The Seven in Lancashire: the Cleworth Hall Possessions

Anne Parr, heiress of Cleworth, married Nicholas Starkie of Huntroyde in 1578. The match cost her Catholic relatives an expected inheritance. Their first four children pined away and died in infancy. Mrs Starkie believed a curse was the cause.

February 1595. Their daughter Anne was "taken with a dampish and heavy countenance". About a week later, her brother John was affected too. Nicholas spent £200 on doctors. Nothing worked. A Catholic priest refused to exorcise the children.

About ten weeks after the onset, Starkie took on Edmund Hartley, a conjurer and cunning man. His "popish charms and herbs" brought relief. He stayed about a year and a half on a pension of 40 shillings a year. Then Starkie refused him a house and land. Hartley threatened that "he would make such a shout as never was at Cleworth".

Seven people fell under the affliction. Anne and John. The tutored children Margaret and Elizabeth Hurdman and Ellen Holland. Margaret Byrom, a poor relation of Mrs Starkie. And the maidservant, Jane Ashton. Hartley, it was said, had passed the devil on by kissing.

The house filled with "such a strange supernatural and fearful noise and loud whupping as the like was never heard". The children barked and howled. Bellies swelled. Bodies heaved, tumbled and lay as if dead. Margaret Byrom felt something "like a cold long whetstone on her left side". She saw "a great black dog, with a monstrous tail" coming towards her. A big black cat threw her backward.

On the night of 4 January 1597, John woke violently. He bit those around him, his mother among them, and threw bedding into the fire. The children were said to answer questions in Latin, which none had been taught. Asked to testify against Hartley, they fell speechless.

Around December 1596 the family consulted John Dee, Warden of Manchester Collegiate Church. He judged it possession and advised godly preachers. Hartley was sent to the Lancaster Assizes. There Starkie described a circle Hartley had drawn in a little wood near Huntroyde. Hartley was condemned. The first rope broke. He was hanged at the second attempt.

On 16 March 1597, John Darrell, George More and the family's preacher, Mr Dickens, arrived at Cleworth. The next day all seven roared and had to be held down. Between 5 and 6 pm six of them rose up free and "leapt, danced and praised God". Margaret Byrom's spirit "went out in the likeness of a crows head round". Jane Ashton's "went out like a great breath, ugly like a toad, round like a ball". She was freed on 18 March, before about 50 onlookers.

In 1599 the High Commission at Lambeth, with Samuel Harsnett prosecuting on the orders of Archbishop Whitgift, found Darrell and More guilty of fraud. Harsnett argued that the signs of possession were easy to imitate. He read Margaret Hurdman's cry of "I must be gone" as theatre. Both men were deprived of their ministry and imprisoned. Darrell maintained there was no fraud.

In 1616 Ben Jonson put "the 7. in Lancashire" into The Devil is an Ass. The historian Philip C. Almond reads the episode as a "cultural drama", played out within a "cultural script known to all of them". Joyce Froome notes that John's behaviour "is not unusual in children". Cleworth Hall in Tyldesley was demolished in 1805. A farm and livery stables stand on its site today.