Original subtitles

This program me contains some strong language

Hi, team. Hello. Hello.

Are we ready to talk witches?

We are ready. How are you feeling?

I'm good. I'm feeling it, yes, I'm feeling witchy.

I'm Surannejones.

And for as long as I can remember, I've been intrigued

by the idea of witches.

I love that, yeah.

BLEEP the cleaning - I'm going to ride the broomstick.

Exactly!

No, Jackson, don't follow me.

Shall I send you one and you can respond?

Yeah.

THEY HOWL LIKE WOLVES

But for much of history,

witches and witchcraft have been viewed with fear and suspicion.

You have 200 years where women are terrified of being called a witch.

I'm going on an epic journey to uncover what led

to some of the biggest trials in history.

There is a worry that witches are rampant,

and they are out to hurt the King and society.

Starting in Pendle, close to where I was born...

This is the dungeon where the witches were imprisoned.

Oh, my gosh.

..|'ll travel to Germany...

If disaster strikes, we become ready to see evil in other people.

...and to the American town of Salem - site of the most

infamous witch trials of all...

If it was the last moment I was to live, God knows I am innocent.

...to discover why so many women were accused of witchcraft...

This really laid the foundations for a hundred thousand

trials of witches, 75% of whom were women.

...and what their history means for us today.

Women were silenced, women didn't have a voice,

they were repressed.

And it has been repeated and repeated and repeated.

What do people think that they are going to achieve by sending those?

They want to shut you up.

They want you to be so scared that you'll stop talking.

Argh! Yes! ARGHHH!

As an actor,

I've always loved strong female roles.

But I've never played a witch.

I guess for most people a witch is...

...a pointy hat, green skin, old, crone,

one eye up here and one eye down there

and she laughs like this. SHE CACKLES

Ooh, that's a good laugh, I'm taking that.

Someone cast me as a witch. I mean, come on.

Growing up, I would much rather play the witch.

To me it's just always been more intriguing.

Popular culture has given us countless portrayals of the witch,

from fairytale crone to magical teenager.

But none of these get us anywhere close

to how dark the real story is.

The story of the thousands of women who were accused of witchcraft in

the 17th century.

And to understand that, I need to head north.

Sol grew up in Oldham, it's near Pendle,

near enough, certainly, to know about the Pendle Witches.

In 1612, ten people from the area of Pendle were executed

for witchcraft, eight of them were women.

It's one of the most notorious executions

for witchcraft in English history.

So this area is called the Forest of Boland

and the walk that I'm doing now is what's known as

the walk that the witches did.

Ancl they knew that in all likelihood they would be walking

to their death.

I mean, that just gives me a chill.

By exploring what happened here in Lancashire,

I'm hoping to shed light on events far beyond 17th century Pendle.

What prompted witch hunts in Britain and Europe?

Who was accused of witchcraft and why?

And what can this horror story from 400 years ago tell us about events

in the present day?

In the early 17th century, Lancashire was a sparsely populated

rural area still coming to terms with the religious

and political upheaval of the last century.

England in the 16th century went through lots of different monarchs

as most people know.

So they went from Catholic to Protestant,

to Catholic to Protestant, erm...

And obviously people's religious allegiances couldn't change

so quickly.

But Lancashire was quite interesting because it did have

a high Catholic community.

Lancashire had an inclination towards Catholicism,

while the rest of England was a broadly Protestant country.

So that set it apart - it was seen as a kind of edge place,

as a rebellious place, as a place where problematic people might live.

Lancashire was known as the dark corner of the land,

the dark corner of England where traitors

and misfits ran away to.

I kind of like that.

I like that I'm from the dark corner.

But being a Catholic stronghold in a now Protestant country

meant that many suffered hardship.

Pendle is particularly down on its knees at this point in time

so some people are well-to-do farmers who do have money

and land and then you have various families who are just eking out

a living on what little they have got.

So there was more vagrancy, more poverty.

One of the key explanations for witchcraft in England

was this idea of charity refused.

So this is often a very destitute society where women

are particularly vulnerable.

They might be asking for money and then being refused money,

that old woman mutters something under her breath as she walks off

and then some harm befalls a person who's refused

the woman and they think it's her.

According to the account of the trials written by clerk of the court,

Thomas Potts, the Pendle Witch Trials were sparked by a similar incident.

Alison Device, a young beggar's daughter,

is walking through the woods.

