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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They were known as recusants and they operated quietly, in secret.
They had secret masses.
They kept their religion a very, very private matter.
It being Good Friday, if Alice was a Catholic, she would have gone to a secret mass somewhere.
And that's why she wasn't able to give an alibi for where she was.
And interestingly, in her family, there are two people who were canonized, two Catholic martyrs, the blessed John Nutter and the blessed Robert Nutter, who'd been executed a few decades earlier for being Catholics.
They weren't her blood relatives.
She was married into the Nutters, but they were her relatives through marriage.
So there's a theory, and it's gaining stronger and stronger ground, that that actually happened.
Well, it was a miscarriage of justice in all of their cases, obviously, because there's no such thing as a witch.
But that in her case, it was an even more manifest miscarriage of justice because she was really being persecuted for being a Catholic and not able to give an alibi.
Whether that's true or not, no one knows, but it's a strong local tradition.
So when Nutter was protesting her innocence, that was as far as she could go.
She wasn't able to say where she was because that would have opened questions as to who she was with, who were these secret Catholics at this mass, who was the priest, and that would have led to other deaths.
So she was protecting them and sacrificed herself.
The Pendle Witch Trial was taking place just a little bit before the peak of the witch craze.
There had been some medieval witch trials, but it really flared after the Reformation, kicking off around 1550.
The peak really was in the mid-1600s, and the Pendle Witch Trial was in 1612.
So it was part of the upswing towards the peak that happened in the middle of the century.
And then it all really was over in England into the early 1700s.
Showing 381–400 of 436 · page 20 of 22
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