SCOTTISH WITCHES TO GET APOLOGY
Campaign may see pardons for those tried as witches in Scotland’s past
After a two-year campaign, the pressure group Witches of Scotland is on course to win pardons and official apologies for the estimated 3,387 people who were tried as witches in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries.
The Scottish witch panic started in 1563 with the Witchcraft Act, and lasted until 1736, when the Act was finally repealed. During that period there were five “great Scottish witch-hunts” that saw two-thirds of those accused, mostly women, executed by strangling, after which their bodies were burned at the stake. This rate of conviction made the Scottish witch hunts among the worst in Europe. “Per capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, we executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women,” said Claire Mitchell QC, who leads the Witches of Scotland campaign.
Among those executed were Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, for casting a spell to cause a neighbour’s hangover and Issobell Young, who a stable boy accused of shape-shifting into an owl and of having a coven. James VI of Scotland, who went on to take the English throne as James I, was a particular enthusiast of witch hunting, writing a book on witches, Dæmonologie, and prosecuting those he believed had summoned storms to sink his ships. A well-known case was that of Geillis Duncan who, after torture, which included sleep deprivation, the crushing and pulling out of fingernails, and pricking of the skin with needles and bodkins, admitted to meeting the Devil to “thwart the king’s ships”, while Agnes Sampson was tortured into confessing that she was among 200 women who witnessed the Devil preach at North Berwick on Hallowe’en, where the king’s destruction was plotted. As a result of the campaign, a member’s bill in the Scottish parliament to clear the names of all the accused has gained Scottish Government support, which will almost inevitably result in its passing.
This pardon follows the precedent of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the US, which pardoned the victims of the Salem witch trials in 2001. Speaking of the Salem pardon, Mitchell said: “In Salem 300 people were accused and 19 people were executed. We absolutely excelled at finding women to burn in Scotland. Those executed weren’t guilty, so they should be acquitted.” theguardian.com, 19 Dec 2021.
A stable boy accused her of shape-shifting into an owl