Pendle is the best documented English witch trial, and the reason is a single book. Thomas Potts, clerk of the court, published a long account of the proceedings the year after, at the direction of the judges. It reproduces examinations, evidence and the shape of the trial in unusual detail, and without it almost nothing would be known.
That is a mixed inheritance, and it is a general problem in this subject. The record is full because a participant wanted the verdicts to look sound. Potts was writing to demonstrate that the court had acted properly, in a county the crown considered troublesome, in the reign of a king who had written a book on witchcraft. Everything he includes was chosen with that in mind, and what he leaves out cannot be recovered. Historians therefore use the account as the fullest available source and as a piece of advocacy at the same time, which is the same double reading the Hopkins pamphlet requires.
The afterlife has been strange. Pendle Hill is now a heritage attraction, with trails, sculptures and an annual trade in tourism, and the executed have become characters. Some of that is affectionate and some of it is not.
Jennet Device's own end is the detail that stays. A woman of that name appears in a Lancashire witch trial some twenty years later, accused, this time, on the evidence of another child.