She comes across a pedlar on the road

and she asks him for some pins. The pedlar refuses.

Alison is angry about that and she turns

and she whispers a curse uncler her breath.

The pedlar falls down partially paralysed.

Alison, confused and alarmed at her own strength

and believes that she now does indeed have magical powers.

This belief might seem strange to us today

but in 17th century Pendle, the Device family

were known to practise folk magic.

They are known locally as being "cunning folk",

and "cunning folk" is this kind of really interesting way

of thinking about people where there's this idea that

they have access to the supernatural.

Ancl it doesn't necessarily mean that they are consorting with the devil.

It could mean that they understand plants and herbs particularly well.

Magic was part of the fabric of everyday life.

It was how people made sense of the world

and how people made sense of misfortune as well.

And people could make money from magical healing.

But while magic might offer comfort and a way for

the Devices to make a living, Alison was convinced it

had given her the ability to harm.

She was devastated about this so she went to the family

and she begged for forgiveness for something that she believed

she was capable of, that she'd clone.

I feel that that moment, the choice that she made,

kicked off this huge thing.

Alison's confession was made at a time when

the idea of "witchcraft", and who could do it, was rapidly changing.

It's really uncommon in the mediaeval period to have

an accusation of someone being a witch.

Sometimes people are denounced as having clone magic,

but a lot of times, the people who are seen to be doing bad magic

with demons are monks, for example - people who speak Latin,

who can draw up a magic circle and bring up the dead

in order to learn things.

So, the witch - the fear of the witch -

completely, exponentially rises from the early 15th century onwards

because the idea of the witch fundamentally changes.

So rather than it being sort of a learned male magician

getting their power from magic books, it's this idea that

a witch is fundamentally giving their soul to the devil,

and they are therefore committing heresy.

When we think about the word "witch", it's a derogatory term.

Whereas, if we think about the word "wizard",

we would use that in a way of, "He's a wizard at that".

He's... You know, that's a positive, that's bigging someone up.

You would never use the word "witch" like that,

in fact you'd say, "Mm, she's a bit of a witch."

So when did "witch" become a term to describe

a woman intent on evil?

I'm meeting feminist art historian Luisa McCormack.

So have you ever heard of the Malleus Maleficarum?

No, I haven't.

So, the name roughly translates to the Hammer of Witches

and it was written and published in 1487 by

a German guy called Heinrich Kramer.

Ancl it's basically your kind of handy user's guide on how

to spot, capture, torture and kill your local witch.

So it's a really, really horrible piece of text,

it's incredibly misogynistic.

So do you know the things we should look out for?

Is that in there, for a witch?

I mean, basically all women. THEY LAUGH

All women... There we go, we just need to stop there, Luisa.

Pretty much.

So one of the things the Malleus did,

which had been around in previous scholarship

but really was cemented by Heinrich Kramer,

was this idea that women were uniquely positioned to be witches.

Kramer's text describes in detail the evil in the heart of every woman.

Kramer believed women were tempted by Satan to become witches

because of their uncontrolled sexuality.

It goes into extreme detail as to the kinds of things

that witches got up to.

That included keeping nests of penises in trees, erm...

Like you do. Yeah, as you do. We've all been there.

THEY LAUGH

MARION: One of the things he thinks that witches do is keep

men's penises, having cut them off and severed them,

or leave them on the male body and hide them, make them invisible.

The Malleus Maleficarum details incidents of his type of witchcraft.

So what the Malleus does is that it really changes

the understanding of the witch - not just about someone who

has made a pact with the devil, but a woman who has made

a sexual pact with the devil.

It is one of the most bonkers books that was ever written,

so included in it, he has large notations about the orgies

that witches have with the devil.

He wants you to know that when the devil has orgies

with witches and ejaculates, his semen is cold because the devil has

to steal semen from unsuspecting men in the night.

There is just more penis stealing than has ever been talked about in

any other book before or since.

It really tells you about his psyche,

that he was that obsessed with women's sexuality,

and I think it is worth remembering that he was a monk

and therefore celibate.

People were really sceptical about it, they very much took it

with a grain of salt.

The powers that be weren't necessarily convinced

that witches needed to be dealt with in the kind of ways

that he had detailed in the book.

But how did this idea spread through Europe

and then the new world and beyond?

It very much has to do with a contemporary piece of technology

that was invented in the 1440s, and that's Johannes Gutenberg

creating the printing press.

