The Lancashire Witch Trials

The Morbid Curiosity Podcast

Hallie Lloyd

Cryptid, Serialkiller, Science, Disease, Medicine, Scary, Skeleton, Historyofmedicine, Social Sciences, Ghost, History, Medical, Anthropology, Monsters, Archeology, Murder, Creepy, Skeptic, Paranormal, Prison

4.8 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nine women and two men were tried and executed for witchcraft in 1612 near Pendle in Lancashire. This was an unprecedented death toll for a single witch trial at the time. In this episode, we discuss witchcraft in England, and why these trials may have resulted in so many executions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode was suggested by a listener, Ruth, on Facebook. If you'd like to make a suggestion,
0:06.1	you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at Morbid Curiosity Podcast, on Twitter, at Morbid Podcast,
0:12.9	and on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com. This episode contains discussions about the persecution of witches and witchcraft.
0:23.6	It should be noted that for this discussion, these terms refer to the medieval Christian concept of witches and witchcraft, even more so, the mysterious and unsolved.
0:52.1	Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid
0:55.9	curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people.
1:03.1	My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast.
1:47.0	Okay. Podcast. ...pheye Podcast. ... Witchcraft is a fascinating topic that is often written and wondered about, yet is still quite elusive and mysterious. It's also interesting because popular opinion about witchcraft
1:53.0	has remained relatively the same since it was officially defined in Europe in the early 15th century.
1:59.0	That popular opinion is that witches are people to be feared
2:03.1	and punished. While humans today don't fear witchcraft as much as they did in the past,
2:08.3	the fact remains that witches have been feared, persecuted, imprisoned, and killed for much of
2:14.2	human history. In the medieval era, witches were feared so much that witch
2:19.4	hunts often resulted in accusations, trials, and sometimes executions of suspected witches. Between
2:26.5	40,000 suspected witches were tried and executed between 1450 and 1750 in Europe and America, with most of these trials occurring
2:36.8	between 1580 and 1660. Around 500 of these occurred in England. One of the biggest witch trials
2:44.6	to occur in England during this time were the Pendle Witch Trials, or Lancashire Witch Trials. Before I get into these, some context on
2:52.7	witchcraft in general is required. Ideas about witchcraft and magic have long been part of many
2:59.1	cultures all across the world, but it was in Europe, specifically the area around Switzerland
3:04.4	in the early 1400s, where what we now think of in the Western world as a
3:09.2	stereotypical witch was defined. Trials at this time and place established that witches were
3:15.3	magical practitioners who owed their powers to the devil and received these powers through
	...

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