There is a database at the University of Edinburgh with 3,837 people in it. It is called the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, it covers the years 1563 to 1736, and every entry is somebody who was accused of witchcraft in Scotland. Of those, 3,212 are named. The remaining 625 are unnamed individuals or groups: people who went into the court records without a name attached and came out of them the same way.

I think about those 625 more than almost anything else in this material.

What actually happened

The Witchcraft Act was passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1563, under Mary, Queen of Scots. It was repealed in 1736 by the parliament at Westminster, which replaced both the Scottish and English acts with legislation that treated witchcraft as a fraud rather than a crime.

In those 173 years, roughly four thousand people in Scotland were accused. Around 84 per cent of them were women. The Survey estimates that about two thirds of those accused were executed, which puts the figure somewhere around 2,500 dead.

Scotland's population at the time was around a million. Academic estimates put the Scottish execution rate at roughly five times the European average.

For comparison, since Salem is the reference point most people have: the Salem trials of 1692 and 1693 killed twenty people.

The method of execution was strangulation at the stake followed by burning of the body. Only a very small number are known to have been burned alive, which is a correction worth making because the popular image is almost universally wrong on this point. It should not be mistaken for mercy. Confessions were routinely obtained under torture, including sleep deprivation and pricking, and the process of interrogation and execution was terrifying and violent whatever the precise sequence.

The last prosecution was in 1727, at Dornoch. Janet Horne was accused, among other things, of having transformed her daughter into a pony and had her shod by the Devil, which was said to explain the girl's lameness in her hands and feet.

Why Scotland

Several things converged, and none of them is mystical.

  • The king took a personal interest. James VI became convinced that witches had raised storms against his ship when he sailed to Denmark to collect his bride. The North Berwick trials that followed, from 1590, were conducted with his direct involvement. In 1597 he published Daemonologie, a treatise arguing for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of prosecuting it. A monarch writing a manual is not a neutral event.
  • The legal machinery was local. Much Scottish witch prosecution happened through commissions granted to local men rather than through a central court. Torture was more readily available than in England. That combination is a large part of why the Scottish rate ran so far above the European average.
  • The Kirk was involved throughout. Kirk sessions gathered evidence, took depositions, and pressed cases. The Church of Scotland formally recognised the harm caused in 2022.
  • The accused were poor, old, female and awkward. Over and over in the records: a woman who quarrelled with a neighbour, who had a reputation for cursing, who knew about herbs, who was a burden on the parish, who had no man to speak for her. Nicola Sturgeon's phrasing in 2022 was blunt and accurate. People were accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable, or in many cases simply because they were women.

The uncomfortable part

Here is what I want to say to anyone who works in this tradition, and I want to say it plainly.

The overwhelming majority of the people killed were not practitioners of anything.

There was no underground pagan religion being suppressed. That idea comes from Margaret Murray's work in the 1920s and it does not survive contact with the evidence. What the records show, over and over, is neighbours in dispute, ordinary Christians, women whose reputations had curdled, and confessions constructed under torture out of the demonological framework the interrogators brought with them.

Some of the accused did practise folk healing, charming and cunning work. Some of them were the local person you went to when your cow stopped giving milk. The rowan charm found on Margaret Barclay at her trial in Irvine in 1618 is a real object of real folk practice. But those people were a minority of the accused, and their practice was Christian folk magick, not a surviving pagan faith.

Claiming these dead as our spiritual ancestors is, I think, a well-meant theft. They were not us. Most of them would have been horrified to be called what they were called. The honest relationship is not descent, it is witness.

What changed recently

  • 8 March 2022. On International Women's Day, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal posthumous apology to all those accused, convicted, vilified or executed under the Witchcraft Act 1563, describing it as injustice on a colossal scale. The apology came after sustained campaigning by Witches of Scotland, founded by the advocate Claire Mitchell KC and the writer Zoe Venditozzi, who petitioned the Scottish Parliament for an apology, a pardon and a national memorial.
  • The Church of Scotland subsequently acknowledged the harm caused. A Member's Bill to pardon those convicted was consulted on from 2022. The campaign for a national monument continues.
  • Lilias Adie deserves naming. Accused at Torryburn in Fife, she died in prison in 1704 before she could be executed, having confessed under interrogation to consorting with the Devil. Because she was believed to be a witch she was buried in the tidal mudflats under a heavy stone slab, to stop her rising. Her grave is still there. In 2017 researchers at the University of Dundee used surviving photographs of her skull, which had been removed by antiquarians in the nineteenth century and subsequently lost, to reconstruct her face.

It is an ordinary face. That is the whole point of it.

Standing at these places

There are markers and sites across Scotland: the Witches' Well on Edinburgh's Castlehill, the Maggie Wall monument near Dunning, the Witches' Stone at Forres, Lilias Adie's grave at Torryburn.

If you visit, and I think you should, a few thoughts.

  • Go quietly. These are execution sites and graves. The tone that suits them is the tone you would bring to any other memorial to state killing.
  • Leave nothing that will not rot. This applies everywhere in Scottish practice and it applies here. No ribbons, no plastic, no crystals left in the grass.
  • Do not perform. There is a lot of content made at these sites. I would think hard before adding to it.
  • Use their names. Where we have them, we have 3,212. Saying one aloud is a more meaningful act than any working you could construct, and it costs nothing.

For the 625 who have no name, there is nothing to say and that absence is the memorial.

Look someone up

The Survey is free, searchable, and extraordinary. You can search by parish. Almost everyone in Scotland lives within a few miles of somewhere an accusation was made. Find the ones nearest you. Read what they were supposed to have done. It is nearly always a quarrel with a neighbour, a sick animal, a curse muttered at a door. That is the real history of witchcraft in this country, and it is not the one on the tea towels.

Sources

Related: [Rowan Tree and Red Thread: Scotland's Oldest Ward]; [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]