Witch hunting in Scotland
In June 1563, the Scottish Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act, calling for any who used ‘Witchcraftis, Sorsarie and Necromancie’ to be put to death. It was not repealed until 1736, by which time several thousand people had appeared at local or central courts on charges of magical malpractice and covenants with Satan. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft catalogues 3,837 accusations, about 84% against women. Possibly around two thirds of accused individuals were executed.
Witch trials took place most frequently in Scotland’s central belt, with about a third of accused witches coming from the Lothians. The first large-scale trials took place in the 1590s, spurred by the involvement of King James VI, who suspected diabolic conspiracies against his rule. There were further waves of witch hunting in 1628-30, 1649 and 1661-2. By the late 17th century the witch hunts were waning, as lawyers and judges became increasingly sceptical about how witchcraft could be evidenced. The last prosecution took place in 1727.
An image from Newes from Scotland, a pamphlet printed in London in 1591. It depicts witches brewing up storms, and attending a service preached by the Devil.
The Scottish witch hunts were relatively severe; Scotland may have executed around ten times as many accused witches per head of the population as England. Brian Levack has outlined three primary legal reasons for this difference. While Scottish witch trials were often conducted by local elites with little or no legal training, England usually tried accused witches in assize courts, where centrally appointed judges directed affairs. Torture was more widely used to force confessions in Scotland, despite theoretically being illegal except by special warrant from the privy council. By the terms of England’s witchcraft act, some charges of witchcraft were punishable by imprisonment, while Scotland prescribed execution in every case (though this was not always carried out in practice).
In addition, the Scottish religious and secular authorities constructed a powerful narrative framing witch hunting as a form of social progress. Witches were heretics who worked with the Devil to bring evil upon the land, and witch hunting was part of a broader endeavour to mould Protestant Scotland into a ‘godly state’. All the same, witch hunting did not just come from ‘above’. Most prosecutions began with accusations by neighbours, which often stemmed from quarrels. People testified in courtrooms that hostile neighbours had cursed them, or perhaps attacked them with harmful magic (maleficia).
Making sense of witch hunting requires us to empathise not only with the accused, but also their accusers. The story of witch hunting is in part a story about misogyny, and about a church and state keen to exert authority over the population. But it is also a story about men and women who believed that their community was vulnerable to diabolic attacks, and feared that the lure of power or wealth might corrupt the hearts of their neighbours. The witch trials were an evil that emerged from a particular cultural context. They also reflect the enduring human capacity to make enemies of the innocent.
For further reading on Scottish witchcraft, see the bibliography.
The 1649 witch hunt
The 1638 Covenanting Revolution threw Scotland into turmoil. In a bid to secure a Presbyterian church free from monarchical interference, the Covenanters took arms against King Charles I’s forces. Meanwhile, Charles was becoming embroiled in a power struggle with his parliament. Over the subsequent decade, England, Scotland and Ireland were drawn into the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a bloody negotiation about the extent of the royal prerogative. In January 1649, England’s Rump Parliament executed Charles I; England subsequently became a republic. Scotland fell temporarily under the control of the most radical Covenanting faction, the Kirk Party. The Kirk Party forged an agreement with Charles II and recognised him as king of Scotland in 1651, but after military defeat at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, Scotland was annexed into the English Commonwealth.
Detail from image of Charles I by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1644
The 1640s was thus a decade of profound political instability. It also saw the resurgence of plague; a furious eruption in Edinburgh in 1645 may have killed as much as half of the population, and outbreaks continued until the end of the decade. The weather was bad, too. Cold winters and heavy rainfall disrupted agricultural output, and in 1649 there was famine in parts of the country. Interpreting these misfortunes as the punishments of an angry God, the Kirk Party resolved to cleanse Scottish society of ungodly elements. In early 1649 parliament passed a raft of acts stamping down on sexual misbehaviour, blasphemy, swearing, drunkenness and other behaviours judged impious. Amid this campaign against sinfulness, witchcraft fell under fresh scrutiny: a new act, passed on 1 February 1649, extended the 1563 act to cover ‘whatsoever persone or persons shall consult with devillis or familiar spirits’.
In this context, witch hunting gathered pace. From 1649 to 1650, perhaps around 800 people were accused of witchcraft, of whom as many as a half may have come from the Lothian area. Haddington saw particularly high numbers of trials. Sometimes Scottish witch trials were held centrally at Edinburgh’s justiciary court, but this does not seem to have happened in 1649-50. Commissions were granted by the committee of estates, which was appointed by parliament (prior to the revolution this job had belonged to the privy council, appointed by the king). Trials were then arranged locally, which meant high execution rates. While the central government was keen to stamp out sin across the land, the big push for further prosecutions came from localities; the committee of estates often frustrated local authorities by being slow to grant commissions, and some trials went ahead without official authority. The witch hunt was derailed by the arrival of Cromwellian troops, which presented parliament and people with a more immediately pressing enemy.
1654 map of Lothian and Fife, from John Blaeu’s Atlas Maior.
For more on the 1649-50 witch hunt, see especially Paula Hughes, ‘Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 1649-1650’, 85-102 in Julian Goodare (ed.), Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters (Basingstoke, 2013).
