The Pendle Witches | Cautionary Tales

What’s better than a witch story on Halloween? Today, we’ve got a special episode from Cautionary Tales’ Tim Harford to share. Back in 1612 Lancashire, a chance roadside argument between a peddler and a teenage girl spirals into England's most notorious witch trial, after the peddler is struck down by a mysterious force. Hundreds of years later, there’s now a campaign to posthumously pardon the people condemned as the Pendle Witches. If you’re looking for more spooky listens, check out Cautionary Tales, where they’ve spent the month telling stories about vampires, crop circles, ghosts and more. Find Cautionary Tales wherever you list to podcasts. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:24Speaker 01

  Hello, Maddie and Anthony here. Now, a few months back, we were delighted to have Tim Harford, host of Cautionary Tales, on the show to chat through Britain's worst airship mishap. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, you should check it out now. Well, we enjoyed Tim's storytelling so much that we wanted to share another story from him, perfectly suited for spooky season.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  So today, we're bringing you an episode from Cautionary Tales, all about the Pendle Witches. If you're unfamiliar, back in 1612 Lancashire, a chance roadside argument between a peddler and a teenage girl spirals into England's most notorious witch trial, after the peddler is struck down by a mysterious force.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Two men and 10 women stand accused, facing lengthy interrogations, dubious confessions, and critical testimony from a nine-year-old girl. Anyone found guilty is to be executed. But hundreds of years later, there's now a campaign to posthumously pardon the people condemned as the Pendle Witches.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  We hope you enjoy this episode from Cautionary Tales. They've got more tales for Halloween season one around vampires, crop circles, and ghosts, oh my, over on their feed. Find Cautionary Tales wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  An early spring day, a country lane in Lancashire, England, in the shadow of looming Pendle Hill with its bare morland slopes. The year is 1612, a different world. A middle-aged man and a teenage girl are about to pass each other. The man has a pack on his back. He's a peddler, a kind of 1612 answer to Amazon, a one-man walking warehouse, bringing wares to rural people who can't easily get to a shop. And the teenage girl? Her grandma is a notorious local witch.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  What happens on this lane will cause the deaths of 10 people and will still bring tourists to Lancashire over 400 years later, especially at Halloween.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  So what does happen? It's hard to be certain. Our sources are questionable, for reasons we'll get to. But the encounter goes something like this. The young woman tells the man she wants to buy some pins. He has pins in his pack. It's the kind of thing a peddler carries, but he refuses to stop and get them out. Why? Perhaps he assumes that the young woman, Alison, wants the pins on credit and he doesn't trust her to pay. Perhaps he knows who Alison's grandma is, and that witches use pins to curse people by stabbing them into crude clay figurines. The peddler takes up the story.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  "She was very earnest with me for pins," Alison adds. "He sturdily answered that he would not lose his pack." Whereupon, the peddler continued, "She seemed to be very angry." The peddler trudges on with his pack and gets a couple of hundred yards down the lane, unaware that Alison is now conferring with a vicious-looking, talking dog.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  The dog asks Alison, "What wouldst thou have me do to yonder man?" She replies, "What canst thou do to him?" The dog offers, "I can lame him." Alison says, "Lame him."

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Down the lane, the peddler suddenly collapses, lame in great extremity. His entire left side useless, his leg, his arm, the left side of his face deformed. He can't speak. And then, standing over him, he sees a great black dog with very fearful fiery eyes, great teeth, and a terrible countenance looking me in the face.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Where it, I was very sore afraid.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Witchcraft was real in England in 1612. Just ask the King of England, King James, who literally wrote the book on it, Demonology. "Such assaults of Satan are most certainly practised," the king assured his readers. "Witches, those detestable slaves of the devil, deserve most severely to be punished." The king himself had been subject to an assault of Satan after he decided to marry a princess from Denmark. First, when his bride-to-be tried to sail to Britain, she had to turn back as the weather at sea was too bad.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  It happened again and again, six times. Then, when James himself sailed over to pick her up, his ship too encountered terrible storms.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  He reached for the obvious explanation, witchcraft. A suspect was soon identified. A young maidservant with a noble family in Scotland. Placed in thumbscrews, she named other Scottish witches, including the wise wife from Keith, who refused at first to confess. She too was tortured. A rope twisted tight around her head, and her pubic hair shaved off to reveal a suspicious mark near her genitals. Clearly, the devil had sucked on her. She admitted everything. She had kissed the devil's buttocks.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  She had brewed up a potion from adder's skin and roasted toad. She had caused the storms by sacrificing a cat. King James had her strangled and her body burned.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Having survived this demonic attempt at regicide, James made a careful study of how witchcraft works. "Such persons as are in great misery and poverty," wrote the king. "The devil allures to follow him by promising unto them great riches."

