A Light Far-Shining: In Search of the Pendle WitchesbyMary SharrattIn 2002, I moved to East Lancashire, England, the rugged Pennine landscape that borders on the West Yorkshire Dales. My study window looks out on Pendle Hill, famous throughout the world as the place where George Fox received the ecstatic vision that inspired him to found the Quakers. But the Pendle region is also renowned for its legends of the Lancashire Witches. In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches at Lancaster, based largely on “evidence” given by a nine-year-old girl and her older brother, who appeared to suffer from learning difficulties. She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.Not bad for an eighty-year-old lady! In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture in the witch trials, so the trial transcripts supposedly reveal her voluntary confession, although her statement might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What is interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a witch and a healer. Local people called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb. One evening, at sunset, he appeared to her in the form of a beautiful young man, stepping out of the quarry in Goldshaw, just outside Newchurch in Pendle. Over the years, he taught her all she needed to know about magic. The belief in familiar spirits appeared to have been one of the cornerstones of British witchcraft and cunning craft. Without the familiar, the magical practitioner had no powers. Tibb could shape-shift from human form into the guise of a hare, a brown dog, or a black cat. Some of Elizabeth Southerns’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts. They reveal no evidence of diabolical beliefs, but use ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her spell to cure a bewitched person is a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary: It appears that Elizabeth Southerns was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been fairly commonplace only a generation or two earlier. Traditionally, the Catholic Church embraced many practices that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and even communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. However, Elizabeth Southerns had the misfortune to live in a time and place when Catholicism itself became conflated with witchcraft. Even the act of transubstantiation, in which the communion bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, was viewed by Protestants as devilish sorcery. Keith Thomas’s book Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.Upon Good-Friday, I will fast while I may The crimes of which Elizabeth Southerns and the other alleged witches were accused dated back years before the trial. The trial itself might have never happened had it not been for King James I’s obsession with the occult. Until his reign, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England. But James’s book, Daemonologie, basically a witch hunter’s manual, presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. To curry favour with him, his loyal subjects, such as the Lancashire magistrate Roger Nowell (who would have been my landlord if I had lived back then), went out of his way to arrest the Pendle Witches and even went to the farfetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. But Elizabeth Southerns deserves to be remembered for her life rather than her tragic death, chained to an iron ring on the floor of the Well Tower Dungeon in Lancaster Castle. I am absolutely fascinated with this strong woman who was a widowed quite young and raised her children and grandchildren single-handedly in a place called Malkin Tower. The building no longer exists, but the site is listed on the Ordinance Survey Map. During the week, I research and write the novel and during the weekend, I hike on the public footpaths to the locations mentioned in the trial. I found the quarry where she first met her familiar spirit; the site where her protégé and arch rival Chattox lived; and Greenhead Manor, the home of two of the witches’ alleged victims. Mother Demdike is dead but not forgotten. In 1627, only fifteen years after the Pendle Witch Trial, a woman named Dorothy Shaw of Skippool, Lancashire, was accused by her neighbour of being a “witch and a Demdyke,” showing that the name Demdike had already become a byword for witch. There are legends that Mother Demdike appeared to poor shepherds to help them find water for their flocks in summer droughts. What impressed me when I first moved here is the mark the Pendle Witches left behind. Long after their deaths, they became part of the undying spirit of the region and its folklore. I was amazed to see the images of witches everywhere: on pubs, buses, bumperstickers, bookmarks, even business logos. History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. As contemporary British storyteller Hugh Lupton has said, if you go deep enough into the old tales and can present them in an evocative and meaningful way to a modern audience, you become the living voice in an ancient tradition. This is what I hope I can achieve. Mary Sharratt is an American writer living in Lancashire, England. Winner of the 2005 Willa Literary Award and a Minnesota Book Award Finalist, she is the author of three novels, all historicals, centered on strong women: Summit Avenue (Coffee House 2000), The Real Minerva (Houghton Mifflin 2004), and The Vanishing Point (Houghton Mifflin 2006). She is the co-editor of the fiction anthology, Bitch Lit (Crocus Books, 2006), a celebration of female anti-heroes. Her short fiction has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Twin Cities Noir. Sharratt is a Reviews Editor for the Historical Novels Review, and her feature articles and author interviews appear in Solander, published by the Historical Novel Society. She has taught writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and has given workshops in the US and UK on the theme of women and fairy tales. Her new novel-in-progress, A Light Far-Shining: A Novel of the Pendle Witches, has sold to Houghton Mifflin. Visit her web site, or e-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |