Suranne Jones - Investigating Witch Trials Episode 1
Suranne Jones - Investigating Witch Trials Episode 1
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00:00Hi team.
00:02Hello.
00:05Are we ready to talk witches?
00:07We are ready. Are you feeling it?
00:09I'm good. I'm feeling it, yes. I'm feeling witchy.
00:13I'm Saran Jones.
00:16And for as long as I can remember, I've been intrigued by the idea of witches.
00:21I love that.
00:22Yeah.
00:23F*** the cleaning, I'm going to ride the brimsticks.
00:25Exactly.
00:26No Jackson, don't follow me.
00:27Shall I send you one and you can respond?
00:29Yeah.
00:33But for much of history, witches and witchcraft have been viewed with fear and suspicion.
00:39You had 200 years where women were terrified of being called a witch.
00:45I'm going on an epic journey to uncover what led to some of the biggest trials in history.
00:51There is a worry that witches are rampant and they are out to hurt the king and society.
00:57Starting in Pendle, close to where I was born.
01:00This is the dungeon where the witches were imprisoned.
01:03Oh my gosh.
01:05I'll travel to Germany.
01:07If disaster strikes, we become ready to see evil in other people.
01:14And the American town of Salem, site of the most infamous witch trials of all.
01:20If it was the last moment I was to live, God knows I am innocent.
01:26To discover why so many women were accused of witchcraft.
01:30This really laid the foundations for 100,000 trials of witches, 75% of whom were women.
01:38And what their history means for us today.
01:42Women were silenced, women didn't have a voice, they were repressed.
01:47And it has been repeated and repeated and repeated.
01:51What do people think that they are going to achieve by sending those drops?
01:56They shut you up, they want you to be so scared that you'll stop talking.
02:11As an actor, I've always loved strong female roles.
02:15But I've never played a witch.
02:18I guess for most people, a witch is a pointy hat, green skin, old, crone.
02:25One eye up here, one eye down there.
02:28And she laughs like this.
02:32Oh, that's a good laugh. I'm taking that.
02:35Someone cast me as a witch. I mean, come on.
02:38Growing up, I would much rather play the witch.
02:42To me, it's just always been more intriguing.
02:46Popular culture has given us countless portrayals of the witch,
02:50from fairy tale crone to magical teenager.
02:57But none of these get us anywhere close to how dark the real story is.
03:02The story of the thousands of women who were accused of witchcraft in the 17th century.
03:09And to understand that, I need to head north.
03:16So I grew up in Oldham.
03:19It's near Pendle, near enough certainly to know about the Pendle witches.
03:26In 1612, ten people from the area of Pendle were executed for witchcraft.
03:32Eight of them were women.
03:35It's one of the most notorious executions for witchcraft in English history.
03:41So this area is called the Forest of Boland,
03:45and the walk that I'm doing now is what's known as the walk that the witches did.
03:55And they knew that, in all likelihood, they would be walking to their death.
04:02That just gives me a chill.
04:04By exploring what happened here in Lancashire,
04:07I'm hoping to shed light on events far beyond 17th-century Pendle.
04:12What prompted witch hunts in Britain and Europe?
04:15Who was accused of witchcraft and why?
04:18And what can this horror story from 400 years ago
04:22tell us about events in the present day?
04:29In the early 17th century,
04:31Lancashire was a sparsely populated rural area,
04:35still coming to terms with the religious and political upheaval of the last century.
04:40England in the 16th century went through lots of different monarchs,
04:44as most people know,
04:46so they went from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant,
04:49and obviously people's religious allegiances couldn't change so quickly.
04:53But Lancashire was quite interesting
04:55because it did have a high Catholic community.
04:58Lancashire had an inclination towards Catholicism.
05:01Well, the rest of England was a broadly Protestant country.
05:04So that set it apart.
05:06It was seen as a kind of edge place, as a rebellious place,
05:09as a place where problematic people might live.
05:15Lancashire was known as the Dark Corner of the Land,
05:19the Dark Corner of England,
05:21where traitors and misfits ran away to.
05:24I kind of like that.
05:26I like that I'm from the Dark Corner.
05:31But being a Catholic stronghold in a now-Protestant country
05:35meant that many suffered hardship.
05:40Pendle is particularly down on its knees at this point in time.
05:44So some people are kind of well-to-do farmers who do have money and land,
05:48and then you have various families who are very, very poor.
05:52And then you have various families who are just eking out a living
05:56on what little they have got.
05:58So there was more vagrancy, more poverty.
