Witchcraft had been criminalised in 1563, and there had been a handful of prosecutions since. But Duncan’s confession kicked off something new – Scotland’s first large-scale witch-hunt. What’s striking about this panic over supposed black magic is just how much more intense and lethal it was than witch-hunting in other European countries – perhaps most notably England.
Following her interrogation (involving torture), Geillis Duncan claimed to have participated in a night-time witches’ gathering, also known as a sabbat, at North Berwick kirk. She alleged that other locals were present, and as many as 70 people were ultimately accused. Their confessions detailed bizarre and alarming practices. Supposedly they had sailed across the sea in sieves, meeting at the kirk to dance and sing. The devil had preached from the pulpit, and they had kissed his buttocks. Some of the accused also claimed to have attacked King James VI, casting spells to harm him or raising storms to sink his ships.
Newes from Scotland reported that the devil considered James VI “the greatest enemy he hath in the world” – a statement designed to flatter a monarch who believed himself divinely appointed. But James was also fearful of the devil’s designs on him, and involved himself directly in the interrogation of the accused witches. Blame began to make its way up the social scale, and the king’s own cousin, the Earl of Bothwell, was accused of heading a conspiracy against the monarch. Although he was eventually acquitted, Bothwell’s political career was ruined, and he was forced into exile. The last executions resulting from the North Berwick trials were in 1592, but the fallout from the witch-hunt endured far longer. The idea of the threat of witchcraft had been promulgated from the highest social echelons, and was further publicised in 1597 when James VI published Daemonologie, a book about the devil’s wiles. Mass witch-hunts swept Scotland again in 1628–30, 1649 and 1661–62. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, a database recording known prosecutions, has identified 3,837 accused. Execution rates are difficult to establish but may have been in the region of two-thirds. By these metrics, Scotland’s execution rate per head of population may have been about five times the European average, and 10 times that in England.
Who were the ‘witches’?
Those accused of witchcraft were usually of middle age or older. Though rarely wealthy, they were not typically destitute. People from society’s middling ranks had the strongest economic ties to their neighbours, and were most likely to become embroiled in quarrels. Sometimes local healers or cunning folk were targeted, but most of the accused were not magical practitioners of any kind.
Men were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft. One of the victims of the North Berwick trials was a Haddington schoolmaster called John Fian. According to Newes from Scotland – the primary focus of which was Fian’s case – he confessed under torture to having served as the devil’s clerk at witches’ meetings. Other crimes ascribed to him by Newes from Scotland and the trial transcript included throwing cats into the sea to raise storms and magically lighting up a horse’s ears while travelling by night.
One interrogation method was witch-pricking, in which the accused was searched and pricked to find a ‘devil’s mark
Perhaps the oddest story told how Fian became obsessed with the sister of one of his pupils. When she rejected his attentions, he asked the boy to bring him three of the girl’s pubic hairs, promising in return to refrain from beating him in the classroom. The boy’s attempt to take the hairs awoke his sister, who complained to their mother. After a sound beating, the boy confessed the scheme. His crafty mother substituted the desired pubic hairs with three strands from a cow. When Fian eagerly brewed up a love spell, the cow reportedly came barging in, “leaping and dancing upon him, and following him forth… to what place so ever he went”.
Fian was something of an outlier: about 85 per cent of those convicted of witchcraft in Scotland were female. Women were more likely to work in domestic spaces and to be blamed for domestic misfortunes. Misogyny was another factor. In the late 17th century, lecturers at Aberdeen University taught that women were more susceptible to demons because they “believe more easily, discern less, and are more driven by desires for revenge and pleasure”. Men who became witches, the lecturers added, were “often effeminate, timid, credulous, fickle, and disturbed in judgment like women”.
In the late 17th century, lecturers at Aberdeen University taught that women were more susceptible to demons
The Scottish kirk was also a patriarchal institution. The Calvinist leader John Knox, who was probably involved in drafting the 1563 act that made witchcraft a capital offence, did have circles of female confidants. Yet he is better remembered for The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), in which he asserted that women were “weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish”. But Scotland was not any more misogynistic than other parts of Europe; indeed, women actually made up a higher proportion of those accused in England. Misogyny can’t explain the relative severity of witch-hunting north of the border.
