In 1612, in the Forest of Pendle in Lancashire, twenty people were arrested on charges of witchcraft. Ten of them were hanged. The youngest was a girl of nine years old, imprisoned on the testimony of her own family, who spent months in the dungeons of Lancaster Castle before the trials began.
Her name was Jennet Device. She was the one who testified against the others.
I want to start with Jennet because she is the detail that refuses to resolve into anything comfortable; not into the story of evil persecutors and innocent victims, not into the story of genuine folk magic practitioners unfairly condemned, not into any of the tidier narratives the witch trials tend to generate. She was a child. She was used. She survived, as far as we know, and was later herself accused of witchcraft in 1634. What her life felt like from the inside is something history cannot tell us.
The witch trials are full of people like Jennet Device. People whose stories resist simplification, whose suffering was real, and whose circumstances were so entangled in the specific social, economic, and psychological conditions of their time and place that no single explanation adequately accounts for them.
Which is exactly why they matter to us, and why understanding them honestly is one of the most important things a practitioner can do.
The scale of what happened
Before the individual cases, the numbers deserve acknowledgement.
Between approximately 1450 and 1750, across Europe and in the European colonies of North America, somewhere between forty thousand and sixty thousand people were executed following accusations of witchcraft. The range is wide because the records are incomplete, and the true figure may be higher. The majority (estimates range from seventy to eighty percent) were women. The peak of the prosecutions was not the medieval period, as is commonly assumed, but the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when Europe was tearing itself apart over questions of religious authority and the boundaries of acceptable belief.
In Britain the numbers were lower than in continental Europe: approximately five hundred executions in England, around fifteen hundred in Scotland, where the trials were significantly more intense. Ireland, perhaps surprisingly given its later association with witch figures like Biddy Early, had very few formal trials; the most famous, the Kilkenny trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in 1324, predated the main period of persecution by more than a century.
These numbers matter because they correct a persistent misconception: that the witch trials were primarily a medieval phenomenon driven by the Catholic Church. The reality is considerably more complicated and considerably more disturbing. Most of the trials occurred in Protestant as well as Catholic regions, during a period of intense religious upheaval, and were driven by a combination of factors that had very little to do with any genuine belief in the magical powers of the accused.
The Pendle Witches, 1612
The Pendle trials are among the best documented in English history, partly because the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, published a detailed account the following year, and partly because the circumstances were unusually complex even by the standards of the period.
The accused were mostly members of two rival families (the Demdikes and the Chatoxes) living in poverty in the Forest of Pendle, a remote and economically marginal area of Lancashire. Several of them had reputations as cunning folk: healers and charmers who offered services to their community and were understood, by that community, to possess some form of supernatural ability. This is important: they were not random innocents with no connection to magical practice. They were, in the terms of their own time and place, practitioners.
What brought them to trial was a combination of local enmity, economic desperation, and the particular anxieties of Jacobean England under a king (James I) who had written his own treatise on witchcraft, the Daemonologie, and who brought to the English throne a genuine and intense personal preoccupation with the demonic.
The testimony that condemned them was extracted from family members, including the nine-year-old Jennet Device, under conditions that no modern legal system would consider remotely acceptable. Accused people were sleep-deprived, kept in appalling conditions, and questioned repeatedly until their answers matched what the interrogators expected to hear. Confession was considered the highest form of evidence, and confessions were obtained by methods that ensured they would be forthcoming.
What the Pendle trials tell us is not that witchcraft was real and dangerous and deserving of prosecution. They tell us that poverty, family conflict, local enmity, and the specific political anxieties of a particular historical moment could combine, under the right conditions, to produce a catastrophe for the most vulnerable people in a community.
The North Berwick Trials, 1590–91
If the Pendle trials reveal the role of local community dynamics in producing witch accusations, the North Berwick trials reveal something different and, in some ways, more disturbing: the role of state power and royal paranoia.
In 1589, James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) sailed to Denmark to collect his new bride, Anne of Denmark. The voyage was troubled by severe storms, and on the return journey the storms worsened. Someone, in the logic of the time, was responsible. The storms had been too severe, too persistent, too specifically inconvenient to be natural.
What followed was an investigation that eventually implicated over a hundred people in a supposed conspiracy to kill the king through magical means. The confessions extracted (under torture, in almost every case) described sabbats on the beach at North Berwick, dances around the church, the raising of storms through ritual, and the creation of wax images of the king. The accused included a schoolmaster named John Fian, who was tortured so extensively that his fingernails were pulled out and needles driven into the exposed flesh, and who confessed to everything before retracting his confession and being executed anyway.
The North Berwick trials are significant for several reasons. They demonstrate the direct role of royal authority in generating and sustaining witch panics; James VI was personally involved in the interrogations, personally present at some of the torture sessions, personally convinced that he was the target of a demonic conspiracy. His subsequent Daemonologie was not an abstract theological exercise. It was the product of a man who genuinely believed he had survived a supernatural assassination attempt.