06:02One of the key explanations for witchcraft in England
06:06was this idea of charity refused.
06:09So this is often a very destitute society
06:13where women are particularly vulnerable.
06:16They might be asking for money and then being refused money.
06:19And that old woman mutters something under her breath as she walks off,
06:24and then some harm befalls the person who's refused the woman.
06:28And they think it's her.
06:32According to the account of the trials
06:34written by Clerk of the Court Thomas Potts,
06:37the Pendle witch trials were sparked by a similar incident.
06:42Alison Devis, a young beggar's daughter, is walking through the woods.
06:47She comes across a peddler on the road, and she asks him for some pins.
06:52The peddler refuses.
06:54Alison is angry about that,
06:57and she turns and she whispers a curse under her breath.
07:01The peddler falls down, partially paralysed.
07:05Alison, confused and alarmed at her own strength,
07:09and believes that she now indeed does have magical powers.
07:14This belief might seem strange to us today,
07:17but in 17th-century Pendle,
07:19the Devis family were known to practise folk magic.
07:24They are known locally as being cunning folk.
07:27And cunning folk is this kind of really interesting way of thinking about people,
07:31where there's this idea that they have access to the supernatural.
07:35And it doesn't necessarily mean that they are consorting with the devil.
07:40It could mean that they understand plants and herbs particularly well.
07:45Magic was part of the fabric of everyday life.
07:48It was how people made sense of the world,
07:51and how people made sense of misfortune as well.
07:54And people could make money from magical healing.
07:58But while magic might offer comfort and a way for the Devis' to make a living,
08:03Alison was convinced it had given her the ability to harm.
08:08She was devastated about this, so she went to the family
08:12and she begged for forgiveness for something that she believed
08:16that she was capable of, that she'd done.
08:19I feel that that moment, the choice that she made,
08:23kicked off this huge thing.
08:30Alison's confession was made at a time when the idea of witchcraft
08:35and who could do it was rapidly changing.
08:38It's really uncommon in the medieval period
08:41to have an accusation of someone being a witch.
08:44Sometimes people are denounced as having done magic,
08:47but a lot of times the people who are seen to be doing bad magic with demons
08:51are monks, for example, people who speak Latin,
08:54who can draw up a magic circle and bring up the dead in order to learn things.
08:59So the witch, the fear of the witch,
09:02completely exponentially rises from the early 15th century onwards
09:06because the idea of the witch fundamentally changes.
09:09So rather than it being sort of a learned male magician
09:12getting their power from magic books,
09:15it's this idea that a witch is fundamentally giving their soul to the devil
09:20and they are therefore committing heresy.
09:25When we think about the word witch, it's a derogatory term,
09:29whereas if we think about the word wizard,
09:32we would use that in a way of, he's a wizard at that.
09:35He's, you know, that's a positive, that's bigging someone up.
09:38You would never use the word witch like that.
09:40In fact, you'd say, she's a bit of a witch.
09:46So when did witch become a term to describe a woman intent on evil?
09:51I'm meeting feminist art historian Louisa McCormack.
09:55So have you ever heard of the Malleus Maleficarum?
09:58No, I haven't.
09:59So the name roughly translates to the hammer of witches
10:03and it was written and published in 1487 by a German guy called Heinrich Kramer
10:08and it's basically your kind of handy user's guide
10:12on how to spot, capture, torture and kill your local witch.
10:16So it's a really, really horrible piece of text.
10:19It's incredibly misogynistic.
10:21So do you know the things we should look out for?
10:24Is that in there for a witch?
10:26I mean, basically all women.
10:28All women.
10:29There you go. We just need to stop there.
10:31Pretty much.
10:32So one of the things the Malleus did,
10:34which sort of had been around in previous scholarship
10:37but really was cemented by Heinrich Kramer,
10:40was this idea that women were uniquely positioned to be witches.
10:45Kramer's text describes in detail the evil in the heart of every woman.
10:51Their minds are warped, twisted like the rib from which Eve was formed.
10:56And just as the first woman could not keep faith with God,
11:00so all women are faithless.
11:03Kramer believed women were tempted by Satan
11:06to become witches because of their uncontrolled sexuality.
11:11It goes into extreme detail as to the kinds of things that witches got up to.
11:17That included keeping nests of penises in trees.
11:21Like you do.
11:22Yeah, as you do. We've all been there.
11:26One of the things he thinks that witches do is keep men's penises,
11:31having cut them off and severed them,
11:33or leave them on the male body and hide them, make them invisible.