Capital punishment
Legal frameworks provide a crucial starting point for understanding the differences between witch-hunting in England and Scotland. England’s 1563 and 1604 witchcraft acts prescribed different penalties according to the severity of the offence. By the terms of the Scottish act, any use of “witchcraft, sorcery and necromancy” was punishable by death. So, too, was consulting witches, though this was not enforced. Some convicted witches were given other sentences, such as banishment, but Scottish punishments remained harsher than those typically meted out south of the border.
In addition, Scottish interrogators made more use of torture to extract confessions. This practice was illegal unless authorised by a warrant from the privy council, the main executive governmental body, but zealous ministers and lairds sometimes overlooked that prohibition. Physical torture of the kind used against Geillis Duncan seems to have been relatively uncommon, but sleep deprivation was probably widely employed.
Another coercive interrogation method was witch-pricking, by which the accused was searched and pricked with pins to find a ‘devil’s mark’. Martha Semple (or Sempell), a “well-favoured and genteel” girl of 17 or 18 from Renfrewshire, was investigated for witchcraft in 1697. According to one record, she was twice searched for the devil’s mark, and “the pricker missed not to search the very soles of her feet and other more secret places, for when there was any difficulty to find the mark they did quite unclothe them”. In a society that prized women’s modesty, this ritual would have been deeply humiliating.
Trials also differed between England and Scotland. English judicial processes were largely centralised, and witch trials were typically held in county assize courts presided over by judges appointed by the crown. Before 1662, most accused witches in Scotland were tried in haphazard local courts overseen by commissioners who might have little or no legal training. Though the central court was relatively lenient, execution rates in local trials may have been higher than 90 per cent.
Mary Cunningham was tried in Culross in 1644. Her advocate “gave in such defences as could not be answered by the procurator fiscal, who had no skill of law”. The commissioners admitted defeat, and petitioned the privy council to have her tried at the central court in Edinburgh instead. Mary was lucky. Most accused witches did not have the resources to hire a lawyer, and they were not permitted to speak in their own defence.
Creating a godly state
Particular political and religious contexts underpinned Scottish witch-hunts, which sometimes erupted during periods of economic hardship or political unrest when community tensions ran higher and the authorities were keen to appease God’s wrath. More broadly, they reflected a drive on the part of both church and state to transform Scotland into a godly nation. Following the 1560 Reformation, kirk sessions were established to enforce religious conformity and tackle sins such as blasphemy, swearing, drunkenness, profaning the Sabbath and illicit fornication.
Ministers did not believe every accusation. In Ayr in 1633, Margaret McCall accused Agnes Dunschit of being “a rank witch who should be burnt quick”. McCall claimed that Dunschit had come to her house on a thundery night and told her to renounce her baptism. Yet the accuser could offer no proof, and the kirk – bearing in mind that McCall was “a drunkard and keeps a bad house” – ordered her to declare publicly that she had lied.
Sometimes, however, ministers or local lairds did take accusations seriously. This was particularly likely if accusations covered a long period and were voiced by multiple people, or during periods of mass witch-hunting. Arrest and interrogation typically followed, at which point the nature of the accusations might evolve.
Neighbours commonly accused each other of acts of maleficium, or magical harm. In Kirkcaldy in 1633, Janet Allan testified that she had refused to give Alison Dick some sour bakes, after which the latter had declared that Allan’s children would beg and that tadpoles would nest in her husband’s hair. The husband was later lost at sea and their children were left destitute, leading Allan to suspect that Dick had cursed the family. The accused woman was executed a month later.
The accused were believed to have entered into covenants with Satan, with the aim of dismantling godly society
In the eyes of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, witches targeted not just individuals but entire communities. Accused witches had entered into covenants with Satan, with the ultimate aim of dismantling godly society. As James VI explained it, witches used a variety of methods, but all worked towards “the enlarging of Satan’s tyranny”. Interrogators were often less concerned with investigating specific acts of maleficium and more with posing leading questions about diabolic pacts.
Thus Janet Barker, tried in Edinburgh in 1643, confessed that the devil promised her a red petticoat and gown, so that “she should be as trimly clad as the best servant in Edinburgh”. She thereupon “condescended to be his servant for half a year”. Others detailed sexual encounters with Satan, who might take the form of a man or a beast. In 1662, Jonet Braidheid from Nairn described how the devil sucked the blood out of her mark and spat it out over her head to rebaptise her, then had sex with her. He was “as cold as spring well water” inside her. He paid her afterwards, but the money turned red.
