Mother Demdike and Old Chattox
Alison Device had given Roger Nowell sufficient evidence to suggest a veritable nest of witches existed in the area of his jurisdiction. So on April 2, he and Alison traveled to Fence, near Burnley, a town south-east of Pendle Hill and interviewed both Mother Demdike and Old Chattox at the House of a local gentleman, James Wilsey.
Both of the old women freely admitted to practicing witchcraft. Their tales had several elements in common. Mother Demdike had made her pact with her familiar, Tibb when she had turned sixty, some twenty years earlier. Old Chattox had contracted to her own familiar, Fancy, some five years later. Both familiars, who took the form of young men, offered to do the women’s bidding and ensure they wanted for nothing in return for their souls.
Both Chattox and Demdike explained that they did not immediately take up the offers of Fancy and Tibb. In Demdike’s case, she resisted for six years. But in the end, both gave in for the same reason: they were tired of being powerless in the face of poverty, and the ill-treatment and mockery of their neighbors. From then onwards, both women had the power to cure- and kill.
Both women were adamant that they had only ever ill-wished those who harmed them. When questioned about the incident with Richard Baldwin, Mother Demdike explained the man had refused to pay her daughter Elizabeth Device for work she had undertaken for him. He had abused both women when they tried to reason him into paying. So Demdike had taken her revenge on him via Tibb. Old Chattox confirmed Alison Devices’ account of bewitching Farmer Moore’s cows because he favored Mother Demdike over her.
She also made an admission of her own: she had used magic to take revenge on a Robert Nutter of Greenhead who had tried to “have his pleasure” with her married daughter, Anne Redferne. Anne had refused him, and Nutter had threatened to have the family evicted once he inherited the land from his grandfather. However, before this, she had been asked to take the young man’s life by no less a person than Nutter’s grandmother who had also tried to persuade two other local women (who were now dead) to take on the task.