Latest / The Story of Scotland: Clans, Crowns, and the Fight for Identity — Fexingo History / The Scottish Witch Trials: Fear, Faith, and the Kirk
Transcript
- Lucas: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the bright lights of the Scottish Enlightenment and the bloody drama of the Jacobite risings, but there’s a shadow that stretches across the earlier part of the kingdom’s history that we haven’t really stepped into yet. I’m thinking specifically about the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were far more intense in Scotland than almost anywhere else in Europe. Luna: I remember hearing that Scotland had one of the highest execution rates for witchcraft on the continent. Lucas: It’s true, and it wasn’t just random local hysteria; it was deeply tied to the political and religious upheaval of the Reformation. When the country shifted from Catholicism to Presbyterianism, the Kirk was desperate to establish its moral authority, and witchcraft became a convenient way to police behavior, enforce conformity, and demonstrate that God’s law was being upheld on earth. Lucas: But the real turning point came when the king himself got involved. In 1589, James VI returned from Denmark after his marriage to Anne of Denmark, and his fleet was battered by severe storms that forced them to take shelter in Norway instead of reaching Scotland. Luna: So he actually blamed witches for sinking his ships? Lucas: Exactly. The narrative, which James himself helped promote, was that a coven of witches in East Lothian, particularly around the village of North Berwick, had raised storms using devilish magic to drown him and his new queen. It wasn’t just superstition; it became a state security issue because the monarch’s safety was seen as divinely protected. Lucas: This led to the North Berwick witch trials, where James didn’t just sit back—he actively participated in the interrogations, even testing whether certain accused women could walk without making a sound, based on the belief that witches couldn't move silently if they were under God's protection. He wrote a book called Daemonologie shortly after, which basically codified the idea that witchcraft was a real, lethal conspiracy against the state and the church. Luna: That sounds incredibly invasive for someone who was supposed to be the head of state. Lucas: It was, and it set a dangerous precedent. Once the king is treating witchcraft as high treason, the legal system starts taking it much more seriously. The Scottish Parliament passed laws that made witchcraft a capital offense, and unlike in England, where you usually needed to prove actual harm—like a cow dying or a child getting sick—the Scottish courts were quicker to accept spectral evidence and confessions obtained under torture. Lucas: The toll was staggering. Estimates suggest that between three and four thousand people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. That’s a huge number relative to the population, especially when you consider that many of the early trials were concentrated in the northeast and the Borders, areas where the Kirk was particularly active in rooting out 'idolatry' and pagan remnants. Luna: Did the pattern change depending on where you were in the country? Lucas: It did, and this is where the cultural divide gets really interesting. In the Lowlands, the trials were often driven by urban tensions, neighbors accusing neighbors, and the Kirk’s desire to clean up moral behavior. But in the Highlands, the dynamic was different because of the Gaelic language and clan structures. Many Highlanders still held onto older folk beliefs, like the existence of good fairies or protective spirits, which the Protestant ministers viewed as demonic. Lucas: So when witches were accused in places like Sutherland or Ross-shire, it wasn’t always about malicious hexes; sometimes it was about clashing worldviews. A woman who knew herbs might be seen as a healer in her community but a warlock in the eyes of the minister. The trials in the Highlands were also more likely to involve accusations of shape-shifting or transforming into animals, which reflects the deep Celtic mythology embedded in the local culture. Luna: So the victims weren’t just random strangers, but people within their own tight-knit clans. Lucas: Precisely. And often, the accusers were other women. It wasn’t a simple gender war in the sense that men were hunting women; it was often women policing other women, fueled by jealousy, land disputes, or simple misunderstandings. If your neighbor’s chicken died, and you’d had a falling out with the local herbalist, she was an easy target, especially now that the authorities were looking for reasons to believe. Lucas: One of the most famous cases, aside from North Berwick, involved a woman named Kate Edmonstone. She was accused of witchcraft in 1590, right in the middle of the North Berwick panic, and her trial documents give us a chilling glimpse into how confessions were extracted. Under pressure, she admitted to attending a witch sabbath, which was a common trope imported from continental European demonology. Luna: Where did those ideas about sabbaths come from? Lucas: They came largely from French and Belgian legal theorists, like Martin Delrio, whose works were translated and circulated among Scottish ministers. They imagined a global conspiracy of witches meeting in secret to worship Satan, which wasn’t really present in the earlier, more localized folklore. By importing these sophisticated theories, the Scottish elite elevated witchcraft from a petty nuisance to a cosmic threat. Lucas: This intellectual shift meant that the trials became more systematic and brutal. Judges started using sleep deprivation and physical torture to get confessions that fit this new, grander narrative. It wasn’t just about punishing a bad neighbor anymore; it was about exorcising evil from the nation itself. Luna: It feels like a perfect storm of religion, politics, and imported ideas. Lucas: It was, but eventually, the pendulum swung back. By the late seventeenth century, some Scottish lawyers and ministers began to question the reliability of these confessions. They realized that torture produced fantasies, not facts, and that the spectral evidence was impossible to verify. The last major wave of executions happened in the 1660s and 70s, but after that, the courts became much more skeptical. Lucas: The turning point for legal reform came with the Witchcraft Act of 1736, which actually decriminalized witchcraft in Scotland, treating it instead as fraud. If someone claimed they could cast a spell, they could be punished for lying, but they couldn’t be executed for actually doing it, because the law no longer believed it was possible. It was a pragmatic end to a long nightmare. Luna: So the state finally decided that believing in witches was just foolishness, not a crime. Lucas: Exactly. And it’s a stark reminder of how quickly societies can turn on each other when fear is weaponized by authority. The legacy of those trials lingered for generations, creating a deep suspicion of outsiders and reinforcing the power of the local kirk until the Enlightenment minds we talked about earlier finally began to dismantle that worldview. Luna: It makes you wonder how many innocent lives were lost to that specific kind of institutional fear. Lucas: It does, and it’s a sobering counterpoint to all the intellectual triumphs of the same era. For every Adam Smith writing about economics, there was a community tearing itself apart over who controlled the weather or why the milk went sour. Lucas: If you’ve found value in stepping through these layers of Scottish history with us, and you want to help keep the research ad-free, you can support the show directly at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps us dig deeper into the archives so we can bring you stories like this one. Luna: Thanks for keeping these conversations grounded in the real human costs. Lucas: Absolutely. And while the legal side of witchcraft ended in 1736, the cultural memory of those trials remained a powerful tool for storytelling, influencing everything from Walter Scott’s novels to modern fantasy. It’s a testament to how trauma shapes identity, even centuries later. Luna: Do you think that fear of the unknown is still something we see today? Lucas: In different forms, certainly. But understanding how it operated in Scotland gives us a clearer lens to see how easily truth can be bent when authority demands it. Thanks for listening.