11:38The Malleus Maleficarum details incidents of this type of witchcraft.
11:43A young man was involved with a young girl.
11:47He wanted to leave her and lost his penis.
11:50He can see and feel nothing except his smooth body, uninterrupted by any member.
11:58So what the Malleus does is that it really changes the understanding of the witch.
12:04Not just about someone who's made a pact with the devil,
12:08but a woman who's made a sexual pact with the devil.
12:11It is one of the most bonkers books that was ever written.
12:14So included in it, he has large meditations about the orgies that witches have with the devil.
12:20He wants you to know that when the devil has orgies with witches and ejaculates,
12:26his semen is cold because the devil has to steal semen from unsuspecting men in the night.
12:31There is just more penis stealing than has ever been talked about in any other book before or since.
12:37It really tells you about his psyche, that he was that obsessed with women's sexuality.
12:42And I think it is worth remembering that he was a monk and therefore celibate.
12:47People were really sceptical about it.
12:49They very much sort of took it with a grain of salt.
12:51The powers that be weren't necessarily convinced that witches needed to be dealt with
12:56in the kind of ways that he detailed in the book.
12:58But how did this idea spread through Europe and then the New World and beyond?
13:04It very much has to do with a contemporary piece of technology that was invented in the 1440s.
13:11Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press.
13:13Because what the printing press enables for the first time ever in human history
13:18is the mass dissemination of ideas and imagery.
13:22It's got everything. It's got sex. It's got conflict.
13:25It's got witches. It's got magic. It's got the devil. Why wouldn't it become popular?
13:30A book that was absolutely laughed at and considered to be of no account at all whatsoever
13:35in a few decades kind of has a massive turnaround and is treated as it's the absolute truth.
13:41So then he wrote this. Printing press allowed it to get out and all his ideas.
13:46It's almost a form of something going viral.
13:49It's like once something goes on Twitter then everyone can comment about it.
13:54Forty years ago the internet was created.
13:56We could never have conceived of how the internet kind of put power in people's hands
14:01and all the ways it's changed our society.
14:03The printing press very much was the 1400s equivalent of that.
14:07So the Malleus Maleficarum is written sort of at the birth of this brand new technology.
14:12Kramer's concept of the evil witch was also popularised by artists of the time.
14:18The most famous print was by Albrecht Dürer.
14:23This is the kind of the original crone, the original hag.
14:26And there's all sorts of interesting markers that are defining her as an agent of chaos in this piece.
14:31So for example the goat is riding in this direction
14:34but she is facing in this direction and her hair is streaming out in the wrong way.
14:38There's loads of things which are kind of suggesting to us that she's acting against nature.
14:44She's depicted with a broomstick and a spindle,
14:49both of which are traditional implements of womanhood.
14:52But in the hands of the witch the broomstick becomes this kind of phallic rod that she's clutching.
14:58So it really signifies this kind of turning upside down of traditional good female values to have.
15:04You know, a broomstick that you swept your yard with becomes this kind of crazy phallic thing that she rides on to her witch's sabbath.
15:11I love that, yeah. F*** the cleaning, I'm going to ride the broomstick.
15:15Exactly, that's pretty much it.
15:18Kramer's book led to thousands of trials of suspected witches,
15:25most of them women.
15:40To understand more about the executions for witchcraft in Panama,
15:45to understand more about the executions for witchcraft in Pendel,
15:49I've come to Germany.
15:51This was the epicentre of the witch hunts that swept through Europe in the 17th century.
16:03I'm here to meet Professor Johannes Dillinger.
16:07Could you tell me a bit about the history of witches in Germany, Bamberg?
16:13I would always say that we just see them in the double context of the economy and politics.
16:20For the economy, it was a shambles.
16:24We are right in the middle of the so-called Little Ice Age.
16:29That is a period of extreme temperatures in European history.
16:35It was extremely cold.
16:38Of course, you know that Europe was an agricultural society.
16:44Now, with a series of extremely cold, not just years, but decades, society hit rock bottom.
16:54People were starving.
17:00It took the Germans a couple of years to learn the concept of witchcraft.
17:07You've already heard about Malleus Maleficarum and Kramer who wrote it.
17:13Kramer was a crackpot, and most people did not respect him any too well.
17:19It took the crisis of the Little Ice Age to try and foam Kramer's message
17:26that was essentially, something's wrong with the world.
17:30Where is the secret conspiracy at work?