Cos what the printing press enables for the first time ever

in human history is the mass dissemination of ideas and imagery.

MARION: It's got everything - it's got sex, it's got conflict,

it's got witches, it's got magic, it's got the devil.

Why wouldn't it become popular?

A book that was absolutely laughed at

ancl considered to be of no account at all whatsoever in

a few decades kind of has a massive turnaround

and is treated as if it's the absolute truth.

So then he wrote this. Mhm.

Printing press allowed it to get out and all his ideas

and its almost a form of something going viral.

It's like... Very much so. ..when something goes on

Twitter, then everyone can comment about it.

40 years ago the internet was created.

We could never have conceived of how the internet kind of put power

in people's hands and, you know, all the ways it's changed us

as a society.

The printing press very much was the 1400s equivalent of that so

the Malleus Maleficarum is written sort of at

the birth of this brand new technology.

Kramer's concept of the evil witch was also popularised

by artists of the time.

The most famous print was by Albrecht Durer.

This is the, kind of the original crone, the original hag.

There's all sorts of interesting markers that are defining her as

an agent of chaos in this piece.

So, for example, the goat is riding in this direction but she is facing

in this direction, and her hair is streaming out in the wrong way.

There's loads of things which are kind of suggesting

to us that she's acting against nature.

She's depicted with a broomstick and a spindle,

both of which are traditional implements of womanhood.

But in the hands of the witch, the broomstick becomes this

phallic rod that she's clutching and so it really signifies this kind of

turning upside down

of traditional, like, good female values to have -

you know, the broomstick that you swept your yard with

becomes this kind of crazy phallic thing that she rides on

to her witches' sabbath.

I love that, yeah.

BLEEP the cleaning, I'm going to ride the broomstick.

Exactly, that's pretty much it.

Kramer's book led to thousands of trials of suspected witches...

most of them women.

To understand more about the executions

for witchcraft in Pendle, I've come to Germany.

This was the epicentre of the witch hunts that swept

through Europe in the seventeenth century.

I'm here to meet Professor Johannes Dillinger.

Could you tell me a bit about the history of witches

in Germany, Bamburg?

I would always say that we should see them in

the double context of the economy and politics. Uh-huh.

For the economy, was a shambles.

We are right in the middle of the so-called Little Ice Age that is

a period of extreme temperatures in European history.

It was extremely cold.

Of course, you know that Europe was an agricultural society.

Now, with a series of extremely cool not just years but decades,

society hit rock bottom.

People, they are starving.

It took the Germans a couple of years to learn

the concept of witchcraft.

You've already heard about Malleus Maleficarum

and Kramer who wrote it.

Kramer was a crackpot, and most people

did not respect him any too well.

It took the crisis of the Little Ice Age

to drive home Kramer's method that was essentially,

something's wrong with the world. Yeah.

What is this secret conspiracy at work?

Totally secret, basically invisible because it consists mostly

of women who hide, of course, behind men.

Witches, in a German context, are first and foremost

weather magicians.

We send the rain, we send the snow, the hailstones.

If disaster strikes, we become ready to see evil in other people.

Ancl the early modern understanding of evil is witchcraft.

We see spikes of witchcraft accusations in the years

of really, really bad weather and the crop failures,

so there is a causal connection between bad weather

and spates of witch hunting.

It's about witches harming society and wreaking havoc on society.

What we're living through now probably would be thought

of as witchcraft.

The mediaeval town of Bamburg saw some of Germany's most brutal trials.

So we have communities that are devastated,

that are starving, so the communities look to the rulers

and the rulers need someone to blame.

Ancl very few rulers were so enthusiastic about hunting witches

when actually just two Prince Bishops,

here at Bamburg.

But they accepted the witchcraft doctrine

line, hook and sinker.

The witch trial, we always have the difficulty of evidence.

How do you actually prove magic?

So local witch hunters, they're very often left

to their own devices and they used torture -

I'm tempted to say - liberally in order to overcome

the difficulties with evidence, and they are very aggressive.

I know a number of cases, one actually here at Bamburg,

that pregnant women were tortured for clays.

The state told them witches do exist,

all churches told them witches do exist,

science, the universities, told them yes, witches do exist.

Ancl all your neighbours were convinced that witches do exist.

Who are you to step out of line and say, no, they don't.

It was what they were told, they were frightened,

they were scared and they were starving.

Nearly 20,000 women were executed for witchcraft in the German lands.

