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A woman with that name was listed in a group of 20 tried at Lancaster Assizes on 24 March 1634, although it cannot be certain that it was the same Jennet Device. [83] The charge against her was the murder of Isabel Nutter, William Nutter's wife. [84] In that series of trials the chief prosecution witness was a ten-year-old boy, Edmund Robinson.
The Late Lancashire Witches belongs to a subgenre of English Renaissance drama that exploited public interest in the scandalous subject of witchcraft. The most famous of these plays is Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1603–6), though Middleton's The Witch (c. 1609–16) and The Witch of Edmonton (1621) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, are other notable examples.
Thomas Potts, the clerk to the Lancaster Assizes, was ordered by the trial judges Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley to write an account of the proceedings, making them some of the most famous and best recorded witch trials of the 17th century. Potts completed the work on 16 November 1612, and submitted it to the judges for review.
Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins's The Discovery of Witches (1647), showing witches identifying their familiar spirits. Following the Lancaster Witch Trials (1612–1634), William Harvey, physician to King Charles I of England, had been ordered to examine the four women accused, [29] and from this there came a requirement to have material proof of being a witch. [30]
The 1612 trials were, by no means, the last in the county. For instance, in 1634, there were further witch trials at Pendle itself. [7] Cunning men and women operated in Lancashire right through the 1800s. Take, for instance, Owd [Old] Rollison at Worsley with his small library of occult books. [8]
Lancashire witch trials (1612) [ edit ] In 1612 Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley were the presiding judges in the Lancashire witch trials, held at the Lancaster assizes in August, in which twenty men and women were tried as witches, among them the Pendle witches and the Samlesbury witches , of whom eleven were found guilty and were hanged.
Edmund Robinson was an English ten-year-old boy from Wheatley Lane, Lancashire, who sparked a witch-hunt. His story was the inspiration for the 1634 play The Late Lancashire Witches . [ 1 ]
Since the band's breakup, one of her writing projects is a play based on the same Pendle Witch Trials. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] The 1990 novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (later adapted for television ) features several witch characters named after the original Pendle witches, including Agnes Nutter, a prophet burned at the stake, and her ...