They also demonstrate something that the psychological literature on coerced confessions has documented extensively: that torture does not produce truth. It produces whatever the torturer needs to hear. The confessions from North Berwick were elaborate, detailed, and almost entirely the product of extreme physical suffering imposed on people who had no other means of making it stop.
The Salem Trials, 1692
Salem is the trial everyone knows, partly because it has been so extensively dramatised and partly because it occurred within a context (colonial New England) that left unusually detailed records.
In the winter of 1692, in the village of Salem, Massachusetts, a group of young girls began exhibiting strange symptoms: convulsions, visions, the sensation of being pinched and bitten by invisible forces. When pressed to identify the source of their torment, they named names. What followed was a cascade of accusations, arrests, trials, and executions that claimed the lives of nineteen people hanged and one man pressed to death under stones, with several more dying in prison.
The Salem trials have been analysed from so many angles that the literature on them could fill a library. Historians have proposed ergot poisoning (a fungal contamination of the rye crop that can produce hallucinations) as an explanation for the girls’ symptoms. They have proposed genuine childhood hysteria, produced and amplified by a community under enormous stress. They have proposed deliberate fabrication, motivated by local property disputes and longstanding community enmities. They have proposed the specific psychological pressure of a Puritan theology that located the devil’s work everywhere and provided no acceptable outlet for the ordinary anxieties of adolescence.
The most honest answer is probably all of these at once. Salem was not one thing. It was a community under pressure (theological, political, economic, and interpersonal) in which the witch accusation provided a framework for expressing tensions that had no other acceptable outlet. The people who were accused were, in almost every case, people who had already attracted suspicion or resentment or fear in their community for reasons that had nothing to do with witchcraft. The trials gave existing social fractures a lethal legal form.
What ended them is, in some ways, more instructive than what caused them. When the accusations reached high-status members of the community (including the governor’s own wife) the framework began to crack. The same logic that had convicted the marginally positioned suddenly seemed unreliable when applied to the powerful. The trials were suspended. The surviving accused were eventually released. Several of the accusers later recanted, one of them publicly and with evident anguish.
The machinery of persecution, it turned out, required a specific class of victim to function. When it tried to consume the wrong people, it stopped.
What the trials were actually about
Three cases, three different contexts, three different proximate causes. What connects them?
The historian Lyndal Roper, whose work on the witch trials in German-speaking lands is among the most psychologically sophisticated in the field, argues that witch accusations were not primarily about witchcraft. They were about anxiety; specifically, the anxieties of communities under stress, looking for a human agent to blame for suffering that was otherwise inexplicable or uncontrollable.
The women, and they were mostly women, who were accused were not random. They were people who occupied particular social positions: elderly women dependent on community charity who inspired guilt in those they depended on; midwives and healers whose access to the intimate moments of birth and illness made them suspects when things went wrong; women who lived outside the approved social structures of wife and mother; women who were too poor to defend themselves and too isolated to be protected.
The witch accusation gave a community’s undirected anxiety a specific target, a human face, a legal mechanism for expulsion. The accused woman was not condemned because she had done something. She was condemned because she was the kind of person whom it was socially possible to condemn, and because condemning her resolved, temporarily, a tension that had no other available resolution.
The community’s own fears, displaced onto a convenient other and then destroyed in the hope that the destruction of the other will destroy the fear.
It never does, of course. The trials always ended not because the witches were found and eliminated but because the accusation machinery eventually became socially unsustainable. The anxiety that produced them remained. It always does.
What this means for practice
Understanding the witch trials honestly (not as a simple story of innocent victims and evil persecutors, not as evidence that witchcraft was real and dangerous, but as a complex, psychologically legible, socially produced catastrophe) does several things for the modern practitioner.
It grounds the practice in a real history that deserves to be honoured rather than romanticised. The people who were accused were not, for the most part, glamorous magical practitioners whose power threatened the established order. They were the poor, the marginal, the socially vulnerable; people whose suffering was real and whose deaths were not heroic but simply terrible.
It clarifies why the no-gatekeeping, no-performance, privacy-first orientation of a practice like this one matters. The historical witch was destroyed partly by visibility; by being seen, by being known, by having a reputation that made her a viable target. The practitioner who keeps her practice private and personal and entirely her own is not being timid. She is being historically intelligent.
And it reminds us that the impulse to identify, isolate, and destroy the person who seems different (the person who holds knowledge others do not, who lives outside the approved structures, who cannot easily be classified or controlled) is not a historical aberration. It is a persistent human tendency that requires persistent human vigilance.
The best response to that tendency is not to hide but to build something so grounded, so genuinely yours, and so quietly powerful that it requires no external validation and offers no convenient target.
That is what practice is for.