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Misery and poverty were common enough in Lancashire in the time of James's reign. It would be no surprise then if witchcraft were common too. The peddler who collapsed on the lane, lame in great extremity, was helped to an alehouse. A message was sent to his adult son, who worked in a nearby town. "Your father is speechless," it said. "The left side lamed, all save his eye." From the description of his symptoms, we can reasonably assume that the unfortunate peddler had likely had a stroke. By the time his son arrived at the alehouse, his speech was starting to recover.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  He told his son the story, his refusal to sell pins, Alison's angry reaction, his collapse. And they reached for the obvious explanation, witchcraft.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  The accusation reached the local magistrate, an eminent gentleman, whose role combined the work we'd now associate with both police and prosecutor. He interviewed the recovering peddler, who apparently told him about that great black dog with its fearful fiery eyes.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  The magistrate had Alison arrested.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Luckily for Alison, under English law, she wasn't supposed to be tortured like the Scottish witches. Still, it was 1612, she won't have been read her rights and offered a lawyer. Alison, it seems, readily confessed to instructing the talking black dog and told the magistrate about the first time the dog had appeared to her. He'd made her an offer. “Give me your soul,” and in return, he'd give her the power to do anything she would. Alison agreed. They sealed the deal by means of the black dog sucking on Alison's breast, a little below the paps.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  At this point, I should pause to answer a question. How do we know all this? It's one thing when witches attempt to kill a king, you'd expect that to make it into the history books. But disputes between peddlers and beggars on country lanes tend not to have been recorded for posterity. Our information comes from an account written later by a legal clerk called Thomas Potts. The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancashire. It's a deeply suspect source.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Potts wrote his account at the request of the judges, who later heard the case the magistrate built. No doubt, the judges will have wanted to look good to the king. Their clerk will hardly be a reliable narrator. Still, suspect or not, The Wonderful Discovery is a rare insight into everyday provincial life in 1612. We hear, for example, what Alison supposedly told the magistrate about the powers of her grandma, the notorious witch, known locally as Old Demdike. Like the time Alison begged a jug full of milk and brought it to her grandma, half an

• 12:22Speaker 04

  hour later, there was butter to the quantity of a quarter of a pound in the said milk, and the quantity of the said milk still remaining. Alison's grandma had magicked up butter. She told young Alison how she too could gain such powers. “She did sundry times advise me to let a devil suck at some part of me.” But the grandma had a rival, another woman aged about eighty, Old Chatax. The two old matriarchs vied for trade as cunning folk. Many communities had them, people with powers.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  You'd go to them if you'd lost something, or had it stolen, or you'd been bewitched, or you were ill. Only the rich could afford a doctor. Anyway, such was medical knowledge that a doctor might do you more harm than good. The cunning folk used charms and spells, and for illness, herbal remedies, some of which even helped. Cunning folk were respected, but also feared. “Upset them, it was believed, and they might turn their powers against you.” Alison told the magistrate about a farmer who'd asked her grandma's help to heal a sick cow.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  The cow died, and we hear that Alison did “verily thinketh that her said grandmother did bewitch the said cow to death.” Cunning folk could even operate a kind of protection racket. “Nice cow you've got there. Shame if something were to happen.” Alison's own father was so afraid of Old Chatax that he gave her eight pounds of oatmeal a year so she wouldn't harm him. Then, one year, he didn't, and he died, convinced on his deathbed that Old Chatax was to blame.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  As the magistrate extracted these stories from Alison, he began to realise that Lancashire was home to more detestable slaves of the devil than he could have imagined. He had Alison's grandma, her rival Old Chatax, and Old Chatax's daughter rounded up and sent with Alison to the dungeons in Lancaster Castle. But the story of the Pendle Witches was only getting started.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. Visit Lancashire today and you could take a stroll up Pendle Hill, a five-mile circular from the car park with 400 yards of elevation. On a clear day, from the top, you might see Blackpool Tower. In the little village of Newchurch in Pendle, you could visit the gift shop, Witches Galore,

