Costs and profits of Scottish witch-hunting
Professor Julian Goodare investigates the financial consequences of witch-hunting, demonstrating that it had the potential for generating windfalls for a few, but overall came with heavy costs to individuals and local communities
We take a look at the financial consequences of witch-hunting, demonstrating that it came with very significant costs to individuals and local communities – but also had the potential for generating windfalls for some
During a local witchcraft panic in Mid Calder parish, West Lothian, in 1644, not everybody was happy with the way that things were going.Three witches had been executed, and a fourth suspect was being interrogated and tortured in prison.The prosecutions were promoted by the parish minister Hugh Kennedy and a local laird William Sandilands, along with the kirk session of the parish. An objection was voiced by Isobel Ewart, wife of another local laird,William Douglas of Pumpherston – and she specifically alleged financial impropriety.The kirk session summoned her ‘for scolding and railing against the session’. She had claimed that ‘there was four hundreth markis gott in fra the witches, and that the sessioun leived thairupon’.Were they hunting witches for money?
In fact, the money was probably not crucial. Ewart’s allegation that the kirk session had ‘gott in’ 400 merks (£266 13s 4d) may have been an exaggerated or misunderstood version of ‘fourscore merks’ (onefifth of that sum, £53 6s 8d) – a sum owing to Janet Bruce, one of the recently-executed witches, who evidently had some property. Sandilands ordered Bruce’s husband,
David Aikman, to pay this to the kirk session, to pay her prison costs. Such confiscations were legal, as we shall see. Ewart’s allegation of impropriety in allocating the money might still be partly true – but it is unlikely to have formed an important motive for the witch-hunters.The minister, Hugh Kennedy, was a religious zealot who would later sacrifice his career rather than compromise with the Restoration regime. Nevertheless, Ewart’s challenge to the witchhunters can also form a challenge of a different sort to the historian.What were the costs of witch-hunting, and who paid these costs? And, if there were profits, what happened to them?
Imprisonment costs
Witchcraft suspects were often imprisoned before trial while the prosecutors gathered evidence against them. Evidence could come from neighbours complaining about bewitchment, or from the confession of the suspect herself or himself. In towns, tolbooths were multi-purpose administrative buildings that usually included imprisonment facilities. Rural witchcraft suspects were often taken to the nearest town to be imprisoned. Others were imprisoned in the church, or in private houses, and repair costs were sometimes claimed in the accounts. In Dumfries in 1649, ‘dressing’ (preparing) John Beattie’s cellar ‘for to have put the whichis in’ cost 2s. Prisoners were expected to provide their own food, or to pay the jailer for food, if they could afford it.
Costs of torture and pricking of witches
Witchcraft suspects were often interrogated under torture. Many suspects’ confessions included improbable details of dealings with the devil that were evidently obtained in this way.The most common torture was sleep deprivation – an effective way to break down a suspect’s resistance. This required a rota of volunteers, two or more at a time, to keep the suspect awake around the clock. Margaret Donald, in Dunfermline in 1645, was ‘watched’ for five days and nights – a common length of time for the process to succeed – with two ‘watchers’ at any one time. James Brown received 30s for organising the rota, and four other watchers each received 6s for each day and night. These fees are comparable to an unskilled labourer’s daily wages, 6s 8d, in Aberdeen in the 1650s.
Pricking witchcraft suspects to find the devil’s mark became common during the large-scale panics of the mid-17th century. This was not, strictly, torture, since torture aimed to extract a confession, whereas pricking aimed to produce physical evidence. Pricking was theoretically painless, though certainly humiliating. From the 1640s onwards a handful of professional ‘prickers’ emerged, skilled in finding an insensitive spot into which a pin could be thrust without drawing blood. Prickers visited localities in which panics were occurring, and received fees for pricking many suspects.The most famous professional pricker was John Kincaid. For pricking Margaret Denholm in Stow in 1649, he received a fee of £6, plus another £4 ‘for meat and drink and wyne to him and his man’. He seems to have believed in his own powers, and to have had a commitment to his craft that went beyond money.
