Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Pendle, in the early 1600s, was a very rural, agricultural, forest community.
It's not somewhere where you would expect detailed records to have been created and survive.
But magically, we do have records of the Pendle Witch Trial, very, very full records, because the court clerk at the trial, a man called Thomas Potts,
After the trial, realising that this was quite a big story, he came down to London and he worked with the two judges who'd sat on the trial, Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Alton, and he wrote the story of the trial.
So the three of them had been in the courtroom, they'd heard everything that was said, and they had the papers.
They had the witness statements.
They had the confessions.
So they were able to use all of these and put them into the book.
So it was published as The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster and became an immediate bestseller.
The facts that underlined the trial were really very sensational.
They concerned two families, both with bad reputations and both with a sideline in magic.
It started with a woman called Alison Device.
And she stopped a peddler and asked him to give her some pins from his bag.
And he refused to do this.
And there's been some speculation because pins are often used in magic for sticking into dolls and wax images.
The peddler didn't give her the pins.
But as he walked away, he fell down and he was lame.
And Alison put it about that she had used her familiar spirit in the form of a black dog to attack and lame the peddler.
This story got to the local magistrate, a man called Robert Noel.
So he hauled in Alison and her brother, James, and her mother, who was known as Squinting Lizzie, and eventually her grandmother, who was known as Old Demdyke.
Showing 281–300 of 436 · page 15 of 22
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