At about the same time as the investigations into the Pendle group of witches was being carried out there was a parallel investigation into another group of people who lived not very far away and their trial coincided with that of the Pendle group and took place at Lancaster concurrent with that of the Pendle group.
The worrying thing about this trial is that the allegations were found to be totally false and were the invention of a malicious person, who persuaded a child to incriminate her family, amongst others. I think, kitties, that this has some bearing on the Pendle witch trials and I can't help wondering if the same thing might have taken place in the Pendle witch trials. The difference between the two sets of trials seems to have been that, at various times, some of the Pendle group confessed to being witches, whereas the Samlesbury group were consistently adamant about their innocence. Some of the accusations made by the child who was accusing her mother, amongst others of witchcraft in the Samlesbury case were murder, grave robbery and a horrific story of cannibalism. Three of the Samlesbury group pleaded tearfully with the magistrate to find out who had put the child up to this, and why. The child in the Samlesbury case broke down in court and told the magistrate that she had not been prepared for such intensive cross examination.
Again, I don't know why some of the Pendle people confessed, it doesn't seem to make sense, unless they were tortured in some way. There might, also, have been some malice between the Pendle group towards each other resulting from the feud between Demdike's family and Chattox's family and each family seems to have been happy to accuse the other of witchcraft. Perhaps each family would have been pleased to see the other family executed. If that is the case the unfortunate consequence was that they all went to the gallows, with the exceptions of Elizabeth Southerns (Demdike) who died in prison before the executions and Jennet Device. They also took other people with them to the gallows, many of whom were identified by Jennet Device as being at the meeting at Malkin Tower and various of them were found guilty of harming others by witchcraft. Perhaps there is a lesson there for anyone who has a feud with their neighbours.
These were dark times in England, kitties. They were times of widespread persecution of Roman Catholics. King James, who was on the throne at the time of the Lancashire witch trials, had taken over the throne of England from Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry the Eighth, who had ruled over the split with the Roman Catholic church (because of his liberal views on marriage). Henry had set himself up as the head of the Church of England and initiated the 'dissolution of the monasteries'. There was widespread persecution of any priests and monks who refused to accept the king as the head of the Church, this was difficult for some of the clergy to accept. The punishment dealt out to any of them who refused to accept the monarch as the head of the Church was even harsher than that handed out to a convicted witch. I know it seems strange to say that a sentence could be harsher than the death penalty, but whereas the punishment for a convicted witch would normally be to be hanged, the usual punishment for being a priest who would not accept the monarch as head of the Church was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. This did not apply to as many of the monks and clergy as you might think as the changes were introduced slowly, firstly the small monasteries were closed and then the larger ones, it was a sort of creeping change. Many of the priests accepted the monarch as head of the Church, probably thinking that, as the alternative was death, it was better to try to ride out the storm until such times as they could restore their Church to the old ways. The monasteries were closed down, and the land attached to them confiscated by the monarch. These possessions were sold off at rock bottom prices to whoever wanted them and could afford to buy them. Some monasteries were burnt down. The persecution of Roman Catholics was at it's height at the time of the trials in this story. However, Lancashire seems to have been seen as a relatively safe haven for them at that time because of it's relative remoteness from the central government.
The plot to incriminate the Samlesbury group seems to have been put into motion by a catholic priest who was a relative of one of them and who, according to the girl's confession to falsifying evidence, put her up to accusing them of witchcraft. It seems that he had a grudge against some of the Samlesbury group because they had turned away from the Roman Catholic faith.
Although the Samlesbury group were tried in Lancaster at the same time as the Pendle group, they were tried by different magistrates and the implications of the case do not seem to have occurred to the magistrates who were in charge of the Pendle group of trials.
I have tried to give you a general idea of the story of the Lancashire witches, cats. The story is quite complicated in places, though, and so there is a lot that I have not really been able to cover. It is from the book "The Trials of the Lancashire Witches", which was written by Edgar Peel and Pat Southern. I was pretty catfused after I read the book the first time as the story seems to jump about a bit. Also some of the people in the story have very similar names, but I suppose that I can not blame the authors for that, can I? So I had to read it twice to get a better idea of what happened. I have checked with Amazon and they can get the book if you want to find out more.
The older book, which was written in the 1800s by W. Harrison Ainsworth and is called "The Lancashire Witches", can be pretty hard going as it is written in an old style. I couldn't scan a picture of the cover of this book as I couldn't find my copy. However, if you want the book, Amazon would probably be able to supply it, but when I wrote this they said it was temporarily out of stock.