Jennet Device’s Testimony at the Pendle Trials
A record in The Hawthorn Archive, preserving folklore with its place, type and source context attached.
Jennet Device, a young child, gave evidence against members of her own family and other accused people during the Pendle prosecutions. Potts records her identifying people said to have attended the Malkin Tower gathering and giving evidence against her mother, Elizabeth Device.
The testimony is historically important but must be read within an early seventeenth-century prosecution conducted by adults and under legal assumptions very different from modern standards. It should not be simplified into a story of a uniquely malicious child.
Source trail: Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie (1613); modern scholarship on early modern English witch trials.
Related Journal record: The Pendle Witch Trials.