The Lancashire witch trials, 1612: gender and representation in historical record and historical fiction

At Lancaster Castle, in 1612, twenty-one individuals were imprisoned and tried for witchcraft, eleven died, one in prison at Lancaster Gaol, and the other ten sentenced by the Assizes Judge overseeing their trials. Nine women and two men died as witches. Everything that we know about these trials comes from the work of court clerk Thomas Potts, who wrote and published the only surviving record of these trials, the 1613 pamphlet The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. The first argument to be presented within this thesis is that this text was written by Potts with a clear and ambitious purpose. He constructed the victims of these trials as hyperbolic characters, and the women were treated much worse than the men. The pamphlet was designed to be consumed, by both the public and the King, as a sensational tale of evil witches and intrigue, and because of this, the victims of the Lancashire witch trials were carefully constructed as frightening and villainous, and this is how history remembers them. Over the next four hundred years, the accused witches of 1612 became the subjects of several fictional retellings of the Lancashire witch trials, sometimes as villains, other times as protagonists. The second argument within this thesis is that the accused witch-figure became a vessel for a variety of authors to insert their own views and goals into when writing their historical fictions about the 1612 trials. Through a combination of historical record and historical fiction, and with notions of gender and identity in mind, this thesis aims to trace the witch-figure of Lancashire through four centuries, and assess how they have been created, remembered, and represented by their original author, Thomas Potts, and in the fiction written about them between 1612 and 2012.