page_title: Samlesbury witches
section_title: Southworth family
hierarchical_section_title: Samlesbury witches / Background / Southworth family
caption_attribution_description: Samlesbury Hall
context_page_description: The Samlesbury witches were three women who were said to be witches, murderers and cannibals. The three women, Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley, and Ellen Bierley, were accused of practising witchcraft by a 14-year-old girl, Grace Sowerbutts. They were tried in the village of Samlesbury in Lancashire. Their trial on 19 August 1612 was one of a series of witch trials held over two days. It is among the most famous in English history. The trials were unusual for England at that time for two reasons. First, Thomas Potts, the clerk to the court, wrote about it in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. Secondly, the number of people found guilty and hanged were high: ten at Lancaster and another at York. Some of those accused were burnt alive and hung.
  However, the three Samlesbury women were found not guilty of witchcraft.
  The women were accused of murdering children, and of cannibalism, amongst other things. In contrast, other people tried at the same time were accused of maleficium, that is causing harm by witchcraft. This included the Pendle witches.
context_section_description: During the 16th century English Reformation, the Church of England broke away from the rule of the pope and the Catholic Church. This event split up the Southworth family of Samlesbury Hall. Sir John Southworth, head of the family until his death in 1595, was a leading recusant. He  had been arrested many times for not giving up his Catholic faith. His eldest son, also called John, did join the Church of England, for which his father disinherited him. The rest of the family stayed strictly Catholic.
  One of the accused witches, Jane Southworth, was the widow of the disinherited son, John. Relations father and son were not polite; John Singleton, said that the father would not even go passed his son's house if he could keep clear of it, and believed that Jane would probably kill her husband. Jane Southworth (born Jane Sherburne) and John were married in about 1598, and the couple lived in Samlesbury Lower Hall. John had died only a few months before her trial for witchcraft in 1612, and she had seven children.
caption: Samlesbury Hall, family home of the Southworths[14]
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