This was made possible by the willingness of

the authorities to prosecute.

The same was true at home.

To find out how that developed here, I'm meeting Claire Mitchell KC.

So, before the Witchcraft Act, the church dealt with

what was right and wrong, or good or bad.

When the Witchcraft Act - both North and South of the border -

came into being, what that meant was that

the law had got its fingers into who was a witch.

So, for the first time, it became the state that was

weighing up who was a witch and deciding who should live or die.

In Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots brought in some trials,

but it really took off when her son, James VI and then

the First of England later, became involved

because he was obsessed with witchcraft, and therefore

he saw witches everywhere, that witches were amongst us.

In a real sense he literally wrote the book,

cos he wrote a book called Demonology,

giving all the detail- what they wear, what they do,

how to look out for them, how to deal with them.

Ancl so he, having written the book on it,

provided a legitimacy from the highest form

through to the people.

So there is no question in people's minds other than the devil was real,

that witches were amongst us, and they were doing bad things.

Cos the King said so. Absolutely.

What Demonology tells us about is what forms

a witch can take, what ills they might do,

how they might affect you.

For example, erm, if a woman has been standing near a bush

and that bush later goes on fire, is she a witch?

If a woman has been out late at night, is she a witch?

If a woman has cursed you in the market

and then later something happens to one of your family or

your animals or your stock, is she a witch?

I'm saying "she", in fact Demonology doesn't gender

the person - they just talk about acts of witchcraft

and neither do the acts themselves.

That's why it's so interesting... How society...

...how society decides that a witch is a woman

because the law doesn't in fact prescribe it.

In the period of the witch trials, often people who were accused

were outsiders in some way, so they might be heretics,

people who were seen to misbelieve in religion in some way.

They might be women who refused to be quiet

and do what their husbands told them to do.

They might be midwives or healers, they might be simply people you'd

had a business dispute with.

The thing about a witch trial in a lot of senses is that it's not

necessarily about rooting out magic, but a lot of the time

it's about rooting out parts of society that you don't like to see.

Ancl particularly at this time, we see a real interest

in kind of decreasing the influence that women have

in society more generally.

Of the 2,500 people executed in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act,

around 80% are thought to have been women.

So we've got King James, obsessed with witches, in Scotland.

How does that come over to England?

Because he becomes James the First of England,

and when he moves - he physically moves,

leaves Scotland and he goes down to England where he

brings with him all his ideas.

So the Pendle witch trials took place in 1612,

so this is not long after James VI of Scotland becomes

James I of England.

So imagine you are a judge in Lancashire.

You're probably not going to be super excited about that

because you're living in this really poor, rural area

and you know you want to rise through the ranks of the judiciary,

but, hey look, here's this new Scottish King

and he is really into cracking down on witches.

So this idea of you being able to find witches in

a community and hunt them out, exterminate them,

probably if you are an ambitious man is

a good way of gaining the King's favour.

One man's ambition would drive the prosecution of the Pendle witches.

News that Alison Device had paralysed a pedlar with a curse

reached the local magistrate, a man called Roger Nowell.

Alison was summoned before him, and according to

Thomas Potts' account, told Nowell everything he wanted to hear.

During Nowell's interrogation, Alison is said to have confessed

to witchcraft acts and to selling her soul to the devil.

I wonder if there was some prompting on his part.

Three other women were also implicated -

Alison's grandmother and two members of a local family with whom

the Devices had a long-standing dispute.

So, what should have been an isolated incident of

a man accusing this girl of witchcraft

and then her confessing, becomes something much bigger

because these two families, become embroiled.

They've had long-standing antagonisms against each other.

So it's also this idea of community conflict being

played out through witch accusations.

Grasping an opportunity to gain attention

and favour with the new King, magistrate Roger Nowell

sent all four women to Lancaster Gaol, to await trial.

400 years ago, the women of Pendle accused of witchcraft became victims

of ambitious men trying to further their careers.

Everything we understand about the Pendle story is from

the accounts of men.

The women's voices have not been heard.

But today there is a generation of women reclaiming

the label "witch', and they will not be silenced.

Hello. Oh!

Musician Natasha Khan, better known as Bat for Lashes, is one of them.

I've been looking at some videos of you. Can I start there? Yeah.

The screaming and the wailing and the... Oh, my God.

ETHEREAL HOWUNG

What does one have to do to howl?

Absolutely nothing. just do it? just do it.