17:34Totally secret, basically invisible, because it consists mostly of women who hide, of course, behind men.
17:44Witches, in the German context, are first and foremost weather magicians.
17:50We send the rain, we send the snow, the hailstorms.
17:57If disaster strikes, we become ready to see evil in other people.
18:04And the early modern understanding of evil is witchcraft.
18:12We see spikes of witch accusations in the years of the really, really bad weather and the crop failures.
18:19So there is a causal connection between bad weather and spates of witch hunting.
18:25It's about witches harming society and wreaking havoc on society.
18:31What we're living through now probably would be thought of as witchcraft.
18:38The medieval town of Bamberg saw some of Germany's most brutal trials.
18:45So we have communities that are devastated, that are starving.
18:49So the communities look to the rulers, and the rulers need someone to blame.
18:54Very few rulers who were so enthusiastic about hunting witches than actually just two prince bishops here at Bamberg.
19:05But they accepted the witchcraft doctrine, Leinhoek and Zinker.
19:09With a witch trial, we always have the difficulty of evidence.
19:14How do you actually prove magic?
19:18So local witch hunters were very often left to their own devices.
19:23And they used torture, I'm tempted to say, liberally, in order to overcome the difficulties with evidence.
19:32But they are fairly aggressive.
19:35I know a number of cases, one actually here at Bamberg, where pregnant women were tortured for days.
19:46The state told them, witches do exist. All churches told them, witches do exist.
19:52Science, the universities, told them, yes, witches do exist.
19:57And all your neighbours were convinced that witches do exist.
20:01Who are you to step out of line and say, no, they don't?
20:05It was what they were told. They were frightened, they were scared, and they were starving.
20:11Nearly 20,000 women were executed for witchcraft in the German lands.
20:18This was made possible by the willingness of the authorities to prosecute.
20:26The same was true at home.
20:29To find out how that developed here, I'm meeting Clare Mitchell Casey.
20:34So before the Witchcraft Act, the church dealt with what was right or wrong, or good or bad.
20:39When the Witchcraft Acts, both north and south of the border, came into being,
20:43what that meant was that the law had got its fingers into who was a witch.
20:50So for the first time, it became the state that was weighing up who was a witch and deciding who should live or die.
20:57In Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots, brought in some trials,
21:00but it really took off when her son, James VI, and then the First of England later,
21:05became involved because he was obsessed with witchcraft.
21:08And therefore, he saw witches everywhere, that witches were amongst us.
21:12In a real sense, he literally wrote the book, because he wrote a book called Demonology,
21:17giving all the detail of what they were, what they do, how to look out for them, how to deal with them.
21:23And so he, having written the book, was the first person to write it.
21:28And so he, having written the book on it, provided a legitimacy from the highest form through to the people.
21:35So there was no question in people's minds other than the devil was real,
21:39that witches were amongst us, that they were doing bad things.
21:42Because the king said so.
21:43Absolutely.
21:44What demonology tells us about is what forms a witch can take,
21:48what ills they might do, how they might affect you, for example.
21:53If a woman has been standing near a bush, and that bush later goes on fire, is she a witch?
21:59If a woman has been out late at night, is she a witch?
22:04If a woman has cursed you in the market, and then later something happens to one of your family,
22:11or your animals, or your stock, is she a witch?
22:14I'm saying she. In fact, demonology doesn't gender the person.
22:19They just talk about acts of witchcraft.
22:21And neither do the acts themselves.
22:23That's why it's so interesting how society decides that a witch is a woman,
22:28because the law doesn't, in fact, prescribe it.
22:32In the period of the witch trials, often the people who were accused were outsiders in some way.
22:36So they might be heretics, people who were seen to misbelieve in religion in some way.
22:41They might be women who refused to be quiet and do what their husbands told them to do.
22:47They might be midwives or healers.
22:49They might be simply people you'd had a business dispute with.
22:52The thing about a witch trial, in a lot of senses, is it's not necessarily about rooting out magic,
22:59but a lot of the time it's about rooting out parts of society that you don't like to see.
23:05And particularly at this time, we see a real interest in decreasing the influence that women have in society more generally.
23:14Of the 2,500 people executed in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act,
23:19around 80% are thought to have been women.
23:24So we've got King James obsessed with witches in Scotland.
23:29How does that come over to England?
23:33Because he becomes James I of England.
23:36And when he moves, he physically moves, leaves Scotland and he goes down to England,
23:41where he brings with him all his ideas.
23:45So the Pendle Witch Trials took place in 1612.
