This chapter explores economic and social history in the context of witchcraft in the Pendle area using the ‘village tensions’ approach, the most influential modern explanation of witchcraft. This model focuses upon the grassroots generation of witchcraft accusations rather than on the prosecution process. It proposes that the profound social and economic pressures of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tended to divide the members of parish communities against each other, and these in turn generated threats and accusations of witchcraft. Using this model, an account of the...

This chapter explores economic and social history in the context of witchcraft in the Pendle area using the ‘village tensions’ approach, the most influential modern explanation of witchcraft. This model focuses upon the grassroots generation of witchcraft accusations rather than on the prosecution process. It proposes that the profound social and economic pressures of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tended to divide the members of parish communities against each other, and these in turn generated threats and accusations of witchcraft. Using this model, an account of the pressures on Pendle's upland ‘cattle and cloth economy’ is combined with a detailed analysis of the individual accusations in the 1612 trial. A high proportion of the witchcraft cases in Pendle involved disputes over money and property or misfortunes involving milk and cattle, arguing that social and economic pressures influenced but did not determine the events of 1612. Magical powers, offered or threatened, were themselves part of the local economy, what might be called a black economy of witchcraft.