A brief history of the Scottish witch-hunt
As an introduction to our special issue on Scottish witchcraft, Dr Allan Kennedy offers a short overview of witch-hunting in early modern Scotland
As an introduction to our special issue on Scottish witchcraft, Dr Allan Kennedy offers a short overview of witch-hunting in early modern Scotland
Beginnings
While belief in magic, benevolent and malevolent, has clearly existed in Scotland for centuries, if not millennia, the core era of witchhunting began in 1563. It was in that year that the Scottish parliament passed its short and fairly woolly Witchcraft Act. This outlawed ‘witchcraft, sorcery [and] necromancy’ on pain of death, and was part of the more general drive for social and behavioural regulation that followed in the wake of the Reformation. But the passage of the Act did not spark any immediate mania for witch-hunting: aside from a brief spasm of prosecutions in 156869, leading to eleven deaths, very few witches were tried during the following quarter century.
Things changed in the 1590s. By that point, however, the concept had undergone a degree of evolution, the key effect of which was to move the devil centre-stage. According to this thinking, witches’ power derived from Satan, to whom the witch had pledged themselves, and it was his evil work they were advancing when casting their spells. As the 17th century progressed, this demonic turn grew ever more pronounced, and eventually, it was not even really necessary for a suspected witch to have used, or been believed to have used, harmful magic at all.The heart of the crime lay in the relationship with Satan, and in the demonic pact entered into with him, and it was on this basis that witches were executed – despite the fact that the 1563 Witchcraft Act, still the legislative basis for all this activity, did not mention the devil at all.
The panics
In the 1970s, Christina Larner, in many ways the foundational scholar in the field of Scottish witch-studies, noted that witch-hunting followed a distinctive pattern in Scotland. One part of this was that the vast majority of prosecutions took place within a relatively truncated time-period, effectively between 1590 and 1662. The other key part of Larner’s observation, though, was that the rate of witch-hunting was not even uniform within this shorter window. Instead, most accusations and executions occurred during very brief bursts of intense hunting, with
Being accused of witchcraft was not necessarily a deathsentence, although if you got all the way to trial, you probably were in deadly trouble
these spasms being separated by long fallow periods containing very few trials. Larner termed these flashes of intense hunting ‘panics’, and while the model she suggested has been modified and finessed by later scholars, the basic framework of ‘witch panics’ has remained broadly accepted.
For Larner, there were five major witch panics in early modern Scotland.The first, generally known today as the ‘North Berwick witch trials’, took place in 1590-91, and dealt primarily with a purported group of witches from East Lothian and Edinburgh accused of trying to murder James VI by raising storms while he was sailing back to Scotland from a visit to Denmark. At least 70 individuals are thought to have been accused of witchcraft during this spasm of hunting. The North Berwick trials were shortly followed by a second witch-panic in 1597, this time much
larger (possibly involving several hundred accused witches) and more geographically widespread, albeit with particular concentrations of activity in Aberdeenshire, Fife, Perthshire, Lanarkshire and Stirlingshire.
The panics of the 1590s were followed by something of a lull, caused apparently by a deliberate effort on the part of central government to suppress witchhunting. This may have led to pentup demand, and if so, that would explain why the next witch-panic, which took place in 1628-31 was so large. There were perhaps as many as 350 cases of witchcraft during this hunt, and likely many more people were accused without facing formal proceedings, meaning that the panic of the 1620s was at least comparable in size to the 1597 hunt, and possibly bigger.
The intensity of activity reached in 1628-31 was sustained into the next ‘panic’, which broke out in 1649-50, taking place in the febrile atmosphere of the Civil Wars, and before it burned itself out the following year, more than 500 individuals had faced trial for witchcraft. A new convulsion hit barely more than a decade later, in 1661-62.Termed the ‘great’ witch-hunt by the historian Brian Levack, this panic outstripped all the others. About 600 people are thought to have been tried in a period of little more than six months, with accusations emerging from almost all parts of Scotland. Between them, Larner’s five witch-panics, collectively lasting only around six or seven years, accounted for more than half of all known Scottish witchcraft cases.
