The Real Witch Trials that Inspired the ’Good Omens’ Prophetic Subplot

When a new reader or viewer comes to the Good Omens franchise, they are likely to notice a pretty major inspiration for the story: the 1976 horror film The Omen. In addition to their similar names, both stories feature the forces of evil swapping the child of an American diplomat for Britain with the Antichrist, leading up to a chaotic birthday party. Of course, things go hilariously wrong when another baby gets tossed into the mix, and the child that has been primed to become the Antichrist turns out to be a perfectly ordinary boy.

Once this deviation takes place, the remainder of Good Omens seems to be a fairly original story. However, there is one other key inspiration that many fans are unaware of: The Pendle Witch Trials. While Crowley and Aziraphale are caught between their respective cosmic orders and their desire to prevent the end of the world, a romantic subplot takes place between "Professional Descendant" Anathema Device and a trainee witch hunter named Newton Pulsifer. Historically, however, the relationship between the Device family and local witch hunters was considerably less pleasant.

Neil Gaiman has acknowledged that the names of both Anathema Device and her ancestor Agnes Nutter come from the names of the so-called Pendle witches. Read on to learn more about the women whose names made it into Good Omens and how their own encounters with witch hunters went down.

1. The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612
2. The Historical Origins of Alice Nutter
3. The Real Fate of the Device Family

The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612

England was in a particularly fragile state when the Pendle Witch Trials began. After Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church in 1534, he forced his people to convert to Protestantism. His children then changed the country’s religion multiple times, prosecuting those who continued to practice the ‘wrong’ faith. In this environment, witch trials were a way for people to prove their faith and punish those who didn’t conform to their religious expectations.

Making this worse, the new king (James I and VI) saw witchcraft as one of the greatest threats to his reign. He encouraged legal and religious figures to conduct witch trials and made it easier to convict accused witches by allowing testimony from children and claims made under torture to be used in legal proceedings.

While the higher echelons of society were focused on witchcraft as an evil practice requiring pacts with the devil, ordinary people saw it as a normal part of life. Communities had known “witches” living among them, who would provide medical treatments to their neighbors and lead superstitious rituals. In the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, there were two prominent “witch” families, led by matriarchs known as Old Demdike and Old Chattox.

On March 21, 1612, Old Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon Device, met a peddler named John Law. She asked him for pins, and he refused. According to the witch hunters, she then put a curse on him, which caused him to collapse a few moments later. Most people today believe this was an unfortunately timed stroke. However, Alizon believed that she had hurt the man, admitting what she had done and begging for his forgiveness.

From this point, things went downhill quickly. Though John Law had forgiven Alizon, his family reported her actions to Roger Nowell, the local justice of the peace. He questioned Alizon and her family, who promptly began confessing to performing witchcraft and accusing others from their family and the family of Old Chattox.

In the midst of this, Alizon’s sister Elizabeth Device reportedly organized a party to gain support for her family. This meeting was then labeled a witches' sabbath, and eight of the attendees were subsequently accused of witchcraft. Of the twelve people who were accused, only one survived. Old Demdike died in prison, and the other ten accused witches were executed.

This was a particularly bloody event in England's history, often compared to the Salem Witch Trials. In addition to having an unusually high number of victims, the Pendle Witch Trials became famous because they were so well documented. Thomas Potts, the Clerk of the Court, recounted the trials in his 1613 work,
“The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster.” As this book was intended to be read by officials as high as King James himself, we must take its words with a grain of salt. Still, it's a useful source on how witch trials were supposed to be conducted at the time, as well as the fates of those involved.

The Historical Origins of Alice Nutter

In Good Omens, we are introduced to Agnes Nutter, a woman caught up in the Lancashire witch trials. Unlike the real women, Agnes Nutter really was a witch, recording thousands of prophecies that her descendants would study for centuries. Outside of her prophecies, the only thing we know about Agnes Nutter is the manner of her death.