In one episode, however, a witchpricker influenced prosecutions for financial gain. In Peebles in October 1649, the pricker George Cathie colluded with the accused witch Janet Coutts to make her into a star witness, naming many other suspects whom he would then prick. Over three months, Coutts named about 88 other suspects in Peebles, Biggar, Lanark and Jedburgh. But the church elders in Biggar began to doubt her when they found her contradicting herself, and questioned her more narrowly. On 10 January she admitted that her accusations had all been false, declaring that Cathie had been her ‘inticer’ to accuse innocent persons in return for the prolongation of her own life and for his own ‘profite’. Coutts was executed; Cathie is not heard of again, but his profitable career seems to have been over.
Costs of trial proceedings
Once evidence had been gathered in the locality, it was time to arrange for a criminal court to be established, to put the suspect to a formal trial. Witchcraft was a serious crime, beyond the regular jurisdiction of local courts, so the local prosecutors had to negotiate with the central government in Edinburgh. Usually it was the privy council, the daily co-ordinating body for central government, that would grant the crucial ‘commission of justiciary’ – the document authorising the local prosecutors to convene a criminal court. Obtaining this commission could be the single largest expense of a witchcraft prosecution.
To attract the attention of an aristocratic early modern government, you had to look aristocratic yourself. The local prosecutors seem to have tried to send their wealthiest and most respectable men to Edinburgh. Such men would travel and live in style. The burgh of Peebles obtained a commission of justiciary in 1629 enabling them to put a group of witches to trial. Thomas Tweedie, the burgh treasurer, led the delegation to Edinburgh, and claimed £4 10s expenses for three days there. A further £3 6s 8d was spent on wine to celebrate the treasurer’s successful return to the burgh. Legal fees cost £6 13s 4d, plus 12s for copying documents.
Back in the locality, equipped with their commission of justiciary, the witch-hunters now formally created a criminal court. They would appoint a clerk (preferably someone with legal knowledge), one or more ‘officers’ (to run errands and take custody of the accused person), a ‘dempster’ (a minor ceremonial official who announced the sentence), and perhaps a ‘procurator’ – a prosecutor to present the case against the accused person. Although this ‘justice court’ was formally a freshly-created institution, it could in practice employ officials from existing local courts like the burgh court. All these officials received fees.The court also required an assize – a jury of fifteen local propertied men. Assizers were not paid, but might receive expenses or hospitality.
Execution costs
If the court convicted them, witches were executed by burning at the stake. Usually they were tied to the stake and strangled, after which the pyre was lit to burn their dead body. Burning at the stake was more costly than hanging, the usual method of judicial killing, because of the need for a pyre.
The pyre to burn Janet Wishart and Isobel Cockie in Aberdeen in 1597 consisted mainly of 20 loads of peat, costing £2. A ‘load’ was an approximate quantity that could be carried on a horse-drawn sledge.To this were added 1 boll of coal (£1 4s; a boll was about 140 litres), 4 tar barrels (£1 6s 8d), and an unstated quantity of other barrels and fir wood (16s 8d). The stake itself, a sizeable piece of carpentered timber that had to be set into the ground with the pyre constructed round it, cost 16s for supplying and ‘dressing’ it. Both women were evidently tied to the same stake. Ropes to tie them cost 4s, and carrying the fuel to the execution site outside the town cost 13s 4d. This pyre was the first of a series, as local witch-hunting gathered pace. It may have proved inadequate to the task of reducing two human bodies to ashes, since Aberdeen’s subsequent pyres used more peat.
Executions were managed by a specialist executioner, a feared and despised operative with essential skills. Dunbar’s executioner in 1698 received an annual fee of £24, plus rent for his house, an annual suit of clothes and a right to collect oatmeal in the meal market. He was also the burgh’s jailer, and had the duties of evicting beggars from the town and cleaning the marketplaces. These rewards may be compared with farm servants’ annual wages. Comparison is imprecise, since farm servants received board and lodging, rather than rent and perquisites, in addition to their money wages.The annual wages of male farm servants in Peebles in 1664 were £20 for the leading worker, £14 13s 4d for other workers, and £5 6s 8d for a young herdsman.The executioner also received a fee for each execution that he carried out, enabling him to hire an assistant for the day.