Erm, so I'm not going to howl here, I'm just going to

go over there and howl. NATASHA LAUGHS

But you keep looking this way, cos I feel I need to do that...

Yeah. ..like, without...

No, Jackson, don't follow me, don't... I want to do this...

So you can do it for yourself? Yeah. Yeah. I just want to do,

I just want to try it.

Shall I send you one and you can respond?

Yeah...yeah.

NATASHA HOWLS LIKE A WOLF

SURANNE HOWLS BACK

Louder.

SURANNE HOWLS LOUDER

SHE HOWLS EVEN LOUDER

You really needed to do that.

F**k me.

I saw it, I saw it. Yes!

Oh, it feels so good, doesn't it? NATASHA LAUGHS

Oh, my God.

I mean that's better than a headache tablet. Yeah.

Women got told that our voices have to hit just maybe one or two notes

throughout the clay. Yeah. We're like this.

Ancl as a singer, for me, I had to really push myself

to move outside of this

SOFTLY: "I speak like this and I don't really move,

you know, outside of that," to, like,

LOUDLY: "Hey!" you know, on stage. Yeah.

It's, like, so liberating and I come off, like, buzzing.

I feel like it moves stuff.

It feels good so I don't really care, you know?

But taking it back to the witch thing, isn't that

so interesting that we do that ancl then we're instantly afraid...

Mm! ..of someone going "Oh, God, those two..."

Ancl that's the narrative in our heads that's like,

women getting together and making too much noise...

Yes, but, that's so true.

It's about using your voice, speaking out

and life's too short as well to do anything other than that.

I think we're all witches.

I think a witch is just a woman who is in tune

with mystical forces and the sort of unconscious power

of the cycles of life. Mm.

Natasha is giving me a card reading using

a deck she designed called the Motherwitch.

So...

...do you want to just turn over that top card?

Oh, my gosh. OK.

The Tyrant. This is so interesting.

Is that me? No. Oh, right, OK.

Erm, so if you look at the card, it's this masculine figure

that's got his hands squashed down... Gosh. Yeah.

...onto the woman.

So the way I would interpret this is that

it's the force of, like... The patriarchal force of, like,

"you must create, you must be generating work",

you've got to keep going beyond your means, which means you have

to work longer hours, like... You know, it's that thing,

it's stamping the woman down.

It's stamping your feminine intuition and your own power

and your own instincts and ability to know what your limits are.

He's sort of squashing you.

I feel like this woman.

Squashed? I feel squashed. Crushed. Yeah.

There's a force at work in our society that says you can't stop

and you have to keep producing, you have to do more,

you've got to be bigger, better, work longer.

You just end up feeling mad. Crazy and overwhelmed.

When you first described it, I felt like... I thought I was gonna cry,

cos I've just felt like that's exactly where I am right now.

Aww. Yeah. Erm...

It's no wonder I wanted to howl. Yeah.

I really felt like I needed it. Yeah.

For women, using their voice to speak out,

I've had so many occasions coming up through my career

where you have an opinion and the moment you do,

you can feel the atmosphere change because then you are either

too mouthy or too loud, or too brash and "that's not your job",

"you need to be quiet", "you need to just be here,

"look pretty, smile"... All of that stuff has happened.

Women like Natasha are defying the expectations of what

might be considered appropriate behaviour for women today.

But in 17th Century Pendle, not conforming could get you killed.

While Alison Device, her grandmother Demdike and two others

were being held in Lancaster Gaol, there was a gathering which would

place even more people under suspicion.

This field is thought to be the site of the Device family home.

April 10th, Good Friday.

While all obedient Christians are in church,

allegedly a party was held here by Alison's mother, Elizabeth.

They roasted a stolen sheep and they celebrated by

feasting and dancing.

The party sparked rumours of a huge conspiracy of witches,

plotting to overthrow law and order.

So everything might have just stayed there -

four people are accused of witchcraft, that's good enough.

Except there's a big family meet-up on Good Friday

where basically everyone who is accused,

called their neighbours who were a little bit sympathetic

and James, one of the brothers, steals a sheep in order

to feed everyone and have a bit of a barbecue.

I just think it was a very bad idea for people who were

suspected of witchcraft to then have a gathering of people,

which then involves sheep.

It just seems like the rulebook of what not

to do when accused of witchcraft would be that.

It's probably just a family feast, but it comes across to

the magistrate as being some sort of satanic church gathering.