Agnes Nutter was considered a witch by the local townspeople for “her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people.” Witchfinder Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer took her to the town square, where she was expected to be burned at the stake. She accepted this fate but had secretly hidden gunpowder and nails inside her petticoats, which caused a massive explosion that killed everyone who had gathered for her execution.

There are three likely inspirations for Agnes Nutter’s character. Her characterization seems to have largely come from Elizabeth Southerns (Old Demdike), who was described in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches as “a general agent for the Devil in all these parts: no man escaped her, or her Furies.” According to Thomas Potts, she had been a witch for 50 years when the trials took place and had raised all her children and grandchildren as witches. While her name is obviously quite different, Elizabeth Southerns had a son-in-law named John Device, who was listed in Good Omens as Agnes's son.

The name itself was probably taken from two other accused witches. The first is Agnes Sampson, the first known victim of the British Witch Trials. She was accused of attempting to kill King James in 1590, after which she was tortured and personally interrogated by the king. Her death marked the first execution for witchcraft in Scotland—but it was far from the last.

The “Nutter” surname came from another victim in the Pendle Witch Trials: Alice Nutter. Alice was the odd one out among the Lancashire victims, as she was a wealthy noblewoman. It’s unclear if she even attended Elizabeth Device’s meeting, but she was found guilty of witchcraft after being named by Device's daughter. The accusations against her were likely religiously motivated, because she was believed to be Catholic.

Between these three women, we get a broad picture of the 17th-century Witch Trials that Good Omens references. One victim was an old woman, widely known as a witch. Another was a younger widow, who seemed like a victim of circumstance. Unfortunately, none of the women that inspired Agnes Nutter got nearly as satisfying an end as she did, dying in gruesome conditions despite committing no true crimes.

The Real Fate of the Device Family

In Good Omens, the Device family spent their lives interpreting and following their ancestor’s prophecies until the final descendant, Anathema, was born at the right time to stop the apocalypse. Anathema was born explicitly to follow Agnes’s instructions, but her character arc culminated in her decision to live her own life outside of the confines of family prophecies.

The real Device family was not nearly as united. In the original round of interrogations, Alizon confessed that her mother and grandmother were witches. Her mother, Elizabeth, supported the accusations against Old Demdike, claiming that she had a witches’ mark. Alizon’s brother James also testified against both his mother and sister.

The most crushing betrayal came from nine-year-old Jennet Device, who was the primary witness against her family and the other accused witches. Over the course of the investigation, Jennet claimed that her mother spoke to the Devil in the form of a brown dog she called Ball, whom she instructed to kill multiple people. She also claimed that everyone who had attended her mother’s meeting was a witch, providing the court with six additional names and condemning her brother and sister to death.

We may never know why Jennet Device testified against her family, but there may have been coercion involved. She was being cared for by the state after her family members had been arrested, and her treatment may have depended on her usefulness at the trials. Alternatively, she may have truly believed her family was witches, as her sister Alizon seemed to.

Regardless of her reasoning, Jennet was likely the end of the Device family line. She was one of many people accused of using witchcraft to murder a woman named Isabel Nutter in 1634. While none of the accused in that case were executed, there are no records of her after 1636, leading many to believe she died in captivity, as her grandmother had twenty years earlier.

Good Omens imagines a happier ending for the Device family, with Agnes Nutter’s descendants living on and becoming wealthy by following her prophecies. While Anathema was intended as a living weapon, even she got to break away from the role she had been given. She was allowed to embrace her magic and live happily ever after, a fate that was steadfastly kept from the real women whose name she bore.

The Pendle Witch Trials are theorized to have resulted in 2% of all the witch trial executions in England. Lancaster as a whole became known for its executions, earning the nickname “the hanging town” after it was noted that it had hanged more people than anywhere in the country outside of London. Yet Good Omens claimed that Agnes Nutter’s death “more or less marked the end of the serious witch-hunting craze in England.”

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman chose to build a better world in Good Omens long before the apocalypse came calling. By using the names of real women killed on charges of witchcraft, Pratchett and Gaiman created a clear dividing point between our reality and theirs, where people came to their senses and stopped trying to kill their neighbors for being different.

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