• 15:43Speaker 04

  to buy yourself a commemorative Pendle Witches mug, or tea towel, or fridge magnet, all depicting a witch in traditional garb, broomstick and pointy hat. You could stop for a pint at the pub, The Pendle Witch. The reviews are good. “Super friendly staff and a quirky witch-themed beer garden.” And then you could go to the village of Roughleigh, down the road from the Pendle Valley Caravan Park, and take a selfie with the statue of Alice Nutter, lovingly sculpted in brass and steel by a local artist. The Alice Nutter statue was unveiled in 2012, marking the 400th anniversary of the Pendle Witches trial.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  So, who was Alice Nutter? Back in 1612, Alison and her grandma, Old Demdike, have been locked up in Lancaster Castle. A few days later, a gathering takes place at Old Demdike's house, hosted by Demdike's daughter, Alison's mother. Present are assorted relatives, friends and neighbours. Or, as the legal clerk Thomas Potts describes them in The Wonderful Discovery, “all the most dangerous, wicked and damnable witches in the country, far and near.”

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Potts, remember, is writing at the behest of the judges who heard the case. He wants to justify their verdict. “With great cheer and merry company,” Potts tells us, “this great assembly resolves on a plan of action to free their imprisoned comrades. The jailer shall be slain. The castle of Lancaster to be blowen up.” It's unclear how exactly Potts thought these “damnable witches” would blow up the castle, but he was delighted to report that their scheme was thwarted when some notice of this meeting comes to the attention of the local magistrate.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  He has eight more people rounded up for allegedly being at this “great assembly”. They include Alison's mother and brother, and various local associates of the family. One of these people is not like the others. Her name is Alice Nutter. In his book, Demonology, King James had explained how the devil allures such persons as are in great misery and poverty. While that described most of the unfortunate souls the Lancashire magistrate had arrested for witchcraft, it did not describe Alice Nutter.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Thomas Potts tells us, “She was a rich woman, had a great estate, and children of good hope. And yet, here she was, confined to a cell in Lancaster Castle, accused of murder by witchcraft.” The alleged victim was a landowner. The story of the murder went like this. Old Demdike asked him for a penny. He refused her. Later, he died. The explanation was obvious and explicitly confirmed by Alison's brother. He told the magistrate how his grandma had got her revenge by bewitching the man to death.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  He also mentioned Alice Nutter as being somehow involved in this bewitchment. King James admits in Demonology that “even the rich might sell their soul if they burn in a desperate desire of revenge. The devil may promise them to get their turn satisfied to their heart's contentment.” Did Alice Nutter then have some burningly desperate desire to revenge herself against the man she supposedly helped bewitch to death? It seems not. “In the common opinion of the world,” says Thomas Potts, “Alice Nutter was considered

• 20:07Speaker 04

  a woman of good temper, free from envy or malice.” Potts doesn't tell us much more about Alice Nutter. What did she say when it was put to her that by force of witchcrafts, she feloniously did kill and murder? Nothing, apparently. She didn't confess. She didn't defend herself. The judge's clerk seems almost embarrassed by how little he has to go on when recounting her case. “Oh, he's sure she committed murder and many other vile and damnable practices, but