Trials and executions were stressful but cathartic occasions, and those responsible often needed alcohol to keep them going. At the execution of Elspeth MacEwen, in Dalry (Kirkcudbrightshire) in 1698, 4s 6d was spent on brandy ‘by the Proveist with Howell and Bailie Dunbar’, and the same officials later that day spent another 6s in James MacColm’s alehouse. The most striking payment was 2s for a pint of ale to the executioner himself ‘quhen she was burning’. When she was burning, the executioner was drinking ale. Perhaps he needed it.
Confiscations of property
A court’s sentence of execution often contained a clause about the ‘escheat’ (confiscation) of the convicted witch’s movable goods. In practice, the authorities targeted their confiscation efforts where it would be most worthwhile – on a small minority. The sentence of execution against nine witches in Dumfries in 1659 ordered ‘all ther moveable goods to be esheite’. However, this seems to have been an empty formality for eight of the nine.The order continued: ‘Further, it is ordained that Helen Moorhead’s moveables be intromitted with by the Shereff of Nithsdaile, to seize upon and herrie [i.e. take by force] the samin for the king’s use’. Evidently Moorhead was the only one who was known to have property worth ‘seizing upon’.
How were confiscated assets allocated? This required central and local government to negotiate with each other, and could lead to competition between various local interests. Confiscated assets were formally ‘for the king’s use’, as the Dumfries order indicates.The local court could order confiscation, but could not control who ultimately received the assets. Here, central government had to become involved in the witch’s affairs for a second time.
The king’s personal claim was merely a legal formality to enable central government to reallocate the assets – usually within the locality. Formally, this decision was made by the royal exchequer in Edinburgh, which would make a ‘gift’ of the ‘escheat’ to someone in the locality. The ‘gift’ took the form of a document under the privy seal, stating that the witch’s movable goods were now the property of the recipient. But the exchequer clerks could not know the
local circumstances, so they were open to lobbying by prospective local recipients – principally the witch’s kinsfolk or the local authorities involved in the prosecution.The burgh of Culross executed four witches in 1675, but then discovered that ‘divers persons’ – presumably the witches’ kinsfolk – were applying for their escheats, although the burgh had been at ‘great panes and expence’ to prosecute them.The burgh clerk was sent to Edinburgh to seek the escheats for the burgh. Failing that, the burgh asked the exchequer that, if they granted the escheats to anyone else, it should be on condition of reimbursing the burgh’s expenses.The exchequer granted the latter request – but the recipients failed to pay, so that the burgh had to take legal proceedings against them two years later.
Five accusations of witchcraft against wealthy gentlewomen have been studied in detail by Louise Yeoman. In each case she identified a particular individual who was not only involved in the prosecutions but who also took an interest in the property involved. Four of the accusations failed, but one wealthy gentlewoman was executed in 1591: Euphemia MacCalzean, daughter of an Edinburgh judge. However, her accuser, David Seton, bailie of Tranent, did not obtain MacCalzean’s escheat.That initially went to the courtier James Sandilands of Slamannan, but next year MacCalzean’s daughters were restored to most of the property. Yeoman concluded that these gentlewomen’s accusers tended to be inadequate, troubled and quarrelsome men. Several were seriously indebted, and their hunting of rich witches was connected to their indebtedness, but they seem to have had a broader and even obsessive sense of their mission.
So most accused witches owned no property worth confiscating; their trials and executions simply cost time and money. Even when there were confiscations, the proceeds were usually inadequate to meet the costs. And the prosecutors could not control the allocation of assets; some confiscations did not benefit them because the royal exchequer allocated the assets elsewhere.
All witches, at the point of their execution, did suffer one confiscation. Their outer clothing was removed, and was traditionally the perquisite of the executioner. For most women and men this was their plaid – their woollen cloak. Sir Robert Hepburn of Keith, overseeing the execution of four witches in Peaston in 1678, actually paid the executioner 6s ‘to give back their plaids’. The financial value of a plaid was modest, even for a poor person, but it had symbolic value in giving the person dignity in their final moments – or stripping them of that dignity, as usually happened.
