Pendle

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 Cath’lic 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.”

*

The daughter of the Demdike, Squinting Lizzie is her name,
Has children by three fathers, Jennet, Alizon and James;
Jamie he is moon-kissed, and young Jennet still a child
But Alizon is lusty and her heart is quick and wild.

She’ll call the young men to her when the summer moon is full
“A June night and a dry ditch,” say the women, “she’s a trull.”
They turn their faces from her and they speak beneath their breath
But they daren’t accuse her straightly for they fear a wasting death.

The Demdike and wild Alizon go begging farm to farm.
Where begging brings no scraps, they swear they’ll do your livestock harm.
“My poor blind Grannie hungers for a pudding or a pie.
A penny, sir, for buying meat, or else your flocks will die.”

The Rough Lee is the richest farm in Pendle to be found.
Her steward, Harry Mitton, meets the beggars snooping round.
“I’ve neither milk nor meat to spare, so you be on your way!”
Old Demdike spits and snarls, her eyes like pebbles dull and grey.

Young Alizon starts cursing. When old Harry shakes his fist
She flings a cowpat in his face, “Here, cop a load of this!”
In fury at her insolence he roars and starts to run,
He’s struck down on the grass before he fairly has begun.

The Demdike sits there stolid in her malice cloaked and chill.
Alizon runs to fetch her mother Lizzie’s sullen will.
They watch the farm-hands lift him in a futile rescue bid.
“They saw nowt,” says the Demdike, “so they can’t say what we did.”

“He’ll never live,” the Demdike says, “he’s dead within the hour,
So, Alizon, you silly wench, believe you now have power.
When stingy folk refuse you, send the black dog from your heel
And the fear of being bitten will bring many a tasty meal.”

*

Young Bessie Chattox steals a shift from Demdike’s Malkin Tower.
She hides it till the Sunday comes, then wears it for an hour.
At church she’s spied by Alizon, who screams like living fire;
The charge is duly brought for Master Nowell to enquire.

Young Bessie then denies the theft, but witnesses prevail.
He makes decisions quickly and he sends her off to gaol;
But she has a stabbing weapon that she’ll use at final pitch –
Young Bess cries out to Nowell that Old Demdike is a witch.

*

John Law the local chapman is a man both stout and hale.
He walks across the countryside with packs of goods for sale.
His ribbons and his pins are simple wares for maids and squires,
But he’ll order up the quality for her who so desires.

One morning in the town he meets with Alizon the wild
Who stands across the way and thinks to coax him like a child;
She begs of him a paper of cheap pins to take and sell
And she’s shocked and then she’s surly when he tells her, “Go to Hell!”

“You think I’m nowt, John Law? you fool! you’ll find that I have teeth.
Though naked in my petticoat, my black dog runs beneath.”
“Begone, wild wench,” says Pedlar John, with paling cheek, “begone,
and keep your cursing for the men and boys you leech upon.”

Then turning, he begins to run, and running, he falls lame;
and Alizon delights in what she learned from her grand-dame:
“There, sir, you should have pleased me; where the black dog bites he’ll hold.
And what he bites, you’ll never cure, though doctors choke on gold.”

Young Abraham, the son of John, is of the toughest sort;
He carries John indoors and has the wild young hoyden caught.
“You cursed my father in the street, and here he lies in pain,
I’ll charge you straight with witchcraft and you’ll never curse again.”

“O spare me sir, forgive me, for I never meant you harm!”
Alizon cries, and moans, and weeps, in pitiful alarm.
“Well, I forgive you, wench,” says John, but Abraham, more stern,
Is set to make the girl face retribution in her turn.


*

Questioned by Roger Nowell, in the courtroom at Read Hall,
Young Alizon confesses how she made the pedlar fall,
But then to ease her penalties, she tells of Demdike’s harms,
Conspiring with the Chattox against livestock on the farms.

Her brother Jamie tells the witchcraft Alizon performs,
His mother’s waxen images, and conjuring of storms;
So Squinting Lizzie takes the stand and sourly makes defence
That she has never pictured folk, and Jamie has no sense.

But she too tries plea-bargaining; to prove her word is good
She tells of Demdike’s witch-mark, where familiars suck her blood.
Most damning of the witnesses is Jennet – though so young,
She tells of human teeth for spells, and fat from babies wrung.

The testimonies multiply which Nowell hears at Read.
His fellow judge Nick Bannister takes good and solemn heed.
Lizzie, Chattox, Alizon, and Demdike’s pebble eyes,
Are sent down into Lancaster for Lammastide Assize.

*

A holy day for Christians is Good Friday, when the Cross
Held up the Saviour to the sun in agony and loss.
But Pendle’s coven meet this day to feast and sing and wail,
And, at the Malkin Tower, plot to break their kin from gaol.

But Jennet tells the magistrates, who hunt the coven down
And send the plotters chained to join their sisters in the town.
Old Demdike cheats the hangman. Lying blindly down, she dies.
Ten others are to hang, decides the Lammastide Assize.

*

So all you mystic ladies who have listened to my song,
The tale of Pendle witchcraft running days and years along,
No prayers to God or Devil saved the women from the test.
Perhaps the word of witchcraft was an old wives’ tale at best.

It might be, neither Alizon nor Demdike had a skill,
That everyone was scared by simple hints that they could kill.
Perhaps they threatened neighbours with a secret that they knew
And begging, with such menaces, received more than its due.

Where daughter curses mother and grand-mother to their end,
Their evil tongues make evil lives, that die without a friend.
Consider how the use of evil soon becomes a trade
And those who work with malice are then by their own betrayed.

There always will be falling-out between such cheating clans
Where family wars with family take the law in their own hands,
And law-abiding people speak of vermin to be shot;
They neither know nor care if witchcraft really works or not.

*