Authors: Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate
About the Book
Can a man be maimed by witchcraft?
Can a severed head speak?
Based on the most notorious of English witch-trials, this is a tale of magic, superstition, conscience and ruthless murder.
It is set in a time when politics and religion were closely intertwined; when, following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, every Catholic conspirator fled to a wild and untamed place far from the reach of London law.
This is Lancashire. This is Pendle. This is witch country.
About the Author
Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion
and
Sexing the Cherry
; a book of short stories,
The World and Other Places
; a collection of essays,
Art Objects
, a memoir,
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
, as well as many other works, including children’s books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d’argent at Cannes Film Festival. She lives in London and Gloucestershire.
Also by Jeanette Winterson
Fiction
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The Passion
Sexing the Cherry
Written on the Body
Art & Lies
Gut Symmetries
The World and Other Places
The Powerbook
Lighthousekeeping
Weight
The Stone Gods
Non-Fiction
Art Objects
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Comic Book
Boating for Beginners
Children’s Books
Tanglewreck
The King of Capri
The Battle of the Sun
The Lion, The Unicorn and Me
Screenplays
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
(BBC TV)
Great Moments in Aviation
(BBC TV)
Ingenious
(BBC TV)
Contents
Malkin Tower: Good Friday 1612
To Henri Llewlyn Davies
1954–2011.
Her own witch and mine.
Introduction
The Trial of the Lancashire Witches, 1612, is the most famous of the English witch trials. The suspects were taken to Lancaster Castle in April 1612 and executed following the August Assizes.
The Well Dungeon can be visited and Lancaster Castle is open to visitors.
It was the first witch trial to be documented. Thomas Potts, lawyer, wrote his account:
The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancashire
. It is supposedly an eye-witness verbatim account, though heavily dosed with Potts’ own views on the matter. Potts was loyal to James I – the fervent Protestant King whose book,
Daemonology
, set the tone and the feel of a century obsessed with witchcraft, and heresy of every kind – including those loyal to the old Catholic faith.
Witchery popery popery witchery, as Potts puts it, is how the seventeenth century English understood matters treasonable and diabolical.
All of the conspirators of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot fled to Lancashire. And Lancashire remained a stronghold of the Catholic faith throughout the seventeenth century.
The story I have told follows the historical account of the witch trials and the religious background – but with necessary speculations and inventions. We do not know if Shakespeare was a tutor at Hogton Hall, but there is evidence to suggest that he might have been. The chronology of his plays, as used here, is correct. His own use of the religious, the supernatural and the macabre, is also correct.
The places are real places – Read Hall, the Rough Lee, Malkin Tower, Newchurch in Pendle, Whalley Abbey. The characters are real people, though I have taken liberties with their motives and their means. My Alice Nutter is not the Alice Nutter of history – though why that gentlewoman was tried for witchcraft along with the Demdike and Chattox riff-raff remains a mystery.
The story of Alice Nutter and Elizabeth Southern is an invention of my own and has no basis in fact. It pleases me though, that there might have been a connection with Dr John Dee, and with Manchester, London, as well as Shakespeare himself.
And Pendle Hill is still the enigma it ever was, though the Malkin Tower is long gone.
Jeanette Winterson
June 2012
Pendle
THE NORTH IS
the dark place.
It is not safe to be buried on the north side of the church and the North Door is the way of the Dead.
The north of England is untamed. It can be subdued but it cannot be tamed. Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed.
The Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter – alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt.
The hill itself is low and massy, flat-topped, brooding, disappeared in mists, treacherous with bogs, run through with fast-flowing streams plunging into waterfalls crashing down into unknown pools. Underfoot is the black rock that is the spine of this place.
Sheep graze. Hares stand like question marks.
There are no landmarks for the traveller. Too early or too late the mist closes in. Only a fool or one who has dark business should cross Pendle at night.
Stand on the flat top of Pendle Hill and you can see everything of the county of Lancashire, and some say you can see other things too. This is a haunted place. The living and the dead come together on the hill.
You cannot walk here and feel you are alone.
Those who are born here are branded by Pendle. They share a common mark. There is still a tradition, or a superstition, that a girl-child born in Pendle Forest should be twice baptised; once in church and once in a black pool at the foot of the hill. The hill will know her then. She will be its trophy and its sacrifice. She must make her peace with her birth-right, whatever that means.
John Law
THE PEDLAR JOHN
Law was taking a short cut through that nick of Pendle Forest they call Boggart’s Hole. The afternoon was too warm for the time of year and he was hot in his winter clothes. He had to hurry. Already the light was thinning. Soon it would be dusk; the liminal hour – the Daylight Gate. He did not want to step through the light into whatever lay beyond the light.
His pack was bulky and his feet were sore. He slipped and put out his hand to save himself, but he sank wrist to elbow to knees into a brown bubbling mud, thick under the surface of the spongy moss. He was a heavy man. As he struggled to get up he saw the witch Alizon Device standing in front of him.
She was wheedling, smiling, flouncing her skirt. She wanted pins from his pack:
Kiss me, fat pedlar
. He
didn’t
want to kiss her. He wouldn’t give her pins. He heard the first owl. He must get away.
He pushed her roughly. She fell. She grabbed his leg to steady herself. He kicked her away. She hit her head.
He ran.
She cursed him. ‘FAT PEDLAR! CATCH HIM, FANCY, BITE FLESH TO BONE.’
He heard a dog snarling. He couldn’t see it. Her Familiar … it must be. The Devil had given her a spirit in the shape of a dog she called Fancy.