Alongside the five classic witch panics, a case is sometimes made for identifying a sixth: the western panic of 1697-1700. This was an unusual hunt because it centred on some alleged cases of demonic possession, a novel feature in Scottish witch-belief reminiscent of the ideas famously aired during the 1692 witch-trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Larner did not include the western panic in her list because it was mainly localised to Renfrewshire and involved a relatively modest 50-or-so accusations, but later research has suggested that it may well have had the potential to spawn a national hunt, even if, in the end, this potential was not realised. This latter point, though, could also be made about other ‘second order’ witch hunts, for example in 1643-44, 1658-59 and 1677-78, so the case for adding the western panic to Larner’s five major hunts remains contested.
When observing this pattern of witch-hunting, it is important to correct one common misconception: not all accusations of witchcraft resulted in trial and execution. The most recent estimates suggest that around 4,000 people were formally accused of witchcraft in early modern Scotland, but only around 2,500 were convicted and executed, typically by strangulation
followed by burning.This means that at least 1,500 alleged cases did not result in a conviction, or indeed even a trial, normally because insufficient evidence could be gathered. In short, merely being accused of witchcraft was not necessarily a death-sentence, although if you got all the way to trial, you probably were in deadly trouble.
Endings
Witch-hunting in Scotland went into steep decline following the ‘great’ witch-hunt, and it has been estimated that only around twelve per cent of Scottish witchaccusations can be dated to the period after 1662. But the dropoff was by no means linear: levels of prosecution oscillated from year to year and from decade to decade, and there were occasional localised flare-ups as well, most notably of course the Renfrewshire panic. It was not until the 1710s that the terminal decline set in, with the last person executed for witchcraft traditionally said to have been the Sutherland woman Janet Horne – although her case, usually dated to 1727, is poorly attested. The formal end of the witch-hunt in Scotland came in May 1736, when the British parliament passed a new Witchcraft Act. This explicitly repealed the 1563 act (alongside similar English legislation), while also introducing a new offence of pretending to use magic or sorcery.
The Witchcraft Act of 1736 seems to have been motivated largely by English considerations, and there is some evidence that opinion in Scotland was rather less keen on the idea of removing witchcraft from the criminal code: certainly the most vocal opposition to the Act within parliament came from a Scot, the Clackmannanshire MP James Erskine, Lord Grange. And this reflects the broader oddity that historians have generally struggled to locate a strong strand of ‘philosophical scepticism’ – that is, the belief that witchcraft did not exist – as a means of explaining the waning of the Scottish witch-hunt after 1662. Instead, both learned and popular opinion seem to have retained at least a degree of witchbelief well into the 18th century.
Instead, historians trying to explain the decline of witchprosecutions most usually point to ‘judicial scepticism’. This is the concept that the authorities, while not necessarily ceasing to accept the reality of witchcraft, came to believe that it was impossible to prosecute as a practical matter, largely as a consequence of the runaway, chaotic nature of the 1661-62 hunt. In response, the government and the legal profession began subjecting evidence, especially confessions and witness statements, to far more rigorous scrutiny, and were much more inclined than before to find such evidence wanting and to throw out entire cases as a consequence. Simultaneously, crackdowns on the use of torture and witch ‘pricking’ (the practice of pushing long pins into witches’ bodies to find the ‘devil’s mark’, an insensible blemish supposedly bestowed as part of any pact with Satan) removed two of the major tools that had conventionally been used to generate evidence in the first place. Combine all this with the potential emergence of ‘ideological scepticism’ – the idea that witch-prosecutions were gradually losing their utility to the government as a tool for building a godly state – and the picture that emerges is one of procedural constriction: it simply became much more difficult to secure a trial and conviction, irrespective of developments in belief-systems.