Unquiet Lancashire

Every legend has an address. Every story has a source.

In March 1612 a pedlar collapsed on the road outside Colne. Within five months a girl of about eleven was hanged for it at Lancaster, and Lancashire had the witch trial everybody has heard of.

Almost everything known about that case comes from one book, written in three months by a junior court clerk, in London, and corrected before publication by the judge whose conduct it describes.

This is not a ghost book. There are no encounters, no investigations and no atmosphere manufactured for the reader. There is also no debunking. There is one question, asked of twenty-two places, objects and events across the county: when did the story enter the record?

The answers are rarely what the guidebooks say.

• The most famous boggart tale in England was set in Yorkshire, printed in 1828, and moved across the Pennines the following year by a banker from Rochdale.
• A drowned village off the Fylde first appears in a Preston bookseller's compilation of 1831 - and the author of the version everyone repeats admitted to his face, on a rock in the sea in 1860, that he had made the details up.
• A spectral huntsman above Cliviger turns out to be a novelist's invention wrapped around a sound that is migrating geese.
• A dried cat found walled into a Pendle cottage in 2011 travelled the world as a witch's familiar in about thirty-six hours.

And where the record is good, the truth is worse than the legend. A blind woman of eighty dictated a working method for killing by clay image to a magistrate, and nobody in the room asked why. A pedlar was led into court unable to walk and forgave the girl whose conviction his evidence secured. Three hundred and forty-four men and boys died in one Lancashire morning four days before Christmas, and for each of them there is a tally number, a grave and a widow's weekly allowance.

Every chapter opens with two evidence markers - one for the event, one for the claim - rating each separately, from documented court record down to late legend, so the reader always knows which is which.

Twenty-two chapters covering Pendle and the witch trials, boggart country from Droylsden to the Ribble, the industrial county, and the mosses, the Fylde and the coast. Sources named throughout; nothing quoted that has not been read.

Unquiet Lancashire is the second volume of the Unquiet Britain series, after Unquiet Yorkshire.