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 depending on how young the child is, they can have all sorts of reasons for maybe telling a slightly different story to what actually happened.
Why Janet told the story she did is simply not clear.
Whether she'd fallen out with her family, or was enjoying the attention, or thought this is what she had to say because it's what the court wanted her to say, it's really not known.
But back in the day of the trial, James I had written in Demonology that the evidence of a child was fine in a case of treason against God, which is how he saw witchcraft.
because extreme measures needed to be taken when dealing with such a serious and a grave crime.
And one of the long-term consequences of the Pendle witch trial and Jennet's evidence was that it became normalised to allow children's evidence to convict adults as witches.
And so a very, very similar tragedy unfolded
80 years later, in Salem, Massachusetts, at the Salem Witch Trials in America, where again, children's evidence was relied on, largely, for what happened.
And there, more than the 10 at Pendle, 19 people were executed and five died in prison.
One of the Pendle witches who was hanged was a woman called Alice Nutter.
And she's been attracting quite a lot of attention recently because she's a bit different to all the others.
She didn't come from one of those two feuding families.
And recently a counsellor put up a statue of her to try and tell her story that she was a bit different.
She was actually a local landowner.
and pretty wealthy in her own right.
And one suspicion is that Robert Knoll, the magistrate, might simply have been trying to get her out of the way to get her lands.
But young Janet Device had crossed the courtroom and taken Alice Nutter by the hand and said she was at the party on the Good Friday.
Alice was not able to give an alibi for the day although she did protest very fiercely that she was innocent and even as she was being hanged she was protesting that she was innocent and bystanders noticed that she was protesting more than anybody else and it was quite a heart-wrenching sight.
Now there's a local legend that she actually was a Catholic
And of course, at that time in this country, it's just several generations after the Reformation, there were still lots of Catholics.
Showing 361–380 of 436 · page 19 of 22
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