet dug up the body and took it home, where they cooked and ate some of it and used the rest to make an ointment that enabled them to change themselves into other shapes.

Grace also alleged that her grandmother and aunt, with Jane Southworth, attended sabbats held every Thursday and Sunday night at Red Bank, on the north shore of the River Ribble. At those secret meetings they met with foure black things, going upright, and yet not like men in the face, with whom they ate, danced, and had sex.

Thomas Walshman, the father of the baby allegedly killed and eaten by the accused, was the next to give evidence. He confirmed that his child had died of unknown causes at about one year old. He added that Grace Sowerbutts was discovered lying as if dead in his father's barn on about 15 April, and did not recover until the following day. Two other witnesses, John Singleton and William Alker, confirmed that Sir John Southworth, Jane Southworth's father-in-law, had been reluctant to pass the house where his son lived, as he believed Jane to be an evil woman, and a Witch.

Thomas Potts, the clerk to the Lancaster Assizes, records that after hearing the evidence many of those in court were persuaded of the accused's guilt. On being asked by the judge what answer they could make to the charges laid against them, Potts reports that they humbly fell upon their knees with weeping teares, and desired him [Bromley] for Gods cause to examine Grace Sowerbutts.

Immediately the countenance of this Grace Sowerbutts changed; the witnesses began to quarrel and accuse one another, and eventually admitted that Grace had been coached in her story by a Catholic priest they called Thompson.

Bromley then committed the girl to be examined by two JPs, William Leigh and Edward Chisnal. Under questioning Grace readily admitted that her story was untrue, and said she had been told what to say by Jane Southworth's uncle, Christopher Southworth aka Thompson, a Jesuit priest who was in hiding in the Samlesbury area; Southworth was the chaplain at Samlesbury Hall, and Jane Southworth's uncle by marriage.

Leigh and Chisnal questioned the three accused women in an attempt to discover why Southworth might have fabricated evidence against them, but none could offer any reason other than that each of them goeth to the [Anglican] Church.

After the statements had been read out in court Bromley ordered the jury to find the defendants not guilty.

More information: History Extra

I believe in all the qualities of being a liberal.
I keep going back to all the great social events in our country's history,
starting with the Salem witch trials,
where the conservative view was
that they're witches and should be burned at the stake,
and the liberal view was there's no such thing as witches.

George Clooney