23:48So this is not long after James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England.
23:53So imagine you are a judge in Lancashire.
23:56You're probably not going to be super excited about that because you're living in this really poor rural area.
24:01And you know that you want to rise through the ranks of the judiciary.
24:05But hey, look, here's this new Scottish king.
24:08And he is really into cracking down on witches.
24:12So this idea of you being able to find witches in a community and hunt them out, exterminate them,
24:20probably, if you're an ambitious man, is a good way of gaining the king's favour.
24:26One man's ambition would drive the prosecution of the Pendle Witches.
24:31News that Alison Devis had paralysed a peddler with a curse reached the local magistrate,
24:37a man called Roger Knoll.
24:39Alison was summoned before him and, according to Thomas Potts' account,
24:43told Knoll everything he wanted to hear.
24:47During Knoll's interrogation, Alison is said to have confessed to witchcraft acts
24:51and to selling her soul to the devil.
24:54I wonder if there was some prompting on his part.
24:58Three other women were also implicated.
25:02Alison's grandmother and two members of a local family
25:06with whom the Devises had a long-standing dispute.
25:10So what should have been an isolated incident of a man accusing this girl of witchcraft
25:16and then her confessing becomes something much bigger
25:19because these two families become embroiled.
25:22They've had long-standing antagonisms against each other.
25:26So it's also this idea of community conflict being played out through witch accusations.
25:34Grasping an opportunity to gain attention and favour with the new king,
25:38Magistrate Roger Knoll sent all four women to Lancaster Jail to await trial.
25:46Four hundred years ago, the women of Pendle accused of witchcraft
25:50became victims of ambitious men trying to further their careers.
25:56Everything we understand about the Pendles' story is from the accounts of men.
26:01The women's voices have not been heard.
26:05But today, there is a generation of women reclaiming the label witch
26:10and they will not be silenced.
26:12Hello!
26:14Musician Natasha Khan, better known as Bat for Lashes, is one of them.
26:19I've been looking at some videos of you. Can I start there?
26:23Yeah!
26:24They're screaming at me.
26:26They're screaming at me.
26:28They're screaming at me.
26:30They're screaming at me.
26:32Can I start there?
26:33Yeah!
26:34They're screaming and they're wailing.
26:36Oh, my God!
26:43What does one have to do to howl?
26:45Absolutely nothing.
26:46Just do it?
26:47Just do it.
26:48So I'm not going to howl here. I'm just going to go over there and howl.
26:52But you keep looking this way.
26:55Because I feel like I need to do that.
26:58No, Jackson, don't follow me.
27:01No, I want to do this.
27:03You can do it for yourself.
27:05Yeah, I just want to try it.
27:07Shall I send you one and you can respond?
27:09Yeah.
27:10Howl, howl!
27:12Howl!
27:15Louder.
27:16Howl!
27:21Howl!
27:28You really needed to do that.
27:31I saw it.
27:32Oh, it feels so good, doesn't it?
27:35Oh, my God.
27:37I mean, that's better than a headache tablet.
27:39Yeah.
27:40Women got told that our voices have to just hit maybe one or two notes
27:43throughout the day.
27:44Yeah.
27:45We're like this.
27:46Yeah.
27:47And as a singer, for me, I had to really push myself
27:49to move outside of this.
27:51I speak like this and I don't really move, you know, outside of that.
27:55To, like, hey, you know, on stage.
27:57Yeah.
27:58It's, like, so liberating.
27:59I come off, like, buzzing.
28:00Yeah.
28:01I feel like it moves stuff.
28:02It feels good, so I don't really care, you know.
28:04But taking it back to the witch thing, isn't that so interesting?
28:07We do that and then we're instantly afraid of someone going,
28:11oh, God, those two.
28:12And that's the narrative in our heads is, like,
28:15women getting together and making too much noise.
28:18Yes.
28:19But that's so true.
28:20It's about using your voice, speaking out,
28:23and life's too short as well to do anything other than that.
28:26I think we're all witches.
28:28I think a witch is just a woman who is in tune with mystical forces
28:33and the sort of unconscious power of the cycles of life.
28:37Mm.
28:39Natasha is giving me a card reading,
28:41using a deck she designed called The Mother Witch.
28:45So, do you want to just turn in the laptop card?
28:51Oh, my gosh. OK.
28:53The Tyrant.
28:54This is so interesting.
28:56Is that me? No.
28:57Oh, right. OK.
28:59So, if you look at the card, it's this masculine figure
29:03that's got his hand squashed down onto the woman.
