Mist Over Pendle

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The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. The Demdike and Chattox families sit at the pathetic fringe of society, using their reputation to elicit unwilling charity, and not much energy is spent explaining why they would say or do anything suspicious in front of witnesses.

Sent away to live with her distant cousin Roger in Pendle, Margery soon becomes Roger's partner in investigation, as a series of hideous desecrations force Roger to look further into the rumours of witchcraft. The challenge was to somehow reflect these things through accuracy and sensitivity in the handling of the pencil. One of the accused, Demdike, had been regarded in the area as a witch for fifty years, and some of the deaths the witches were accused of had happened many years before Roger Nowell started to take an interest in 1612. I first came across Mist over Pendle many years ago and found it a cracking good read with a wonderfully brooding atmosphere.Nevertheless, Potts "seems to give a generally trustworthy, although not comprehensive, account of an Assize witchcraft trial, provided that the reader is constantly aware of his use of written material instead of verbatim reports". Nine of the accused – Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock and Jane Bulcock – were found guilty during the two-day trial and hanged at Gallows Hill [45] [b] in Lancaster on 20 August 1612; Elizabeth Southerns died while awaiting trial.

Margaret Crooke, another witness seen by Nowell that day, claimed that her brother had fallen sick and died after having had a disagreement with Redferne, and that he had frequently blamed her for his illness. I picked my 14 year old son up from his friend's house earlier, he said "not MORE depressing music, mum? Illustration by John Gilbert from the 1854 edition of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches. This is a beautifully told tale of events leading up to the Pendle Witch Trials, firmly grounded in the beliefs, customs and everyday life of the 17th Century. As I’m fascinated by the history of the Pendle witch trials I have read many novels based on this subject and find that each story is told from a different angle.Pendle was part of the parish of Whalley, an area covering 180 square miles (470km 2), too large to be effective in preaching and teaching the doctrines of the Church of England: both the survival of Catholicism and the upsurge of witchcraft in Lancashire have been attributed to its over-stretched parochial structure. The trials took place not quite seven years after the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in an attempt to kill King James and the Protestant aristocracy had been foiled. and I generally love witch-trial type of books, and for the first say hundred pages I was really into it.

The later petition followed the Swiss government's pardon earlier that year of Anna Göldi, beheaded in 1782, thought to be the last person in Europe to be executed as a witch. just imagining what the 12 accused must have gone through even before the trial took place they had to walk from Pendle to Lancaster over 46 miles on foot. The official publication of the proceedings by the clerk to the court, Thomas Potts, in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, and the number of witches hanged together – nine at Lancaster and one at York – make the trials unusual for England at that time. Altham was nearing the end of his judicial career, but he had recently been accused of a miscarriage of justice at the York Assizes, which had resulted in a woman being sentenced to death by hanging for witchcraft.

The main character, Margery, and her cousin, Roger, were interesting at first but pretty much one-dimensional. Take Margery’s stern brother: ‘How,’ he demanded, ‘may such a girl as you, undutiful and undevout, be wedded to a godly man? The story focusses on Fleetwood Shuttleworth, a noblewoman who becomes pregnant at the age of seventeen, and becomes involved in the trial of her midwife Alice Gray who is accused of witchcraft. I went on a bit of an artistic journey this week - out of my comfort zone and into the land of portraiture. This most famous of witch trials took place in the forest and hills of the North Lancashire moors, a place that was as cold, dark and inhospitable as the landscape.