Field Notes on the Pendle Witches
By Kate Lomax (scribbled between cups of tea and bouts of mild existential dread)
Right. So apparently, if you hang around witches long enough, you start acting like one. This started as a few pages of research for myself—because if you’re going to call yourself a greenwitch, you should probably know whose ghosts you’re sharing a county with.
Pendle. Everyone in Lancashire knows the name, even if they couldn’t point to the hill on a map. It’s a story we grow up with, like bedtime folklore, but with more hangings.
They say Old Demdike cursed half the valley. They say she sold her soul to the Devil for power.
What they don’t say—what nobody bothered writing down until much later — is that she was poor, half-blind, and very likely just good at herbs.
(Edith says “herbalist” like a benediction. When she says Old Demdike, it sounds like family.)
What the records say
1612. James I was on the throne, paranoid about witches because it made him feel important.
A magistrate called Roger Nowell got it into his head that every cough and dead cow in Pendle was part of a conspiracy.
By August, ten people were hanged at Lancaster.
The evidence wouldn’t pass a Year 9 history project. A list of names, a few “confessions” wrung out of frightened women, and one little girl’s testimony that reads like something she overheard and didn’t understand.
No proof. Just fear, gossip, and poverty doing what poverty does best—turning neighbours into accusers.
Elizabeth Southerns, Old Demdike, never even made it to the gallows. She died in prison before the trial, probably of infection or starvation. Her granddaughter, Alizon, confessed under pressure. Her rival, Chattox, blamed everyone else to stay alive.
It didn’t work.
What the folklore says
Depends on who you ask.
To some, Demdike’s a folk villain. To others, she’s a folk hero.
The stories blur.
One says she could turn milk sour with a glance. Another says she healed babies with charms of rosemary and bread.
You can feel the contradiction humming underneath: fear of women who know things. I went up Pendle Hill last weekend—stupid idea, it was freezing, and I forgot my gloves. The air up there is thin and stubborn. It smells like peat and old rain. If you stand still long enough, you can hear the wind whistle through the heather and think it’s whispering.
Probably is, in its own way.
People leave offerings on the stones. Coins, feathers, bits of ribbon. Half superstition, half apology. Lancashire’s funny like that—we condemn our witches, then build souvenir shops about them.
The family bit
Right. So. Try writing about this, knowing your best friend’s middle name is Elizabeth.
Edith Elizabeth Postlethwaite.
Descendant of Old Demdike herself.
She doesn’t lead with it (understatement of the year). If you bring it up, she makes a face like you’ve just tracked mud through her apothecary. But she feels it, even if she won’t say so. You can tell when she touches the soil or looks at the moon for too long.
It’s in the way she says “we don’t owe them our silence.”
It’s in the way her magic hums—quiet but unbreakable, like a song sung down generations until it’s muscle memory.
I used to think ancestry didn’t matter, that you could just decide who you are. Maybe you can. But watching Edith, I’m not so sure.
Maybe the blood remembers things the brain forgets.
Things nobody tells you about witch trials
Most of them started because someone owed someone else a bit of money.
Or because a cow died.
Or because an old woman muttered when she stubbed her toe, and the milk went off the next morning.
Fear doesn’t need logic; it just needs witnesses. And witnesses don’t need truth; they need attention.
Modern translation (I should stick this in Dan’s bloody glossary):
Witch (n.)—A woman who knows the recipe for something you’d rather pay a man to patent.
The greenwitch bit
I’m still learning. Edith says greenwitches listen first and act second. The land talks if you shut up long enough. Today it said: We’ve been here before.
Pendle’s story isn’t just history—it’s a warning. Every generation gets its own witch-hunt; it’s just that the charges change.
Unfeminine. Unmanageable. Unapologetic.
We keep being hanged for different reasons.
But here’s the thing: every time they bury us, something grows. Herbs between stones. A girl with dirt on her hands who refuses to stop asking questions.
Side note:
Edith caught me nicking foxglove from her drying rack. She gave me The Look. You know the one.
Said, “Kate, that’s poisonous.”
I said, “So is patriarchy.”
She didn’t laugh. But she didn’t take the foxglove back either.
Pendle Witch Myth: Debunked (sort of)
Familiars: probably metaphors for intuition or stray cats.
Still, I like to think Demdike had one that bit magistrates. (Edith’s got Nick. Technically a goat, spiritually a menace. If familiars are reflections of their witches, that tracks—sharp, stubborn, and far too fond of biscuits.)Devil’s pact: a convenient way to explain a woman surviving longer than expected.
Eye of newt: literal plant nickname, not amphibian dismemberment.
Flight: metaphorical. But I’d bet money Edith could levitate if she fancied.
Note to self: ask Edith if bloodline magic feels different.
She says it’s all just current, channelled through whoever’s daft enough to hold it. But sometimes when she casts, the air changes temperature. That’s not just current. That’s inheritance.
Something that stuck with me
There’s a line in one of the old pamphlets: “She confessed freely, and prayed for mercy.”
They meant it as proof of guilt. I think it was proof of humanity. Because mercy’s the one spell we never stop needing.
On ghosts
Pendle’s full of them. Not the sheet-and-chains type—the quiet ones.
Stories that won’t stop repeating themselves. You hear about women accused of witchcraft, and it’s like an echo from another century, saying Are you sure you’re safe yet?
I’m not. But I’m trying.
What I’ve learned (so far)
Magic’s not about power. It’s about responsibility.
History lies—but the land remembers.
“Witch” was never the insult they thought it was.
Edith makes stronger tea when she’s worried.
Grief changes the shape of you, but friendship fills the gaps.
Final thoughts (for now)
If I could go back, I’d stand beside them—Demdike, Alizon, Chattox—all of them. Not to fight, just to say, we remember you. Because remembering is a kind of magic, too.
We light candles now instead of torches. We plant gardens where they burned fields. We tell the stories properly. And we keep living, which might be the most defiant spell of all.
“They called them witches because the word woman wasn’t dangerous enough.”