Three women from Samlesbury, Lancashire, were accused of practising witchcraft. Their trial at Lancaster Assizes in 1612 was one in a series of witch trials. The charges against the women included child murder and cannibalism. The case against the three women collapsed when the chief prosecution witness, Grace Sowerbutts, was exposed by the trial judge as a perjuring tool of a Catholic priest.
About Samlesbury witches in brief
Three women from Samlesbury, Lancashire, were accused of practising witchcraft. Their trial at Lancaster Assizes in 1612 was one in a series of witch trials. The charges against the women included child murder and cannibalism. The case against the three women collapsed when the chief prosecution witness, Grace Sowerbutts, was exposed by the trial judge as a perjuring tool of a Catholic priest. King James I, who came to the English throne from Scotland in 1603, had a keen interest in witchcraft. In 1604 a new witchcraft law was enacted, imposing the death penalty for causing harm by the use of magic or the exhumation of corpses for magical purposes. The trial of the Samlesburys is perhaps one clear example of that trend; it has been described as \”largely a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda\”, and even as a show-trial, to demonstrate that Lancashires was being purged of witches and also of ‘popish plotters’ The trial was unusual for England at that time in two respects: Thomas Potts, the clerk to the court, published the proceedings in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster; and the number of the accused found guilty and hanged was unusually high, ten at Lancaster and another at York. The accused witches lived in Lancashhire, an English county which, at the end of the 16th century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people.
The 16th-century English Reformation, during which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the pope and the Catholic Church, split the Southworth family. Sir John Southworth, head of the family, was a leading recusant who had been arrested several times for refusing to abandon his Catholic faith. His eldest son, also called John, was disinherited, but he did convert to the church. One of the witches, Jane Southworth was the widow of John Singleton, who lived just outside the village of Pendle Hill, near Fence Hill, Lancs. Jane had been widowed only a few months before her trial for witchcraft on March 21, 1612, and had seven children. She asked John Fence Lawlar, a pedlar from Halifax, to pedlar her husband’s house. John refused even if he could avoid it as he believed that Jane would probably kill her husband and had asked him for him to do so. On March 21 1612 a man called Alizon Device asked John Lawlar for help with his son, John, and asked him to pass his son’s house to him as he thought it would be a good way of avoiding the trial. John, who was a Catholic, refused to pass the house to John and refused to let him go. The Pendle witches, who included the Pendle Witches, were tried at the same assizes, and all three women were acquitted.
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This page is based on the article Samlesbury witches published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