• 20:47Speaker 04

  as to her motive, he can only limply say, ‘I know not.’” It's a mystery. A woman of apparently flawless character is accused of vague but murderous black magic, she has no apparent motive, and she remains silent when charged. No wonder the enigmatic Alice Nutter exerts such fascination that tourists head to Roughleigh to take a selfie with her statue.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  We can imagine, of course, what might have happened. In 1848, the writer William Harrison Ainsworth published a bestselling historical novel, The Lancashire Witches, after visiting Pendle and hearing the stories the locals passed down from generation to generation. In his telling, the wealthy Alice is engaged in a property dispute with a local magistrate who cynically takes the chance to ease her aside by having her accused of witchcraft. It's a fun idea, but we'll never know, right? It all happened over 400 years ago. There's no chance now

• 22:07Speaker 04

  of any new evidence coming to light. Or is there?

• 22:17Speaker 04

  In 2023, the author Charlotte Meredith published a fascinating book on the Pendle witches. For the most part, it draws on the same source material as other authors, primarily Thomas Potts and the wonderful discovery of witches in the county of Lancashire. But Meredith has also uncovered never-heard-before testimonies from several of the key protagonists. As I tell you about these new testimonies, see if you can guess where Charlotte Meredith came by them. We'll start with Alice Nutter. The true story is nowhere near as dramatic as William Harrison Ainsworth's imaginings.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Alice was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. She'd known Old Demdike for years. She used the old woman's herbal remedies to treat arthritis in her feet and lower back. They helped, and she gladly paid for them. When she heard Old Demdike had been arrested, she went to the house with a gift of food for the woman's family. That was all. Did she help to feloniously kill and murder the man who'd refused Old Demdike a penny? Of course not. She had no reason to want the man dead. She barely knew him, beyond seeing each other at church. So why not speak up to defend herself?

• 23:44Speaker 04

  "She simply felt powerless", she said in this newly-discovered testimony. "Only God had the power to help me now." There's a new account from Alison, too. What really happened on the lane with the peddler. Yes, she'd asked for pins. He'd refused. And she'd got angry and shouted at him. But she hadn't set a talking black dog on him. She'd just turned and walked away. After a while, she heard raised voices, turned back to look, and saw the peddler on the ground with other men helping him. She didn't give it much thought. Later, she learned how unwell the peddler was

• 24:26Speaker 04

  and that people were gossiping sheer done it. At first, she was worried. Could her anger really have lamed the peddler? She hadn't meant to, but she did believe that some people had the power to do things like that. Might she have that power? She began to feel strangely good about herself. As a young woman, she did find that people were often dismissive of her, like the peddler. Maybe they'd respect her now. As for the peddler, his new testimony reveals he hadn't meant to treat Alison dismissively at all. By the time he met her on the lane,

• 25:09Speaker 04

  he already wasn't feeling right. That's why he said that he wouldn't loose his pack, not because he thought Alison was begging, he just wanted to get to the ale house so he could rest. By the time he came to again after his collapse, he was alarmed to discover that everyone had already decided he'd been bewitched. It's not that the peddler doubted such things were possible. He just didn't think it had happened to him. He'd felt poorly before that brief encounter with Alison. But the magistrate who interviewed him was keen to get a witch convicted. He offered the peddler money to testify, reminding him that there was no guarantee

• 25:54Speaker 04

  his health would recover enough to ever let him work again. The peddler agreed. But he regretted it when he saw Alison in court, desperately afraid because she knew she faced the gallows. He was consumed with guilt for the rest of his life.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Have you guessed yet where the author Charlotte Meredith found these new accounts? Let me quote from the introduction to her book. "There is life after death. The best way to learn the truth about the Pendle witches is to ask them what happened." Thanks to the kind and patient assistance of an experienced spiritualist medium, who also happens to be the author's mother, it is time for the Pendle witches to be heard. Yes, the author Charlotte Meredith has written an impressively sourced account of the Pendle witch trials, with all the end notes and bibliography

