The Pursuit of Witches
October 2002
Greg Dawson Allen
“O thou! Whatever title suit thee,
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick or Clootie,
Wha in yon cavern grim an’ sootie,
Clos’d under hatches,
Spairges about the brunstane cootie,
To scaud poor wretches!”
Robert Burns’ Address to the Deil
In Scotland, witchcraft was a criminal offence from 1563 when it was included in a statute law. Until its repeal in 1736, the purging of heresy and treason against God and the monarch was one of the few common denominators of both the Protestant and Catholic churches.
The zealous pursuit of those carrying on the craft of witchery was undertaken in the King’s name, whereby, those prosecuted were seen to be practising in the Devil’s name. King James had first-hand experience of the supposed power of the Black Airt on passage back to Leith from Norway with his new bride, Queen Anne of Denmark in 1590.
Agnes Sampson, a ‘grave matron-like woman, of a rank and comprehension above the vulgar’, the elder witch of her coven in the Lothians, was tried in the presence of the ‘Kinges Majestie’ at Holy Rood House in January of that same year.
She and her fellow collaborators were accused of invoking the sea into a tempest in a bid to drown the king and his bride. A ship sailing for Burnt Island to Leith containing ‘sundrie jewelles and rich gifts’ to be presented to the newlyweds on their arrival was sunk in the storm. Nearly 200 witches set off to sea in ‘seives and riddles’ to conjour the waves into a tempest “as greater hath not bene seene”.
Upon landing in North Berwick the witches made merry to the reels played by ‘Gellis Duncane’ on the Jew’s harp. Apparently the confessions ‘made the King in a wonderful admiration’ and ordered Gellis to play for him his whole repertoire. Agnes and her companions were sentenced to death on the Castle Hill in Edinburgh.
King James’ obsession with witchcraft led to his writing his own book, Daemonologie, and in taking an uncanny interest in the hunt for witches. At his bidding, and due to the fact the High Court of Justiciary couldn’t cope with the increasing number of alleged persons practising the craft, the King appointed Royal Commissions, the length and breadth of Scotland, to try the accused.
drawing by Sandy Cheyne
The kirk in Scotland was no different from its European counterparts and took a lead role in administering justice, as it saw it, against those accused of associating with Satan or his agents. From 1590 to 1680 there were four main outbreaks of prosecutions; from Aberdeen to the Borders on the east coast, in areas around Edinburgh and the Lothians, Stirling and Lanark, in the Orkney Islands, and later, in Ayrshire and Galloway.
The Privy Council acting for sovereign and government reserved the right to grant commissions for the trials of alleged witches, male and female, and penalties were imposed on those who took the law into their own hands and tried the alleged felons without prior authority.
The peak of the witch trials occurred during the reign of King James VI of Scotland and the first of England, and from the translation of the bible to the familiar King James Authorised Version comes the reference, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus Chapter 22, verse 18). In Hebrew the word for ‘witch’ is ‘chenaph’, meaning a poisener or diviner. Those translators pandered to the King’s vanity and his hatred of the occult and exaggerated the term to ‘witch’. Between the years of 1566 and 1722 in Scotland alone over 4,000 women and men were executed in the name and defence of religion.
Aberdeen Town Council had its own shameful record of witchcraft persecutions. Between February 1596 and April 1597, 23 women and one man were tried and convicted. The guilty were first hanged and then burned on the Heading Hill. The town’s hangman had a set fee, £1 6s 8d (£1.33), and for that four witches were killed in a single day.
A royal commission allowed the provost and baillies of Aberdeen to try, amongst others, Janet Wishart, wife of a stabler, John Lees, and her companions in February 1596. Janet was accused of malevolent deeds against her neighbours for upwards of 30 years. The symptoms were similar in nearly all the cases, “A dwining illness, melting away like ane burning candle”.
James Low, also a stabler, refused Janet the loan of his kiln and barn and, in his dying moments, declared that by the hand of Janet Wishart, “By the whilk witchcraft casten upon him, and upon his house, his wife died, his only son in the same kind of sickness, and his haill geir, surmounting three thousand pounds, are all together wrackit and away”.
Other accusations were laid on her: she caused a dozen hens to fall from their roost, dead at her feet, cursed a neighbour’s cow to produce venom instead of milk, raised the wind to winnow malt barley in her house, and went with her daughter, Violet, to the Gallow Hill to mutilate a dead victim for body parts for use in spell-making.
Thomas Lees, her son, was convicted of aiding his mother in her deeds. He and Janet were part of a company who had gone to the Market and Fish Crosses at midnight on All Hallow’s Eve in 1595 to meet with the Devil, “Who was playing on his kind of instruments”.
Those at the gathering took on many forms, “Some as hares, some as cats, some in other likenesses”, and danced to the music. Mother and son were tried and “That justice ordainit hir (and him) to be brint to the deid”.
John Lees, Wishart’s husband, and his daughters, Elspet, Janet and Violet, were spared the flames, but were banished from Aberdeen.