29:06So, the way I would interpret this is that
29:09it's the force of, like, the patriarchal force of, like,
29:13you must create, you must be generating work,
29:16you've got to keep going beyond your means,
29:18you have to work longer hours, like, you know, it's that thing.
29:22It's stamping the woman down.
29:24It's stamping your feminine intuition and your own power
29:28and your own instincts and ability to know what your limits are.
29:31He's squashing you.
29:33I feel like this woman.
29:35Squashed. I feel squashed. Crushed. Yeah.
29:38There's a big force at work in our society that says you can't stop
29:43and you have to keep producing, you have to do more,
29:46you've got to be bigger, better, work longer.
29:48You just end up feeling mad, crazy and overwhelmed.
29:50When you first described it, I felt like crying.
29:52I thought I was going to cry because I just felt like
29:55that's exactly where I am right now.
29:58No wonder I wanted to howl. Yeah, yeah.
30:01I really felt like I needed it.
30:04Yeah.
30:06For women, using their voice to speak out,
30:10I've had so many occasions coming up through my career
30:14where you have an opinion and the moment you do,
30:18you can feel the atmosphere change
30:20because then you're either too mouthy or too loud or too brash,
30:23that's not your job, you need to be quiet,
30:25you need to just be here, look pretty, smile.
30:28All of that stuff has happened.
30:30Women like Natasha are defying the expectations
30:34of what might be considered appropriate behaviour for women today.
30:41But in 17th-century Pendle, not conforming could get you killed.
30:47While Alison Devis, her grandmother Demdike and two others
30:51were being held in Lancaster Jail,
30:53there was a gathering which would place even more people under suspicion.
31:00This field is thought to be the site of the Devis family home.
31:05April 10th, Good Friday.
31:07While all obedient Christians are in church,
31:10allegedly a party was held here by Alison's mother, Elizabeth.
31:14They roasted a stolen sheep
31:16and they celebrated by feasting and dancing.
31:20The party sparked rumours of a huge conspiracy of witches
31:24plotting to overthrow law and order.
31:27So everything might have just stayed there,
31:29four people are accused of witchcraft, that's good enough.
31:32Except there's a big family meet-up on Good Friday
31:35where basically everyone who's accused
31:37called their neighbours who are a little bit sympathetic.
31:40And James, one of the brothers, steals the cake.
31:43One of the brothers steals a sheep in order to feed everyone
31:46and have a bit of a barbecue.
31:48I just think it was a very bad idea
31:50for people who were suspected of witchcraft
31:52to then have a gathering of people which then involves sheep.
31:55It just seems like the rule book of what not to do
31:58when accused of witchcraft would be that.
32:00It's probably just a family feast,
32:02but it comes across to the magistrate
32:04as being some sort of satanic church gathering.
32:07And of course that plays into his fears
32:09that Satan worship is happening in his locality.
32:14MUSIC PLAYS
32:19Magistrate Roger Knoll rounded up everyone involved for questioning.
32:25By the end of his interrogations,
32:27more than a dozen people were imprisoned here on witchcraft charges.
32:37Hi. Good morning. How are you? I'm very well, thank you.
32:40I'm Anne. Anne Martin.
32:42Lovely to meet you. And you. Are these for me?
32:44They are indeed. If you could pop those on before we go down.
32:47And this, I take it, by the padlock,
32:50isn't somewhere where the general public get to go?
32:53No, this isn't open to the public.
32:56How amazing. Thank you.
33:01This is the dungeon where the witches were imprisoned.
33:04Wow.
33:07Oh, my gosh.
33:10I mean, it's just so grim.
33:15It's cold down here.
33:17It's small.
33:19They would have been chained up.
33:22Not all prisoners were chained, but they chained them
33:24because they thought they were witches,
33:26they thought they had some superpowers,
33:28and if they didn't chain them down, they would fly out of here
33:31or get out through the walls or God knows what.
33:34The 80-year-old Den Dyke didn't make it to the trials.
33:39She died down here.
33:44And I'm sat thinking, who were these women?
33:50They were...
33:52old,
33:54poor.
33:56They were on the outskirts.
33:59They were other, different.
34:02But a witch?
34:05I'm still trying to get to the idea of what a witch is.
34:08A witch is someone who has made a pact with the devil and...
34:12I'm sat here,
34:14feeling like these were just...
34:20..women.
34:24They were held here for months.
34:28And by the end of the trials,
34:30most would be condemned to death.