Hunting witches for money?
Witch-hunting was expensive – and a net drain on the local community. Overall, the profits from confiscations were small, and the costs were much larger. However, this is a broad-brush view. Money did change hands during parts of the process. This in turn meant that some people gained money – either as payment for goods or services, or through confiscations. Did confiscations, in particular, influence prosecutions?
Early modern elite people liked the idea of disinterested public service. They thought that the best public service was carried out by leisured, independent aristocrats, whose very wealth freed them from the necessity of sordid pursuit of gain. But people also liked the idea that public servants should be rewarded.The best and most honourable rewards came, not in the form of official salaries or fees from clients, but in the form of royal gifts.The king, the ultimate aristocrat, recognised his best servants’ devoted qualities by giving rich gifts to those servants. These values appealed to local elites as well as courtiers. Devoted public service was rightfully rewarded with royal gifts.
And it so happened that the escheat of a convicted witch took the direct and explicit form of a royal gift. Recipients of an escheat received a letter from the king, giving them a gift of property.The letter did not usually give a reason for the gift, but it did carry the king’s privy seal.The seal was affixed by an Edinburgh bureaucrat, and after the union of 1603 the king himself was based in London, but the idea of escheats as royal gifts still legitimised the idea that witch-hunting was devoted public service.
Accounting for the costs
What was the average cost of investigating, trying and executing a witch in Scotland? The table opposite attempts to place a figure on this.
These figures, it should be stressed, are merely illustrative of what may have been typical. And, as with all averages, individual cases vary from these figures both up and down. There was little variation in the cost of a pyre, but imprisonment costs varied widely. Sleep deprivation could be expensive, but not all witches were subjected to this. Some received physical tortures that were probably cheaper, while an unknown proportion were probably not tortured at all (the evidence against them being gathered instead from neighbours’ statements). Pricking too could be expensive, but probably only a minority of witches were pricked.The figures in the table take this into account.
So we arrive at an illustrative cost of £25 per witch. Anyone who wishes can multiply this by 2,500 – the likely number of witches who perished during the course of Scotland’s witch-hunt. One may also ask: what was £25 worth in this period? I have already mentioned a figure of 6s 8d for a labourer’s daily wages; working a six-day week, it would take a labourer nearly three months to earn £25.
It was not unskilled labourers, however, who paid these costs: it was usually the local authority, either burgh council or kirk session. The annual turnover of a burgh council would run into hundreds of pounds or even thousands, but a rural kirk session’s annual turnover could be only about £40. A burgh would not worry about the cost of executing one witch – but, during panics, numbers of witches in a locality in a given year could reach double figures, and even a mediumsized burgh would notice the drain on its finances. Panics were rare and brief, but they did occur, and indeed accounted for perhaps half of Scotland’s 2,500 witchcraft executions. Probably members of the local elite met many costs out of their own pockets, never submitting expenses claims for them.
An accountant could analyse this by treating witch-hunting as a business, with the local authorities as the ‘consumers’ or ‘purchasers’, and people like rope-makers or witch-prickers as ‘suppliers’. From this point of view, the resources were consumed in the process of providing the ‘product’ of witchcraft executions. Similarly, today, we may regard the production of certain goods as wasteful or harmful, like armaments or cigarettes – but the accountant will recognise that these businesses make money change hands, and provide livelihoods for workers, like any other. Objections to armaments or cigarettes, or to witch-hunting, should be made mainly on non-financial grounds. However, if we agree that there are principled objections to armaments, cigarettes or witchhunting, then we may suspect that people who accept money for these activities are thereby being encouraged to disregard the moral principles involved. Witch-hunting was mainly carried out because of its own set of moral principles, and it cost money rather than making money. The money that changed hands nevertheless helped to validate witch-hunting.
Julian Goodare is Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. His books include ‘The European Witch Hunt’ (2016), and he is director of the online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.