Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters

J. Goodare

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137355942
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book brings together twelve studies that collectively provide an overview of the main issues of live interest in Scottish witchcraft. As well as fresh studies of the well-established topic of witch-hunting, the book also launches an exploration of some of the more esoteric aspects of magical belief and practice.

1

Scotland’s First Witch-Hunt: The Eastern Witch-Hunt of 1568–1569

Michael Wasser

The pioneering modern scholar of Scottish witch-hunting, Christina Larner, clarified the pattern of Scottish witch-hunting and showed that much of it occurred in brief bursts.¹ Larner listed five major peak periods which she called national witch-hunts: 1590–1591, 1597, 1628–1630, 1649 and 1661–1662.² The recent Survey of Scottish Witchcraft confirms this pattern, even as it increases the numbers based on further research.

However, the 1590–1591 witch-hunt was not the first of its kind. A previously unnoticed Scottish witch-hunt occurred in the years 1568–1569 in the eastern sheriffdoms of Scotland, from Fife to Elgin. Its size corresponds to Larner’s second category of witch-hunts, a large-scale local hunt, existing just below the scale of a national hunt.³ How was it possible for such a large witch-hunt to be previously undetected? Large witch-hunts were usually spectacular occurrences, accompanied by a moral panic and such wide publicity that it could not be hidden.

The explanation lies in the failure of the hunt. As I will argue below, two important characteristics of a witch-hunt were present. There was a determination on the part of the legal and political authorities to pursue witches as a public menace and there were large-scale accusations against suspected witches. However, the element of moral panic was not exclusive to witches, but was diffused among other offenders against God’s law such as adulterers. This was part of a campaign of godly reform under the regime of the ‘good regent’, the earl of Moray. Also, the witch-hunters did not systematically organise the trials and evidence in advance, so they were often unable to secure convictions. Finally, Moray’s regime was unstable and ended with his assassination. The instability detracted from a campaign of law and order; the assassination brought it to an end. The result was a failed witch-hunt: many people were accused as witches, efforts were made to bring them to justice, but few were actually executed. The witch-hunt was lost from sight among these wider issues.

I

The evidence for a witch-hunt in the years 1568–1569 consists of a number of distinct sets of records. At the December 1567 parliament, a commission drafting legislative proposals discussed ‘how witchecraft salbe puneist and Inquisitioun takin thairof’.⁴ There was probably no formal response, but it was followed in the next two years by a succession of prosecutions or attempted prosecutions of witches. In April 1568, there was a commission to try many people in Forfarshire, and at least one other person was subsequently investigated in May.⁵ On 2 August 1568 Sir William Stewart, the Lord Lyon, was arrested on charges of treason and using witchcraft against Regent Moray. He was later tried and executed.⁶ In the late spring of 1569, Moray conducted a justice ayre (a travelling criminal court) up the east coast of Scotland, during which large numbers of witches were accused, and ten were executed.⁷ Finally, there was another isolated case on 12 August 1569.⁸ The political context for these events was Moray’s regency, which lasted from August 1567 until his assassination in January 1570.

The two main incidents of witch-hunting were the commission of 1568 and the justice ayre of 1569. The April 1568 commission was issued to try thirty-eight individual witches in Angus. It was to last for six months and allowed for the investigation and trial of any other suspected witches as well.⁹ The commission is an example of how research expands our knowledge. It lay in the archives of the earls of Airlie until it was discovered by Arthur Williamson and mentioned in his book, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI, published in 1979. This late discovery meant that Larner was not aware of it. Since Williamson was not primarily interested in witchcraft, the commission occupied only part of a paragraph in his book and was not explored further.¹⁰ The discovery slowly percolated into the wider scholarly community. It formed a major part of the 1998 conference paper on which this chapter is based and was addressed in Peter Maxwell-Stuart’s 2001 book, Satan’s Conspiracy.

A little over a year after the commission was issued, in May and June of 1569, Moray personally conducted a justice ayre up the east coast of Scotland, from Fife to Elgin, putting down political opposition and prosecuting criminals. This circuit included the Forfarshire territory where the 1568 commission had been based. According to Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, Moray executed two witches in St Andrews, two in Dundee and various others in other places – ten witches in total.¹¹ The names of four witches who were accused but whose fate is unknown appear in the treasurer’s accounts via payments made to messengers to summon an assize.¹² One witch, named ‘Niknevin’, is known from a number of sources and is the only one of the ten executed witches whose name we know.¹³ In a letter written to the General Assembly after the justice ayre, Moray complained that he had been unable to convict most of the accused witches presented to him for lack of evidence.¹⁴ This means that the ten executed witches were drawn from a much larger number of accused witches, of which we have no record. I have therefore added an estimate of thirty witches, accused but not executed, to accompany the ten witches mentioned by Pitscottie, a three to one ratio. This extrapolation is based on other examples of the imperfections of Scottish record-keeping. For example, in 1607 and 1628, approxi-mately 75 per cent of the original bills for trials before the privy council did not appear in the subsequent trial records – also a three to one ratio.¹⁵

