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The Lancashire Witches is the only one of William Harrison Ainsworth's forty novels that has remained continuously in print since its first publication. [1] It was serialised in the Sunday Times newspaper in 1848; a book edition appeared the following year, published by Henry Colburn .
Potts was employed as a clerk of the peace for the East Riding of Yorkshire in about 1610–11, and was an associate clerk on the northern assize circuit in the summer of 1612, when the Lancashire witch trials took place. [5] Although he had sufficient legal training to be able to advise Justices of the Peace, he had not received a university ...
Pendle Hill from the northwest. On the right is the eastern edge of Longridge Fell, which is separated from Pendle Hill by the Ribble valley.. The accused witches lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a county which, at the end of the 16th century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region: an area "fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the ...
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.
The trial of the Samlesbury witches is perhaps one example of that trend; it has been described as "largely a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda", [6] 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" (i.e ...
The story of the Pendle witches is a notorious and well-documented example of cases brought against alleged witches in 17th-century England. [ 7 ] The area became popular with ghost hunters after Living channel's show Most Haunted visited it for a live investigation on Halloween 2004. [ 8 ]
But pamphlets about cases of witchcraft tended to use 'Discovery' in their titles (The most strange and admirable discouerie of the three witches of Warboys, The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster, etc.). Ady's point is that he discovers what 'witches' really are, despite all the accusations: innocent.
An illustration of Ann Redferne and Chattox, two of the Pendle witches, from Ainsworth's novel The Lancashire Witches. The Pendle witch trials of 1612 associated Lancashire with witchcraft in the popular imagination: this was particularly so in the nineteenth century after William Ainsworth's celebrated historical novel The Lancashire Witches (1848).