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
And all of them confessed to being witches.
They didn't seem to think this was a dangerous thing to do.
They spoke about their witchcraft.
They gave examples of it.
But they said they weren't the bad witches in the neighbourhood.
The bad witches were another family, which was run by a matriarch called Old Chattox.
And Old Chattox apparently had put a spell on Squinting Lizzie's husband and murdered him.
So that was who they said Noel should be going after.
Noel, like a sensible magistrate, decided this was probably all rubbish and didn't bother with any of it and just left it alone, just thought it was a family feud.
However, shortly afterwards, Good Friday came round.
And this is quite a Puritan Protestant community.
And squinting Lizzie threw a party on Good Friday.
And that caused a real problem because it was a day of sadness, of mourning, of introspection, of recognising for the people at the time that Christ their Saviour had been nailed to the cross.
It was the opposite of a day on which you should hold a party.
And so Robert Knoll, the Magistrate, decided that it had probably been a witch's Sabbath and that they'd been speaking the truth.
Now, whether he really believed it, whether he thought he could gain favour, royal favour, because the king thought there were witches everywhere, by finding some witches and trying them, we can't know.
But he decided to hold a trial.
So he committed them all for trial.
Most of them went to Lancaster, to the Assizes, one went to York, and that's how they wound up in a courtroom being tried for witchcraft.
The trial really explored what had happened on that Good Friday, who had been there, and what were the reputations of these people.
Showing 301–320 of 436 · page 16 of 22
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