34:44I return to Lancashire to uncover the real story of the Pendle witches.
34:50What I'm realising is, it's not about witchcraft,
34:54but about women.
34:5718th of August, 1612, the trial of the Pendle witches began.
35:02Professor Ronald Hutton is a leading expert on these trials.
35:07So when someone's accused for being a witch,
35:10what evidence has to come forward
35:12to allow the prosecution to sentence them to death?
35:16In any European witch trial, there are always two things going on.
35:21One is a pact with the devil,
35:23and the churchmen and the magistrates are mostly interested in that.
35:27The other is the harm they've done to fellow humans
35:31as a result of that pact with the devil.
35:34The hardest questions for historians to answer
35:37is why it seems quite a few people made voluntary confessions
35:42of being harmful witches.
35:44On the continent, there's not much of a problem
35:47because they were tortured until they couldn't bear it any longer.
35:51But torture of that kind is illegal in England.
35:54So we're left to guess.
35:56I need to stress so much
35:58that everything we know about the Pendle witches is third-hand.
36:02It's from the testimony of Roger Nowell,
36:05who gets what are supposed to be their confessions,
36:08and then it's embellished by the clerk of the court
36:11who publishes the evidence as we have it.
36:14So it's filtered. We can only speculate.
36:17One of the obvious conclusions to draw
36:21is that Roger Nowell misled the accused
36:25when he was first taking the evidence
36:28by making them suppose that if they told him what he wanted,
36:31they'd be spared.
36:33Now, that does happen, for sure, in some other English witch trials
36:37with unscrupulous magistrates,
36:39and there's a very strong suspicion in this case.
36:43Although some are said to have confessed to witchcraft,
36:46many continued to protest their innocence,
36:49including Alison Devis' mother, Elizabeth.
36:55But a new prosecution witness was about to surprise everyone.
37:00The star witness is nine years old, and she is Janet.
37:06She is, tragically, the daughter of Elizabeth.
37:11The daughter of Elizabeth, there in the pen,
37:14and therefore the younger sister of James and Alison,
37:19Elizabeth's other children, who are also on trial.
37:23And Roger has got hold of this girl
37:26and persuaded her to provide this massive evidence
37:30against her own family.
37:32Everybody is amazed when this child enters the court,
37:36sets her podium and begins to give evidence.
37:41Janet is really ready to give this very detailed testimony,
37:45where she says she's seen Alison's familiar,
37:48it is the black dog that John Law says cursed him,
37:51she's seen Alison consort with the devil.
37:54According to the account of the trial, Janet also gave evidence
37:59that a coven of around 20 witches had gathered at her home on Good Friday
38:04and her mother, Elizabeth, was a witch.
38:08We don't really know if she is aware of what she's doing,
38:13but she provides exactly what the prosecution wants.
38:17She accuses them of dealing with spirits in detail
38:22and of murdering people by witchcraft.
38:26There were legal limits of who could testify in court.
38:30We were essentially not meant to allow witness statements from children.
38:35In his determination to prosecute witches,
38:38the new king had lowered the bar for evidence.
38:41One of the things that James says in Demonology
38:44is that it's a good idea to question the children of suspected witches
38:48so that their evidence is admissible and should be listened to.
38:51This is really significant in the Pandal Trials.
38:54Janet has been underneath the care of the judges themselves.
38:59So she, this whole time, has probably been being fed lines
39:03about what it is that her family has done wrong,
39:06and Janet gives really detailed testimony.
39:12Janet's evidence sealed the fate of her family and many others.
39:17Two days later, ten people were hanged on Gallows Hill.
39:22Eight of them were women.
39:25Among them were Alison Devis, her mother Elizabeth, and her brother James.
39:31It was the first mass execution for witchcraft in England.
39:38The Pandal victims were a small group of impoverished people
39:42living in the north of England.
39:44Yes, they were different, unusual,
39:48maybe a little wild, maybe even slightly odd,
39:52but what did they really do wrong?
39:55I think they were incredibly unlucky.
39:58They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
40:00They were in the middle of this perfect storm
40:03where powerful men used them to further their career
40:07and curry favour with a deeply paranoid king.
40:13The account of the trials by Thomas Potts,
40:16clerk of the court, was published the following year,
40:19spreading the myth that dangerous witches had been discovered in Pandal.
40:25This idea of big numbers of the same family
40:29all being accused for witchcraft was a news sensation.
40:33You have all sorts of media that crops up around it.
40:37So there are all of these people
40:39who are making money off of the accusations as well.