• 26:59Speaker 04

  you'd want to see in a proper work of history, and augmented it by having her mum talk to the dead.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  I said that 1612 was a different world, a world of strange beliefs. But perhaps we too have our own strange beliefs to contend with. And there's one more thing I need you to know about Charlotte Meredith.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Cautionary tales will return.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  In 2022, on International Women's Day, the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, gave a speech to the Scottish Parliament. "Thousands of Scottish people", she explained, "the vast majority women, stood trial for witchcraft in the late 1500s, 1600s, and early 1700s, until the law was finally amended. Scottish women, like the wise wife from Keith, tortured until she confessed that she'd colluded with the devil to cause the storm that hit King James's ship. These women", Nicola Sturgeon said, "were not witches. They were poor,

• 28:27Speaker 04

  or different, or vulnerable, or, well, women."

• 28:33Speaker 05

  "It was injustice on a colossal scale, driven at least in part by misogyny in its most literal sense, hatred of women."

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Sturgeon was responding to a petition asking for an apology and a pardon for the Scottish witches. The pardon, said Sturgeon, would need Parliament to legislate. But in the meantime...

• 28:58Speaker 05

  "As First Minister on behalf of the Scottish Government, I am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend a formal, posthumous apology to all those accused, convicted, vilified, or executed under the Witchcraft Act 1563."

• 29:16Speaker 04

  The campaign for a pardon continues, and not just in Scotland, but England, where nobody in government has ever even apologized to the likes of Alison, Old Demdike, and Alice Nutter. The Justice for Witches webpage points out that these people could not possibly have committed the crimes of which they were accused, because the idea that you can use magic to harm your neighbours is a make-believe idea. Quite so. The campaign reflects our modern, rational understanding of the world. Oh, and the head of the campaign? Charlotte Meredith.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  If you go to the author's website, charlottemeredith.co.uk and click on the "Justice for Witches" tab, you can add your name to the petition calling for a pardon. Because, obviously, harmful magic is a make-believe idea. Then you can click on the "Book" tab to buy Charlotte's history of the Pendle witches trials, because, obviously, it's perfectly plausible for Charlotte's mum to interview the dead. This tale of two tabs on Charlotte Meredith's website raises an intriguing question. How do we think about the supernatural? What makes one idea seem patently absurd

• 30:44Speaker 04

  while another can still be advanced with a straight face? Opinion polls are no help in solving the puzzle. In 2025, the pollster YouGov asked Brits about their supernatural beliefs. Some 20% say it's either definitely or probably possible to communicate with the dead. But wait, 21% say the same about the existence of witches with magic powers. In the US, the figures are similar. According to Gallup, 27% believe in messages from the other side, and 24% believe in witches. These are minorities, but they're not nothing. There's clearly a market

• 31:28Speaker 04

  for posthumous interviews with people falsely accused of witchcraft. But the opinion polls also suggest that about the same numbers of Brits and Americans should be open to the idea that at least some people in 1612 might really have been witches.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  In August 1612, two judges decided the fates of the Pendle witches. Their clerk, Thomas Potts, took careful notes, as one by one the case was made against each of the accused. Not Old Demdike, though. She had already died in her cell in Lancaster Castle. Her great rival, Old Chatacks, was still going, just barely. A very old, withered, spent, and decrepit creature, as Potts described her, clearly a witch. Alison, of course, had also confessed to witchcraft, but her mother pleaded not guilty.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  So the prosecution brought out their star witness, her other daughter, Alison’s younger sister. Janet, says Potts, was about the age of nine years. Courts wouldn’t normally rely on such young witnesses, but the usual rules of evidence were relaxed in witchcraft trials. The sight of Janet on the witness stand had quite an effect on her mother. Outrageously cursing, says Potts, she cried out against the child in such fearful manner that poor Janet, with weeping tears, told the court she was not able to speak in the

• 33:18Speaker 04

  presence of her mother. Once her mother had been removed, Janet did confesseth and saith that her mother is a witch, and this she knoweth to be true. Guilty. Then there was wealthy, good-tempered, enigmatic Alice Nutter, who was stubbornly refusing to incriminate herself. The judges found an ingenious solution: an identity parade. Young Janet, after all, had been present at that great assembly of all the most dangerous,

