Witnessing Witchcraft: The Inspiration for Cunning Women 

Witnessing Witchcraft: The Inspiration for Cunning Women 

Sitting at my laptop and scrabbling for inspiration a few years ago, I did not plan to write historical fiction. My previous (unpublished) novels were not in this genre – one was a futuristic love story, the other a coming of age tale set in the eighties. This, I concede, might be classed as historical, but I lived through this era and so to me it felt not far from contemporary. I certainly had no plans to go back four hundred years for the setting of my next book.

Then I watched a documentary about the Pendle witch trials. I knew, of course, about this dreadful part of our history, but my knowledge was vague. This excellent programme brought into sharp relief the terrible events of this particular trial, and the plight of those involved.

One of the reasons Pendle is especially well known is simply that the events were very well documented at the time. A clerk to the court, Thomas Potts, recorded and published his account, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster.

There are also other reasons why this particular trial strikes a chord. The unusually high number of accused who were hanged together – nine at Lancaster alone – and the use of a child’s testimony to condemn them.

Jennet Device was nine when she was used as a witness in the trial. Though she became upset when she was brought into court because her mother screamed at her, and refused to speak until the woman was removed, the child soon regained her composure. She climbed onto a table and calmy condemned her grandmother, mother, sister and brother as witches.

Her family all died as a result of the trial – most were hanged, with the exception of her grandmother who passed away in prison. We will never know why Jennet behaved as she did. She was illegitimate, having a different father to her siblings, and there has been some suggestion that she was ill-treated and her relationship with her family was damaged. Perhaps she was coached by the magistrate. Perhaps she spoke what she believed to be the truth, without any real understanding of the consequences. 

This perception of truth is one of the elements that inspired my novel, Cunning Women. Though it is set eight years after Pendle, I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of suspicion and superstition that was so prevalent at the time. The existence of magic was accepted as fact, and greatly feared. It is certain that those around the Devices believed they had magical powers, but it is also likely that the family themselves thought this to be true.

I was especially moved by the event that began the whole thing, which involved the eldest daughter of the family, Alizon, who met a pedlar one night and asked to beg or buy some pins from him. We are not certain which, but we know that he refused and she became angry, cursing him.

Alizon Device was a young girl, just a teenager, from a poverty-stricken and outcast family. In many ways, she was incredibly vulnerable. And yet, this adult man believed utterly in her power to curse him; so much so that he was overcome with terror, and had what we now know to be a stroke.

Alizon was overwhelmed by remorse, and her confession to the magistrate set into motion the terrible events that resulted in her own death, and those of most of her family.

Cunning Women is not about Alizon Device, but I did want to explore the situation she was born into. One of poverty and vulnerability. We can imagine how difficult it was for a teenager to be so starkly different from the norm, to feel that otherness so keenly. Who knows what daily cruelties and rejections she was forced to bear? No wonder she lost her temper on this occasion. 

Yet she was also believed to wield a great power, believed herself to have it too, and was not above using it to punish those who provoked her. It was this huge conflict of vulnerability and power that I wanted to explore in Cunning Women. How would this affect a teenage girl, who on some level at least must yearn for all the freedoms that any teenager does?

We can only imagine. Sarah, the main character in the book, is my best guess at what this must have felt like, using a combination of information, imagination and empathy. For hers is a perspective history has not given voice to.

There is plenty of information to be found about the witch trials and, from a contemporary point of view, much sympathy for those who were accused; mostly women, and largely powerless to defend themselves within a system rigged against them. But the information available to us was, as is so often the case in history, recorded by those in a position of authority; clerks, magistrates, even King James in his book, Daemonologie. Those without power – women, the poor, the outcast – are silenced.

This was another reason I was drawn to write Cunning Women. In a sense, it is my attempt to give voice to those whose perspectives have not been recorded. I am immensely fond of Sarah, the brave, passionate, resourceful heart of my novel, and I very much hope that through her I have breathed life into the stories of those women that did not have the chance to tell their own. 

—
Elizabeth Lee won the Curtis Brown Creative Marian Keyes Scholarship, and her work has been selected for the WoMentoring Project and Penguin’s WriteNow Live. She lives in Warwickshire. Cunning Women is her first novel.
Twitter: @EKLeeWriter

CUNNING WOMEN 

Seventeenth-century Lancashire is a dark and mistrustful place. Ten years after the notorious Pendle witch trials saw ten accused witches hanged, young Sarah Haworth and her family live as outcasts in a ruined hamlet. The inhabitants of the nearby village despise ‘cunning folk’ like them, but their services – healing balms, herbal remedies – will always be in demand, and they have a way of coming to know all the village’s secrets.

A chance meeting sees Sarah become acquainted with Daniel, a young man from the village. In him, she sees a clever, caring man; in her, he sees not the strange, dirty outcast he knows he should, but rather the strong young woman coming into her own.

As they are drawn closer together, a new magistrate arrives in the area to investigate a spate of strange deaths befalling the villagers. Inevitably, his eye falls on Sarah’s family, and his hand carries a burning torch. In the face of persecution, something as fragile as love seems impossible…

https://www.waterstones.com/book/cunning-women/elizabeth-lee/9781786091161

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cunning-Women-Elizabeth-Lee/dp/178609116X

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