Thomas Potts’s 1613 Account of the Pendle Trials
A record in The Hawthorn Archive, preserving folklore with its place, type and source context attached.
Thomas Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, is the principal detailed printed source for the Pendle witch trials. It preserves names, examinations, allegations and the sequence of proceedings in unusual detail.
Its richness does not make it a neutral transcript. Potts wrote under judicial authority and presented the prosecution as the successful exposure of dangerous witches. The source therefore documents both the case and the way Jacobean justice wanted the case remembered.
Source trail: Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie (1613), including later Chetham Society and digital transcriptions.
Related Journal record: The Pendle Witch Trials.