English scepticism
The Scottish privy council wielded significant power over witch-hunts, being able to grant or refuse commissions for local trials. There was no comparable state authorisation in England. Even James VI lost much of his fervour for witch-hunting after he inherited the English throne and moved to London in 1603. English elites had been known to mock the barbaric, superstitious ways of the Scots, and James was perhaps cautious of appearing credulous to his English courtiers. Moreover,
it seems that he became genuinely more sceptical. In the years following his move south, he personally investigated a handful of cases of demonic possession and, in deeming them fraudulent, saved the lives of several women accused of summoning the offending demons.
Nor was the English church involved in witch-hunting to the same degree as the kirk in Scotland. The English Reformation was instigated by Henry VIII, whose motives were more political than ideological. The church remained highly centralised, and, though parish churches were important hubs, they did not develop the same powers of social control as kirk sessions. In Scotland, the Reformation was a relatively radical grassroots movement dedicated to refashioning the nation into a place of unrivalled godliness. It introduced a Presbyterian structure that placed significant power in the hands of local elders.
The relatively limited role of English clergymen in witch-hunting, as well as the more effective prohibition of torture, meant that English witchcraft trials remained largely focused on maleficium – the act of causing harm – rather than the more explicitly religious crime of diabolism. Demonological ideas were explored in popular pamphlets but were rarely voiced in courtrooms. An exception came during the 1640s in the chaos of the Civil War, when the infamous ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins spearheaded England’s bloodiest witch-hunt. In general, though, accused witches in Scotland were blamed for more dramatic and far-reaching crimes against Christendom than their English counterparts.
The phenomenon fades
By the late 17th century, witchcraft prosecutions were declining across Europe, and elite attitudes in Britain reflected that trend. Consider the large-scale Scottish witch-hunt in 1661–62, which involved at least 600 accusations and likely hundreds of executions. The privy council granted commissions for waves of trials, but officials soon began to worry that matters were getting out of hand. In April 1662, the council issued a proclamation declaring that “a great many persons… have been apprehended and hurried to prisons, pricked, tortured and abused… by such persons as have no warrant or authority so to do.” The council was taking aim at ministers and other local elites who had overstepped their commissions or neglected to secure them.
The privy council subsequently became more reluctant to grant commissions for local trials. A growing proportion of those accused of witchcraft were tried centrally or by trained judges from Edinburgh operating in circuit courts, and defence lawyers increasingly challenged the evidential basis for witchcraft, resulting in far higher acquittal rates. The council also made efforts to clamp down on the illicit use of torture.
The lawyer George Mackenzie, lord advocate 1677–86, exemplifies the growing scepticism of legal professionals. He wrote in 1678 that he did not doubt the reality of witches, but believed that many “poor ignorant creatures” had been unfairly prosecuted in Scotland. He attributed confessions to the use of torture, and recounted speaking with an impoverished woman who avowed that she had confessed because she expected to starve otherwise; having been accused of witchcraft, she imagined that “all men would beat her, and hound Dogs at her, and… therefore she desired to be out of the World”.
Janet Horne was reputedly accused of riding her daughter, who took the form of a pony, to pay homage to the devil
Prosecutions petered out in the early 18th century; the last is usually considered to be that of Janet Horne in 1727. She was reputedly accused of riding her daughter, who took the form of a pony, to pay homage to the devil; both were reportedly tried by the local sheriff and found guilty. The daughter escaped, but Horne was burned to death in a barrel of pitch. However, the evidence is uncertain. If this episode did take place, it may have been a lynching rather than a formal trial, without authorisation from the central authorities.
Witchcraft was decriminalised in 1736, bringing an end to what Walter Scott called a “dark chapter in human nature”. However, the witch-hunts remain a culturally relevant and emotive subject. As recently as 2022, the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland made formal apologies for their historical
roles in witch-hunting. And the attitudes and concerns that drove these persecutions are still germane today. Witch-hunting grew out of specific religious, political and cultural contexts – but reflected an enduring human tendency to turn largely powerless victims into enemies of state and society.
Martha McGill is a research associate at the University of Cambridge. She helped develop two games exploring historical perceptions of witchcraft. You can download them here
This article is from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