When we add these numbers together, we have a total of eighty-one accused witches, of whom eleven (including Sir William Stewart) are known to have been executed. This estimate for the accused witches should be seen as conservative; the actual number might have been considerably higher. For example, the justice ayre of 1569 passed through five sheriffdoms: Fife, Forfar, Aberdeen, Banff and Elgin. In one of those sheriffdoms, Forfar, there had been thirty-eight witches judicially accused the year before. Regent Moray complained that what he had during the ayre was merely ‘a generall delation of names’¹⁶ – which is what had also been provided in the 1568 commission. What if this ‘generall delation of names’ in 1569 had averaged thirty-eight witches for each sheriffdom? This would give us a total of 190 accused witches! Consider also that our knowledge of the 1568 commission is due solely to its accidental survival. Were there others? We cannot know. Moreover, Moray conducted six other justice ayres during his regency.¹⁷ There are no mentions of witchcraft prosecutions concerning any of them, but perhaps there were attempts on a smaller scale. Finally, the 1568 witchcraft commission was issued by the earl of Argyll, who was justice general of Scotland, while he was holding a justice ayre in the west of Scotland. If he issued a commission to try witches in the east, might he have been holding his own trials in the west? There are no surviving records to tell us.¹⁸ Yet if he was doing so, this would have been a national witch-hunt, not a regional one. The purpose of this speculation is not to encourage an expansion of the numbers beyond the conservative estimate of eighty-one accused witches, but to demonstrate that this figure is indeed conservative and that 1568–1569 constituted a period of large-scale witch-hunting. On the available evidence, it is just short of one of Christina Larner’s ‘national hunts’. Her examples of the category just below the national hunt were the Inverkeithing hunt of 1623 when twenty-two people were accused and the Paiston, East Lothian hunt in 1678 when eighteen people were accused.¹⁹ Both the 1568 commission and the 1569 justice ayre were larger than these witchhunts. In fact, the figure of eighty-one accused witches approaches that of 1590–1591 when the Witchcraft Survey lists 119 entries for accused witches.²⁰

II

The existence of a large but relatively invisible witch-hunt in the years 1568–1569 raises a number of questions. Why was the effort made to prosecute large numbers of witches? Is it justified to treat the 1568 commission and the 1569 justice ayre as part of a single concerted effort to hunt witches? And why did the witch-hunt fail?

The answer to the first two questions begins with two of the men responsible for the prosecutions. Regent Moray personally led the 1569 justice ayre. John Erskine of Dun was one of the seven commissioners in 1568, and one of the two who had to be of the quorum.²¹ Both men were prominent and powerful supporters of the Protestant kirk and of its agenda, which included a rigorous enforcement of the law. The argument is that Moray’s regency saw a new spirit of co-operation between the royal government and the kirk, and that one specific instance of this co-operation was the attempt by two ‘godly magistrates’, Moray and Erskine of Dun, to prosecute witches.²² This is why there was a witchhunt in 1568–1569, and why the two distinct episodes in 1568 and 1569 deserve to be treated together.

In the eyes of the reformers, crimes were sins and sins were crimes.²³ Men like Moray, Erskine of Dun, and John Knox were oriented in the direction of the Old Testament and wanted to see its judicial laws enforced in society. In the kirk’s fourth general assembly, on 29 June 1562, the second item of the assembly’s supplication to the queen and her council called for ‘punishment of horrible vices’ which ‘for laike of punishment, doe even now so abound, that sinne is reputed to be no sinne’. It continued:

If anie object that punishment cannot be commanded to be executed without a parliament, we answere, that the Eternall God, in his parliament, hath pronounced death to be the punishment of adulterie and of blasphemie; whose acts, if yee putt not in execution, (seing that kings are but his lieutenants, having no power to give life where he commandeth death,) as that he will repute you and all others who foster vice patrons of impietie, so will he not faile to punishe you for neglecting of his judgements.²⁴

Three things need to be stressed concerning this pronouncement. The first is the presence of the death penalty. The kirk was not concerned only with questions of worship and belief, which were held to be exclusive to itself, nor was it concerned only with moral offences that could be handled exclusively through the godly discipline of church courts. If the kirk wanted the death penalty enforced, then it needed the active co-operation of the civil magistrates who wielded the sword.²⁵ The second is the clear link that is made between the execution of sinners and the good of the kingdom and its rulers – God will punish those who fail to enforce his judgments. The third is that witchcraft is nowhere mentioned.

This neglect of witchcraft may have been no more than an oversight; it was no doubt implicitly included under the rubric of ‘horrible vices’. At any rate, this relative neglect of witchcraft was about to end. Beginning at th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps, Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Scotland’s First Witch-Hunt: The Eastern Witch-Hunt of 1568–1569
• 2. The Countess of Angus’s Escape from the North Berwick Witch-Hunt
• 3. Exporting the Devil across the North Sea: John Cunningham and the Finnmark Witch-Hunt
• 4. The Witch, the Household and the Community: Isobel Young in East Barns, 1580–1629
• 5. Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 1649–1650
• 6. Reputation and Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Dalkeith
• 7. Outside In or Inside Out: Sleep Paralysis and Scottish Witchcraft
• 8. ‘We mey shoot them dead at our pleasur’: Isobel Gowdie, Elf Arrows and Dark Shamanism
• 9. Flying Witches in Scotland
• 10. The Urban Geography of Witch-Hunting in Scotland
• 11. Executing Scottish Witches
• 12. Decline and Survival in Scottish Witch-Hunting, 1701–1727
• Bibliography of Scottish Witchcraft
• Index