Witchcraft and magic have a strong hold over our collective imagination. These days, our interest is largely for entertainment, but four centuries ago things were very different. When Shakespeare conjured up the three witches in Macbeth (c 1606-7), his audience believed that the Devil’s votaries prowled the land. King James I (1603–25) even wrote a book, Dæmonologie, warning his subjects of the physical reality and perilous malignancy of the kingdom’s witches.
A few years ago, in Roughlee, Lancashire, Councillor James Starkie erected a statue of a local Jacobean witch. “It has proved very popular, with regular visitors coming from afar,” he says. The effigy is of Alice Nutter, and there is a growing opinion around the neighbouring Forest of Pendle and in east Lancashire that Alice was the victim of a cynical and horrific miscarriage of justice.
