Come all you mystic ladies and listen to my song;
I’ll tell a tale of witchcraft running days and years along;
I’ll tell a tale of Pendle Hill where money buys a spell;
I’ll tell you the sad consequence of praying souls to hell.

Now Pendle is in Lancashire, not far from Burnley Town.
Life treads a slow and steady pace from sun-up to sun-down.
Here cows and sheep are shepherded, their flesh and milk the fee
of quiet solid families from Sabden to Rough Lee.

Read Hall is home to Roger of Nowell, an Esquire,
The canny local magistrate who weekly will require
That those who do not go to church must pay a fine that shocks,
While criminals and vagrants are punished in the stocks.

In Goldshaw there are Papists, their beliefs no longer free,
Who hold the Catholic faith of old and worship secretly.
They grudge their church attendance, but to Newchurch they will ride
Just once a month to save the fine that’s otherwise applied.

The Pendle Forest hamlets are scattered, far and wide
Across the hilly country, a day’s walk from side to side;
There’s Barley and there’s Wheathead where the mill grinds corn for all
And Richard Baldwin, Puritan, confirms that God grinds small.

The Puritans are steady, in the strictness of their Lord,
To read the Bible daily will a way to Heaven afford.
But there’s another system here, whose followers are sure
That homage to the Devil is the way to stay secure.

The matriarch, the Demdike; she is purblind, so they say.
Her enemy the Chattox dame, who mutters night and day.
As secretive as Papists, but without the Christian heart;
a misplaced laugh or honest word could summon their black art.

Between the two fierce families, a cold unholy year
is rolled out by their children in a calendar of fear;
At Candlemas and Easter and All Hallows of ill-fame
The Devil rides the Hoarstones in the candle-smoking rain.

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