And, of course, that plays into his fears that Satan worship

is happening in his locality.

Magistrate Roger Nowell rounded up everyone involved for questioning.

By the end of his interrogations, more than a dozen people were

imprisoned here on witchcraft charges.

Hi. Good morning. How are you? I'm very well, thank you.

Suranne. I'm Martin. Lovely to meet you. And you.

Are these for me? They are indeed.

If you could pop those on before we go down.

Ancl this, I take it by the padlock, erm, isn't somewhere

where the general public get to go?

No, this isn't open to the public.

How amazing. Thank you.

This is the dungeon where the witches were imprisoned.

Wow.

Oh, my gosh...

I mean, it's just so grim.

It's cold down here. It's small.

They would have been chained up.

Not all prisoners were chained, but they chained them

because they thought they were witches,

they thought they had some super powers

and that if they didn't chain them down they would fly out of here.

Or get out through the walls or God knows what.

The 80-year-old Demdike didn't make it to the trials.

She died down here.

Ancl I'm sat thinking, who were these women?

They were...old, poor.

They were on the outskirts, they were "other", "different".

But a witch?

I'm still trying to get to idea of what a witch is.

A witch is someone who has made a pact with the devil, and...

..|'m sat here feeling like these were just...

. ANOTHER.

They were held here for months.

And by the end of the trials, most would be condemned to death.

I returned to Lancashire to uncover the real story

of the Pendle witches.

What I'm realising is, it's not about witchcraft,

but about women.

18th of August, 1612, the trial of the Pendle witches began.

Professor Ronald Hutton is a leading expert on these trials.

So when someone is accused of being a witch, what evidence

has to come forward to allow the prosecution

to sentence them to death?

In any European witch trial there are always two things going on.

One is a pact with the devil- and the churchmen

and the magistrates are mostly interested in that.

The other is the harm they've done to fellow humans as

a result of that pact with the devil.

The hardest questions for historians

to answer is why it seems quite a few people made voluntary

confessions of being harmful witches.

On the continent there's not much of a problem

because they were tortured until they couldn't bear it any longer.

But torture of that kind is illegal in England,

so we're left to guess.

I need to stress so much that everything we know about

the Pendle witches is third-hand.

It's from the testimony of Roger Nowell who gets

what are supposed to be their confessions,

and then it's embellished by the clerk of the court

who publishes the evidence as we have it.

So it's filtered - we can only speculate.

One of the obvious conclusions to draw is that Roger Nowell misled

the accused when he was first taking the evidence,

by making them suppose that if they told him what he wanted,

they'd be spared.

Now, that does happen for sure in some other English witch trials

with some unscrupulous magistrates, and there's a very strong suspicion

in this case.

Although some are said to have confessed to witchcraft,

many continued to protest their innocence

including Alison Device's mother, Elizabeth.

But a new prosecution witness was about to surprise everyone.

The star witness is nine years old and she is jennet.

she is tragically the daughter of Elizabeth there in the pen

and therefore the younger sister ofjames and Alison,

Elizabeth's other children who are also on trial.

And Roger has got hold of this girl and persuaded her

to provide this mass of evidence against her own family.

Everybody is amazed when this child enters the court,

mounts her podium and begins to give evidence.

jennet is really ready to give this very detailed testimony

where she says she's seen Alison's familiar -

it is the black dog that John lost, Has cursed him -

she's seen Alison consort with the devil.

According to the account of the trial,

jennet also gave evidence that a coven of around 20 witches

had gathered at her home on Good Friday,

and that her own mother, Elizabeth, was a witch.

We don't really know if she is aware of what she's doing,

but she provides exactly what the prosecution wants.

She accuses them of dealing with spirits in detail

and of murdering people by witchcraft.

There were legal limits of who could testify in court.

You were essentially not meant to allow witness statements

from children.

In his determination to prosecute witches,

the new King had lowered the bar for evidence.

One of the things that James says in Demonology is that

it's a good idea to question the children of suspected witches

and that their evidence is admissible

and should be listened to.

This is really significant in the Pendle trials.

jennet has been underneath the care of

the judges themselves.

So she, this whole time, has probably been being fed lines

about what it is that her family has clone wrong.

Ancl jennet gives really detailed testimony.

jennet's evidence sealed the fate of her family and many others.

Two days later, ten people were hanged on Gallows Hill,

eight of them were women.

Among them were Alison Device, her mother Elizabeth

and her brotherjames.

