HEDY MAG ISSUE 1

“ PENDLE BECAME THE SITE OF ONE
OF THE WORST WITCH HUNTS IN THE
HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLANDS
The summer of 2012 saw strange goingson
in the usually quiet Lancashire countryside
around Pendle Hill: the unveiling of a
life-sized statue of a woman called Alice Nutter,
a procession of 482 people dressed up as witches
going up the hill (a world record, actually), and
the display of the date “1612” on the hillside, visible
throughout the valley. This last event even
managed to upset the Bishop of Burnley, Rev.
John Goddard. Witches taking over a quiet English
village, a mysterious woman with a strange
name, and the church being concerned about it
all – no, this is not a lost Neil-Gamain-novelplot,
this all happened three years ago while we
weren’t watching (wish Neil made it a novel,
though!). So what lies behind it all? Where does
it all begin? Well, the question is rather: when,
and that takes us straight back to 1612. In 1612
Lancashire and the Forest of Pendle had a sinister
reputation: poor, sparsely populated and remote,
the area was thought to be inhabited by
rough, near-enough lawless people. Most people
were poor and had no education at all. They
clung to the old traditions handed down for generations
when it came to running their villages
and religious matters. Official law did exist, but
very often it was abused to settle old feuds, and
frequently it was by-passed for mob justice. Official
religion as decreed by King James I was the
protestant Anglican church, which people had to
attend by law, but often people secretly attended
Catholic mass. Superstition and belief in ghosts
and witchcraft was deeply ingrained in village
life, and it is before this background that in 1612
the parish of Whalley in Pendle became the site
of one of the worst witch hunts in the history of
the British Islands. John Law was a pedlar, a medieval
door-to-door tradesman, and March 18th
1612 turned out to be the day disaster struck
him down: as he was walking just outside Colne
HEDY 15