Hoarstones

The old house of Hoarstones (in Goldshaw) is situated in a southerly projection of the township between the two portions of Old Laund Booth, has been to a large extent rebuilt by the present owner, Mr. W. H. Hartley.

Goldshaw is closely connected with the famous Pendle Forest witchcraft trials of 1612. Elizabeth Southerns, 'Old Demdike,' confessed that she had first met Tib, her 'familiar,' some twenty years earlier at a stone pit in Goldshaw; she and her daughter Elizabeth Device (or Devis) and Device's two children Alison and James were among the most prominent persons in the trial, as accused or as witnesses, while John Hargreaves of Goldshaw Booth was said to have been a victim. Another 'witch' of the immediate neighbourhood was Anne Whittle, 'Old Chattox,' who with her daughter Anne wife of Thomas Redferne was tried and executed for witchcraft at the same time, she being then eighty years of age. (fn. 13)

An echo of the earlier proceedings against witches occurred in 1634, and resulted in the indictment at Lancaster of seventeen inhabitants of Pendle Forest charged with witchcraft. At the examination of witnesses previous to the trial it was deposed that witches to the number of thirty or more had met on several occasions at a new house called Hoarstones. The principal accuser, a boy ten years of age named Edmund Robinson, of Newchurch in Pendle, actually described how whilst gathering bullaces a black hound and a grey one had appeared, with which he thought to have coursed a hare. They would not run, and upon his beating the black one there stood up in its place one Dickonson's wife, whom he at once charged with being a witch. Failing to bribe him to silence, she conjured a little boy, who had changed out of her companion grey hound, into a white horse, whereupon she set Robinson and carried him to Hoarstones, distant about a quarter of a mile. There he saw other witches on horseback arriving, to the number of threescore, and presently followed them to an adjoining barn, where six of them kneeling upon the floor pulled at six several ropes fastened to the roof; upon which, into the informer's sight, came smoking flesh, butter in lumps, and milk, as it were, syleing (i.e. straining through a sieve) from the ropes, which fell into basins. And so like these six did others in turn until the witness took fright and fled. He was chased by some of them to a place in the highway called Boggart Hole, where they desisted, on two horsemen being met with, but not before he had identified them. (fn. 14)

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