Malkin Tower – Good Friday

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n                You might imagine that all thenlegal goings-on in Lancashire would have encouraged people to lay low and keepnquiet for a while. You might imagine that, but it didn’t happen. Word soonnreached Roger Nowell, Justice of the Peace at Read Hall, that on Good Friday,njust four days after he had committed four women from Pendle to the assizes atnLancaster Castle on charges of witchcraft, there had been a meeting of witchesnat Malkin Tower, on the slopes of Pendle Hill. 

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nAt the house of James Wilsey,nNowell and Nicholas Bannister, a magistrate from Altham, began another seriesnof investigations. They began with James Device, brother of Alizon. ‘SoftnJamie’ was a large, lumbering lad, a labourer, and mentally sub-normal. Whennpressed by the magistrates, he admitted that he had stolen ‘a wether’ (a sheep)nfrom John Robinson of Barley, taken it to Malkin Tower and slaughtered it tonprovide meat for dinner at about noon, on Good Friday, April 6^th. Henwas asked who had been at this meal, and listed himself, his mother Elizabeth,nthe wife of Hugh Hargreaves, Jane Bulcock and her son John, Alice Nutter ofnRoughlee, Elizabeth Hargreaves, Alice Grey, Katherine Hewitt and some othersnwhose names he did not know. 

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nHe said his mother had told him that they werenmeeting for three reasons; to name the spirit, or familiar, of Alizon Device,nto kill Thomas Covell, gaoler at Lancaster and blow up the castle to free thenfour women held there, and to help Jennet Preston of Gisburn kill Mr Lister ofnWestby as ‘her power was not strong enough to do it herself.’ His mother,nElizabeth Device, confirmed the names given by her son, adding two more womennfrom Burnley ‘whose names Alice Nutter knew’, and Anne Cronkshaw of Marsden.nShe remembered ‘The Christening of the Spirit’ and talk of killing Mr Lister,nbut could not remember talk of blowing up the castle and killing the gaoler. 

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nHer nine-year-old daughter, Jennet, was questioned, and she said there had beennabout twenty witches present, of whom she knew the names of about six. Nowellnand Bannister then further examined James and Elizabeth Device, and were toldnhow James had been told to go to Communion on the Thursday before Easter 1610,nbut not to eat the bread but give it instead to a ‘thing’ he would meet on thenway home. James did eat the host, and when a thing shaped like a harenconfronted him, he crossed himself and it disappeared. On Easter Monday, anblack dog came to him at Newchurch and asked for his soul, but he refused,nsaying it belonged to ‘Saviour Jesus Christ’ but it could have the rest of him.nFrom then on, he was a witch with a spirit called ‘Dandy’, by whose power henhad killed two people. 

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nElizabeth said her spirit was called ‘Ball’, and shenhad, with Demdike and Alice Nutter, made a clay figure of Henry Mitton, whonlater died. She told how Jane Bulcock and her son John had bewitched JenetnDean, making her lose her reason, and had agreed to kill Mr Lister for JennetnPreston. Katherine Hewitt and Alice Gray, both of Colne, had killed bynwitchcraft a child, Ann Foulds, and they ‘held in hanck’ a child of MichaelnHartley of Colne (too close to home for me). James Device went on to tell hownDemdike, Chattox and Anne Redferne had taken teeth from skulls in Newchurchngraveyard, and had made clay images at Malkin Tower. 

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nAs a result of thesenfurther enquiries, eight more people from the Pendle Forest (not a wooded area,na ‘forest’ in this sense is an area of open land set aside for hunting), werenaccused of witchcraft, arraigned and sent for trial. Jennet Preston, fromnGisburn (which was then in Yorkshire), was sent to York Assizes. She had beennaccused of the same crime in the previous year; on July 27^th 1612nshe was found guilty of witchcraft and hanged two days later at York Castle,nafter confessing nothing and dying impenitent.

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nThe other seven were sent to thenassizes at Lancaster. They were Elizabeth Device (daughter of Demdike, andnmother of Alizon), and her son James Device. Also accused were Alice Nutter, angentlewoman, the mother and son Jane and John Bulcock, Katherine Hewitt (known,nsplendidly, as Mouldheels), and Alice Gray.

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nThe exact location of MalkinnTower, home of Demdike and her family, is not known. At Blacko, near to MalkinnTower Farm, is a tower, but this is a Victorian folly, built in 1890 by theneccentric Jonathan Stansfield, a grocer from Barrowford, who used it ‘to seeninto Yorkshire.’ A ruined cottage was excavated near Black Moss reservoir innlate 2011, which some have claimed may be the remains of Malkin Tower. 

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nThe namenis echoed in the name of the familiar of one of the witches in Shakespeare’snMacBeth – Gray-Malkin, and is an archaic word for a cat, a female servant and anslut or slattern. It appears in Chaucer, in The Man of Law’s Prologue (c. 1386)n: – 

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