It was the first mass execution for witchcraft in England.

The Pendle victims were a small group of impoverished people

living in the North of England.

Yes, they were different, unusual, maybe a little wild,

maybe even slightly odd, but what did they really do wrong?

I think they were incredibly unlucky.

They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,

they were in the middle of this perfect storm where powerful men

used them to further their career and curry favour

with a deeply paranoid King.

The account of the trials by Thomas Potts, clerk of the court,

was published the following year, spreading the myth that dangerous

witches had been discovered in Pendle.

This idea of kind of big numbers of the same family all being accused

for witchcraft was a news sensation.

You have all sorts of media that crops up around it.

So there are all of these people who are making money

off of the accusations as well.

The Pendle trials were followed by many more women being

persecuted as witches.

The problem with witch trials is that people started

to confess and once people confessed,

it made more people believe in the power of witches.

You had 200 years where women were terrified of being called a witch.

You had to show how Godly you were, you had to show how quiet you were.

Ancl we wonder in the modern age why it is that women

still aren't equal, still don't speak up, still are afraid to say,

"Here's a terrible thing that's happened to me."

Why don't women do that when, at least in theory,

at least in law we have this equality.

And you do wonder - is it because of hundreds of years of

having to stay quiet?

Is it because the gender norms of the time that were thrust upon women

have an effect on women today?

If anyone thinks they're not connected to the witch trials,

one of the biggest things that has struck me is that women

were silenced, women didn't have a voice, they were repressed.

Ancl that is something that has stuck through society

and it has been repeated and repeated and repeated

and it's still a big issue now in modern clay.

We all know these trials as the witch trials.

I'm feeling very much like I want to rename them

and I'm sure there are many, many women out there

who are with me on this.

These are trials of women - the misrepresentation of women,

the persecution, the abuse of women of all ages.

Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum created the idea of

an evil woman in league with the devil,

responsible for all the world's ills.

In Germany, women were tortured before confessing to witchcraft

and condemning themselves to death.

The Pendle witch trials started with a girl in the woods

muttering a curse under her breath.

They ended with the execution of ten innocent people.

I felt like I was... That I needed to do this,

because it feels like it's part of my female story.

I thought I was just interested in witches,

but the more I looked into it, the more I have found

so much in it that I... I feel like I've cracked open

a bit of myself as a woman.

This group of women have come together on Pendle Hill

to perform a ceremony honouring those executed as witches.

We're all here to heal together and this is the last full moon

and that is why this has been so important to us tonight.

Cos we've all followed the Pendle witches.

I'm from Blackburn which is just down the road.

So who's a practising witch then? Is that OK to ask? Yes. Yeah.

Not everybody is a practising witch, but we are a sisterhood regardless.

Right, I'm just going to cast a circle now, ladies.

We're going to set our energy more and more into this moment,

here and now.

"I am the maiden.

"I see the world with a childlike wonder.

"A joyful song plays in my heart.

"I am the mother.

"My womb is ripe and ready to bring forth new life.

"I am the crone.

"The silver strands in my hair speak of the wisdom I possess.

"The lines on my face tell of the strength and endurance

"of a lifetime of journeys.

"I am the witch, I am maiden, mother, crone and goddess.

I stand in my sovereignty... ALL: I stand in my sovereignty!

...and I send healing to my ancestors!

ALL: Ancl I send healing to my ancestors!

I thank you for the strong woman I am today...

ALL: I thank you for the strong woman I am today...

...and we will make you proud. ALL: ..and we will make you proud.

Thank you, ladies.

For nearly 200 years, the poison of the witch trials infected Europe,

and they spread even further.

3,000 miles away and 80 years after jennet Device

accused her family of witchcraft, her name would appear

in a book on a magistrate's desk.

That magistrate's desk was in Salem, Massachusetts,

where the world's most infamous witch trials

were about to be unleashed.

Next time, I'll cross the Atlantic to investigate the Salem Witch Trials.

She tells an extraordinary, lurid tale of having met with the devil.

She says there are actually nine witches at large,

not just the suspected three.

I'll explore some modern-day witch hunts...

Google any female politician and the word "witch"

and I promise you, you will see images of them

with green skin and a pointy hat.

...and discover why witch trials are still with us today.

We're in a period which feels probably

the most unstable it has felt since Heinrich Kramer wrote that book.

No wonder everyone is grasping for these conspiracy theories.