• 34:01Speaker 04

  wicked, and damnable witches in the country. Would she recognise others who’d been there? She assured the judges that she would. And so, in the presence of this great audience, in open court, the nine-year-old girl went and took Alice Nutter by the hand. Case closed. Even in 1612, not everyone believed in witchcraft. On the very first page of Demonology, King James refers to the “damnable opinions”

• 34:42Speaker 04

  of a writer who is “not afraid, in public print, to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft”. We don’t know how common such scepticism was. Ugov and Gallapalas weren’t around back then, but we get an example from Potts himself. We hear an account of a young man convinced he’s been cursed by Old Chatacks, whose father tells him, “Thou art a foolish lad. It is not so.” Admittedly, when the son promptly dies, and the father himself takes to his deathbed, he does change his tune.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  “He did sundry times say that he was bewitched.” It must have been hard to stay sceptical. What we believe as individuals is reinforced or undermined by how much those beliefs are reflected back to us. The sociologist Peter Berger gives us the idea of a plausibility structure, in which personal and collective beliefs are in constant dialogue. Berger was interested in analysing religion, but his idea applies just as well to supernatural beliefs. In 1612, witchcraft had a plausibility structure.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  You get ill, your cow dies, your ship meets a storm, many around you will say you were obviously bewitched. Today, in many parts of the world, that structure has been dismantled. Tell someone you’ve been bewitched, and chances are you’ll get a raised eyebrow or a polite smile. But in some places, belief in witchcraft remains all too plausible. In the 2010s, the Pew Research Centre asked people in 95 countries, “Do you believe in the evil eye? Or that certain people can cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen to someone?”

• 36:48Speaker 04

  The percentage saying yes ranged from as low as nine to as high as 90. In communities where witchcraft still has that plausibility structure, we get stories like the 81-year-old woman in Uganda beaten by her neighbours for causing a drought, the Haitian gang leader who massacred elderly people in Port-au-Prince because witchcraft made his son ill, or the 13-year-old girl in Nigeria deprived of food for bewitching her uncle’s motorbike. When Nicola Sturgeon apologised to Scottish witches, she knew there’d be those who asked, “Why bother? Wasn’t it all so long ago?”

• 37:33Speaker 05

  For some, this is not yet historic. There are parts of our world where even today, women and girls face persecution, and sometimes death because they have been accused of witchcraft.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Charlotte Meredith agrees. By pardoning our historic witches, our government can send a powerful, educational message. When strange ideas are reinforced by a plausibility structure, they have consequences. Without such a structure, the stakes tend to be lower. Claim you can talk to the dead, and you must know that most people aren’t going to take you seriously. Perhaps that difference can help us to resolve the Charlotte Meredith paradox. What we say about witchcraft matters. In parts of the world, belief in harmful magic still gets people killed.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  But a message from beyond the grave is unlikely to get anyone convicted of murder. Ten of the Pendle accused were found guilty, including Alison, her mother and brother, Old Chatacks, and Alice Nutter. The judge put on his black cap. “You shall all go from hence to the place of execution, where your bodies shall be hanged until you are dead, and God have mercy upon your souls.” We don’t hear much on the hanging from Thomas Potts.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  He just notes that it took place the next day. We hear from Charlotte Meredith that Alison wept hysterically. It would hardly be surprising. In truth, we’ll never know the details of what happened in Lancashire in 1612, from the meeting on the country lane to the tightening of the noose. But if the spirits of the Pendle witches really are floating around, ready to communicate over 400 years later, I’d love to know what they make of those commemorative fridge magnets, tea towels, and mugs.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes, and Ryan Deely. It’s produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Ben Nadeff-Hafré edited the scripts. The show also wouldn’t have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Corinne Guillard Fisher, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review, it really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it ad-free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and

• 41:01Speaker 04

  members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to patreon.com/cautionaryclub. That’s Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash cautionary club.