Of all the many pamphlets and chapbooks describing witch trials in England, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster (London 1613) is outstanding. This mass trial of twenty alleged witches was the largest to date (1612) in England, and created considerable stir throughout the northern counties. The pamphlet was 188 pages long and detailed. It was a semiofficial record written by the clerk of the court named Thomas Potts and was approved by the judge, Sir Edward Bromley as being, "carefully set forth and truly reported."

The Lancashire witch trials took place in 1612 in England. In this case, Elizabeth Sowthern, a blind beggar in her eighties who was known as Old Demdyke, was examined by magistrates in the wake of gossip that she was a witch. She was head of a family who lived in the remote area of Pendle Forest at Malking Tower. A miller's daughter had died a year after his uncomfortable encounter with the old woman, and so suspicion fell easily on her. Weak in the face of judicial pressure, she soon admitted that she had indeed killed the miller's daughter, with the aid of her imp Tibb, and implicated her granddaughter Alison, and another octogenarian beggar, Mrs. Anne Whittle, "a very old withered spent and decreped creature." Alison, eleven years old, confessed to using "her devilish art of witchcraft" to lame a peddler who had refused to open a packet of pins for her, and Mrs. Whittle confessed to murdering one Robert Nutter of Pendle Forest by witchcraft. Her daughter, Anne Redfearne, and Mrs. Sowthern's daughter Elizabeth Device (Alison's mother) were also charged in Nutter's murder.

Then two things happened. First, a rumor reached the ears of Justice Nowell that eighteen women and two or three men had met at Mrs. Sowthern's house and, at a Sabbat supper, had plotted to free the witches. They were going to kill the jailer and blow up Lancaster Castle, in whose dungeons the women were being held. Nine of the conspirators were arrested, the others escaped. Next, Jennet and James Device, Elizabeth's other children, informed the authorities that their mother had a brown dog called Ball, and that she used it to murder people. Jennet, nine years old, revealed that James, twenty and simple-minded, had a dog too, Dandy, and used him for the same purpose, so James was arrested as well.