On the 410th anniversary of the Leicester Witch Trials, this article returns to the original archival sources, challenging the story that has been told for generations
'...witches, nine of them, shall be executed at the gallows this forenoon...'
—Robert Herrick , In a letter to his brother William dated 18 July 1616
History has a habit of becoming polished over time. Stories are told and retold, details become simplified, and before long a complicated series of events becomes a well-ordered narrative.
While researching a new public talk exploring the extraordinary legal history of Leicester Castle Great Hall, I found myself returning to the Witch Trials of 1616. I expected little more than to revisit a story I thought I already knew.
Instead, I found questions.
Most people don't associate Leicester with witch trials. Pendle, certainly. Salem, of course. But Leicester?
On 18 July 1616, a number of local women stood before judges, local officials and whispering neighbours, charged with one of the most feared crimes imaginable.
A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to come across a collection of surviving seventeenth-century papers relating to the trials. As I began working through the files, I realised they revealed a far more complicated picture than the accounts most often referenced.
Rather than simply confirming the familiar narrative, they invited me to look again at one of Leicester's most enduring and surprisingly overlooked historical mysteries.
A Hall of Justice
Long before it became part of De Montfort University, Leicester Castle Great Hall was one of England's most important centres of law.
Built around 1150 as part of the Norman castle, the Great Hall quickly became the judicial heart of Leicester. For centuries it witnessed everything from neighbourly disputes to murder trials and some of the county's most notorious criminal proceedings. For many found guilty, the journey from courtroom to gallows was a short one, as they stood just outside.
By the late thirteenth century, the Hall was hosting the travelling Assize Courts, where royal judges visited Leicester twice each year to hear the most serious offences, many carrying the death penalty. That legal tradition continued for centuries, with the Great Hall remaining a working courthouse until the late twentieth century.
Few buildings in Leicester have witnessed such a diverse cross-section of the city's history.
For me, that's what makes the Great Hall so fascinating. Beyond the Norman architecture and royal connections lies something far more compelling: thousands of human stories. Every court case offers a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people - the victims, the accused, the judges, the lawyers, and the communities caught up in the pursuit of justice.
Together they reveal not just how the law worked, but how people lived, feared and, sometimes, failed one another.
When I first began researching the Great Hall's legal history a few years ago, I expected to find Leicester's better-known cases waiting for me: the Green Bicycle Mystery of 1919, the first murder conviction secured using DNA evidence, and perhaps a few colourful eighteenth-century criminals along the way.
What I didn't anticipate was discovering one of the most significant witch trials in the county's history…one that had quietly slipped into the background of Leicester's past.
The Familiar Story
In the village of Husbands Bosworth, a young boy named John Smith suffered violent and unexplained fits. His father, Roger Smith, a prominent local landowner, became convinced that his son had been bewitched. Suspicion soon fell upon local women.
According to the traditional account, nine women were convicted and executed following the Summer Assizes. As John's fits continued, six more women were accused before the case reached the attention of King James I, whose intervention followed growing concerns that the accusations themselves had been fabricated. He ordered the release of the remaining prisoners transforming the Leicester trials into one of England's most remarkable witchcraft cases.
It is an extraordinary story.
Fear. Superstition. Royal intervention. Justice. Everything we expect from a historical drama.
Like many researchers before me, I began with the version of events that has been accepted for generations.
Much of our understanding can be traced back to two letters written by Sir Robert Herrick, Leicester's Member of Parliament, to his brother William in London. Written in July and October 1616, they describe the events unfolding in Leicester and remain among the most important contemporary sources for the trials. Understandably, they have shaped how the Leicester Witch Trials have been remembered ever since.
They are invaluable historical sources and should not be dismissed. But they are not the only documents to survive.
The Legal Dossier
One of the greatest joys of working with historic collections is the opportunity to return to original voices rather than relying solely on later narratives. You just have to find them.
Among the surviving records is what appears to be a legal dossier: a remarkably rare collection of witness examinations, investigation papers and contemporary statements assembled during the events of 1616. Read together, they provide an unusually comprehensive insight into how the case developed.
One detail stood out immediately.
Where later accounts almost universally refer to nine anonymous "witches", the investigation papers consistently focus on six named women:
- Lea
- Fritter
- Randall
- Hawes
- Halliday
- Hartshorne
For perhaps the first time in many modern retellings of the case, the women emerge not simply as a number, but as individuals.
The papers preserve fragments of their lives, names and reputations within the community, including earlier suspicions that had followed some of them for years. They were predominantly elderly, widowed or poor: exactly the kind of people who found themselves most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century England.
The investigation papers also record the specific allegations made against them. Each woman was said to have bewitched the young John Smith in different ways, often with the assistance of familiar spirits that supposedly carried out their bidding.
Read alongside Herrick's letters, the legal dossier presents a more complicated picture than the familiar story alone. Rather than dismissing his account, the surviving records invite us to ask a new question: why do the investigation papers consistently identify six women, while Herrick's correspondence refers to nine?
It is a question that, four centuries later, still refuses to give up an easy answer.
Justice and King James
One of the most surprising aspects of the investigation papers is not what they conclude, but when they were compiled.
By the time many of these documents were produced, the six women named throughout the legal dossier had already died. Rather than bringing the case to a close, their deaths prompted scrutiny as officials sought to understand what had happened, how the allegations had developed, and whether justice had truly been served.
Popular imagination often portrays seventeenth-century witch trials as unquestioning prosecutions, in which an allegation alone could be enough to secure conviction. The Leicester papers suggest a rather more complex picture.
Witnesses were requestioned in detail, testimonies compared, and doubts raised over how the charges had arisen and whether they could be substantiated.
Even more intriguing, the papers repeatedly return to the extraordinary fits suffered by the young John Smith. Officials considered whether his symptoms had been exaggerated, misunderstood, or even deliberately fabricated.
This changes the focus of the case in a remarkable way. Attention begins to shift away from proving the existence of witchcraft and towards the possibility of deception. If the allegations had been manufactured, the issue was no longer simply whether six women had practised witchcraft, but whether a profound miscarriage of justice had occurred.
This provides important context for the involvement of King James I.
Today, James is often remembered as the author of Daemonologie (1597), a work that encouraged the prosecution of witchcraft and helped shape attitudes towards the crime across Britain.
Yet he was equally concerned with exposing fraudulent claims and preventing justice from being undermined by false accusations and confessions.
His intervention in the Leicester case has long been recognised by historians, but the legal dossier encourages us to reconsider precisely what prompted it and, perhaps more importantly, when the first doubts began to emerge.
The records suggest that James did not introduce scepticism to Leicester. Questions were already being raised. His involvement may therefore mark not the beginning of those doubts, but the moment they reached the highest levels of government.
Four hundred and ten years after these women stood before the courts of Leicester Castle Great Hall, much remains unresolved. We may never know with certainty why some records identify six women while others refer to nine, or precisely how and when concerns surrounding the case first emerged.
What we can do is keep returning to the evidence, and keep asking questions.
My thanks to Michele Smith, Haunted Heritage, and Carolyn Bushell, LCC, for their research support, encouragement, and many thoughtful conversations throughout this project.
What's Next
If you'd like to explore the case in more detail, I'll be continuing this research through a new programme of public talks at Leicester Castle Great Hall. Together, we'll delve into the original records, meet the people behind the accusations, and explore the many questions that still surround one of Leicester's most remarkable legal cases.
By Elizabeth Wheelband
Curator, DMU Museum