40:44The Pandal trials were followed by many more women
40:47being persecuted as witches.
40:50The problem with witch trials is that people started to confess,
40:54and once people confessed,
40:56it made more people believe in the power of witches.
41:00You had 200 years where women were terrified of being called a witch.
41:05You had to show how godly you were, you had to show how quiet you were,
41:09and you wonder in the modern age
41:11why it is that women still aren't equal,
41:14still don't speak up,
41:16still are afraid to say,
41:18here's a terrible thing that's happened to me.
41:20Why don't women do that when, at least in theory,
41:23at least in law, we have this equality?
41:25And you do wonder,
41:27is it because of hundreds of years of having to stay quiet?
41:30Is it because the gender norms of the time
41:33that were thrust upon women
41:35have an effect on women today?
41:39If anyone thinks they're not connected to the witch trials,
41:42one of the biggest things that has struck me
41:45is that women were silenced,
41:49women didn't have a voice, they were repressed,
41:52and that is something that has stuck through society,
41:57and it has been repeated and repeated and repeated,
42:01and it's still a big issue now in modern day.
42:10We all know these trials as the witch trials.
42:14I'm feeling very much like I want to rename them,
42:17and I'm sure there are many, many women out there
42:19who are with me on this.
42:21These are trials of women, the misrepresentation of women,
42:25the persecution, the abuse of women,
42:30of all ages.
42:35Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum
42:37was the idea of an evil woman in league with the devil,
42:40responsible for all the world's ills.
42:45In Germany, women were tortured before confessing to witchcraft
42:49and condemning themselves to death.
42:53The Pendel Witch Trials started with a girl in the woods
42:56muttering a curse under her breath.
42:59They ended with the execution of ten innocent people.
43:05I felt like I was...
43:09I needed to do this,
43:11because it feels like it's part of my female story.
43:15I thought I was just interested in witches,
43:18but the more I looked into it, the more I have found so much in it
43:24that I feel like I've cracked open a bit of myself as a woman.
43:29This group of women have come together on Pendel Hill
43:33to perform a ceremony honouring those executed as witches.
43:38We're all here to heal together, and this is the last full moon,
43:41and that's why this has been so important to us tonight,
43:44because we've all followed the Pendel Witches.
43:46I'm from Blackburn, which is just down the road.
43:48So who's a practising witch, then? Is that OK to ask?
43:52Yeah.
43:54Not everybody is a practising witch.
43:56But we are a sisterhood, regardless.
43:58Right, I'm just going to cast a circle now, ladies.
44:05We're going to set our energy more and more into this moment,
44:08here and now.
44:10I am the maiden.
44:12I see the world with a childlike wonder.
44:16A joyful song plays in my heart.
44:19I am the mother.
44:22I am the mother.
44:24My womb is ripe and ready to bring forth new life.
44:30I am the crone.
44:32The silver strands in my hair speak of the wisdom I possess.
44:37The lines on my face tell of the strength and endurance
44:42of a lifetime of journeys.
44:45I am the witch.
44:48I am maiden, mother, crone and goddess.
44:53I stand in my sovereignty.
44:55I stand in my sovereignty.
44:57And I send healing to my ancestors.
44:59And I send healing to my ancestors.
45:02I thank you for the strong woman I am today.
45:04I thank you for the strong woman I am today.
45:07And we will make you proud.
45:09And we will make you proud.
45:11Thank you, ladies.
45:14For nearly 200 years,
45:16the poison of the witch trials infected Europe.
45:20And they spread even further.
45:243,000 miles away and 80 years after Janet Davies
45:28accused her family of witchcraft,
45:30her name would appear in a book on a magistrate's desk.
45:35That magistrate's desk was in Salem, Massachusetts,
45:40where the world's most infamous witch trials
45:43were about to be unleashed.
45:46Next time, I'll cross the Atlantic
45:49to investigate the Salem witch trials.
45:52She tells an extraordinary lurid tale
45:54of having met with the devil,
45:56and she says that there are actually nine witches at large,
45:59not just the suspected three.
46:01I'll explore some modern-day witch hunts.
46:04Google any female politician and the word witch,
46:07and I promise you, you will see images of them
46:10with green skin and a pointy hat.
46:12And discover why witch trials are still with us today.
46:16We're in a period which feels
46:18probably the most unstable it has felt
46:21since Heinrich Kramer wrote that book.
46:24No wonder everyone's grasping for these conspiracy theories.
46:37♪ ♪