Assuming the form of hare was a common accusation, found in many accounts of witchcraft trials including that of Isobel Gowdie. A commission was held at Auldearn, Morayshire, on 13 April 1662, a year in which 35 commissions were issued. In the presence of the Sheriff Depute of Nairn, members of the kirk and Alexander Brodie of Brodie began one of the most notorious witch trials, that of Gowdie.
Sir Walter Scott in his Letters On Demonology published in 1830, commented on Gowdie’s four confessions, “As throwing upon the rites and ceremonies of the Scottish witches a light which we seek in vain elsewhere”.
A footnote to the Aberdeen witch trials of 1595/96 concerns Lawrence Fletcher & Company, who visited the town in October 1601. Fletcher was head of a group of actors of which William Shakespeare was the principal director and playwright. The dialogue of the Scottish play, Macbeth, describes uncannily much of the content of those who previously had been on trial and were fresh in local gossip.
Janet Wishart spoke of, “Peeling the blades of corn… the blade of the corn grows withershins; when it grows sungates about it will be ane cheap year”.
Banquo’s lines are:
“If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which grain will grow,
and which will not
Speak then to me.”
In Othello Shakespeare wrote;
“That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give…
She was a charmer…
’Twould make her amiable,
and subdue my father”.
As it happened, Isobell Strauthaquin, alias Scudder, was tried in 1597 in Aberdeen. Scudder was known to be a matchmaker and so was called upon to assist in ‘charming ane man’:
“Isobel com to Elspet Mutray in Wodheid, scho beand a widow, and askit of hir if scho has ane pennie to len hir, and Elspet gaif hir the pennie; and Isobell tuik the pennie and bowit it, and tuik ane clout and ane piece reid wax, and sewit the clout, and gaif it to Elspet Mutray, commanding hir to wss the clout to hing about hir crag (neck), and quhane scho saw the mane quhome scho lowit best, tak the clout, with the pennie and the wax, and straik hir face thairwith, and scho so doing, scho suld attein in to the mariage of that mane quhome scho luffit”.
Plentiful evidence exists of ‘confessions’ to the practice of the Black Airts throughout Aberdeenshire and beyond, many extracted under torture.
Some persons though, used their gifts for good, and a man called Henderson who had a croft at the foot of Bennachie had the ‘Eolas’ or knowledge. Skairy, as he was familiarly known, could cast out ‘Beelzebub by the power of Beelzebub’. In the spring of 1860 he was asked, for his usual fee of £1 and a bottle of whisky, to investigate the death of calves in surrounding farms, associated with the sighting of a hare. Nannie Souter and Betty Berry were suspected as both were known to be proficient in the craft.
Skairy’s advice was that the brother of Watson, a tenant farmer, who was a good shot with a rifle, should load his gun with a crooked sixpence to shoot the hare with. This proved costly advice, however, for he was forbidden in the lease of his farm from shooting hares. It is not known how the problem was resolved.
How these powers were obtained is open to question. A member of Gowdie’s coven, Janet Breidheid denied her Christian baptism, the first step to a pact with the Devil:
“And efter I haid put my on (own) hand to the soallis (soles) of my foot, and the ither hand to the crown of my head… and all betuixt my two handis to the Divell, the Divell marked me in the shoulder, and sucked out my blood with his mouth..he spowted it in his hand and sprinkled it on my head.”
In the Orkney islands a different practice was held for acquiring witchcraft. A manuscript from the recitation of the grand-daughter of a renowned witch around the early 19th century described various intricate positions of lying between low and high tide and placing stones around the body. The apprentice then had to close his (or her) eyes and recite an incantation.
During the height of the witch-hunts almost no one was immune from accusation, gentry or tenants. The wife of the infamous William Smith, a wealthy miller in Fyvie (father of Annie, the tragic lover in the ballad The Mill O’ Tifty’s Annie) had cause to call upon Gavin Sinclair, a self-professed charmer, to cure a sick cow for two or three pecks of meal.
The last witch to be burned was at Dornach, Inverness-shire in 1727. The Inverness Courier printed a bizarre tale from Lonisburgh near Wick on 26 November 1845, about a young girl suspected of being a witch, who nearly superseded this statistic.
“In order to cure her of the witch-ill, a neighbour put her into a creel half full with wood shavings, and hung her above a fire, setting the shavings ablaze. Fortunately for the child and himself she was not injured, and, it is said, the gift of sorcery has been taken away from her.”
No-one knows the toll of lives taken at the whim of local hearsay. Thousands of innocent women and men were sentenced, many by royal commissions and many by local jurisdiction administered by gossip and superstition.
There is no consolation to those who died at the hands of their executioners but, by the documenting of the ‘Notar Publict’ in the ‘legal’ trials and others, their names are kept alive as the accounts are retold.
“Confessit and declait furth.”
Greg Dawson Allen, originally from Aberdeenshire, now lives in Inverness. An award-winning playwright, widely respected poet, and former student of Gaelic at the University of the Highlands & Islands.
This is an article from the October 2002 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.