To many a beautiful landscape the majestic Pendle adds a nameless
charm, and the traveller who gazes upon it from any of the points
whence a view of the whalelike mass is to be obtained, would hardly
dream that the moss and fern-covered hill, smiling through the dim
haze, once was the headquarters of witchcraft and devilry. Readers of
the quaint and sad trials of the witchmania period, and of Harrison
Ainsworth's celebrated novel based thereon, will, however, remember
what dread scenes were said to have transpired in the dim light of its
cloughs and upon its wild sides, when Chattox, Mouldheels, and the
other poor wretches whose 'devilish practices and hellish means,' as
they were termed in the old indictments, made the neighbourhood of the
mountain so unsafe a locality.
In a lonely little house some distance from the foot of Pendle, there
dwelt a farmer and his family, together with a labourer whom he
employed. Entirely illiterate, and living in a wild and weird
district, with but few houses nearer than a mile away, the household
believed firmly in all the dreadful boggart, witch, and feeorin
stories current in the district. For a long time, however, the farmer
had not any personal experience of the power of either witch or
boggart; but at length his turn came. After a tempestuous night, when
the windows and doors rattled in their frames, and the wind, dashing
the big rain drops against the little diamond-shaped panes, moaned and
shrieked round the lonely dwelling, three of the beasts were found
dead in the shippon. A few days afterwards two of the children
sickened, and when 'th' edge o' dark' was creeping up the hill-side
one of them died. As though this trouble was not enough, the crops
were blighted. With reluctance the farmer saw in these things proof
that he had in some unknown manner incurred the displeasure of the
invisible powers, and that the horse-shoe over his door, the branches
of ash over the entrance to the shippon, and the hag stones hung up
at the head of his own and of the children's bed, had lost their power
of protection.
The family council, at which the unprotected condition of the house
was discussed, was of the saddest kind, for even the rough labourer
missed the prattle of the little one whose untimely end had cast a
shadow over the dwelling, and he thoroughly sympathised with his
master in his losses; while, as for the farmer and his wife, dread of
what the future might have in store for them mingled with their
sorrow, and added to the heaviness of their hearts.
'Isaac, yo' may as weel tek' th' wiggin{27} an' th' horse shoes
deawn, for onny use they seem to be on. We'en nowt to keep th' feorin'
off fra' us, an' I deawt we'es come off bud badly till November,' said
the farmer, as he knocked the ashes from his pipe.
'An' why nobbut till November, Ralph,' asked the wife in a terrified
voice, as she gazed anxiously towards the little window through which
Pendle could be dimly seen looming against the evening sky.
'Because on O'Hallow neet, mi lass, I meean to leet th' witches{28}
on Pendle.'
'Heaven save us!' cried the woman. 'Tha'll be lost as sewer as th'
whorld.'