The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster

In this excellent new book, well-respected historian Robert Poole presents an up-to-date version of Thomas Potts’s original account of the famous witch hunt of 1612, in which 19 Lancashire witches, mostly from the Pendle area, were tried at Lancaster. Of these nineteen, three were declared innocent, five were acquitted, and eleven were found guilty, ten of whom were hanged. The Lancashire witch trials were one of the most important in Britain. Thanks to the trial clerk Thomas Potts, they are also the best known. This modern account based on Potts’s original text summarizes the affair clearly and coherently. It probably provides the best, most authoritative general book about the 1612 witch hunt ever published. It is simply a modernized classic.