Extent 's
Atlas (1654) The hunt of 1649–50 is one of five major witch-hunts in early modern Scotland, the others being in
1590–91,
1597, 1628–31 and
1661–62. There is one surviving and dated accusation for February 1649, a brewer in Dunfermline who successfully defended himself against a charge of using magic, perhaps to enhance his beer. There were two cases for March, three for April, 15 for May and by June the hunt was in full swing, continuing into mid-1650 when it began to subside. Like most of the major series of hunts in Scotland, it was largely confined to the Lowlands, where the
Kirk had most control. It began in
Lothian and spread to
Fife and then throughout the Lowlands. The hunt probably began at
Inverkeithing, where the minister
Walter Bruce demonstrated an interest in witch hunting, being suspended for preaching at the execution of a witch in March 1649. This interest seems to have spread to neighbouring parishes. In addition to Inverkeithing there were major trials at
Aberdour,
Burntisland,
Dysart and
Dunfermline. The hunt spilled over into northern England, where a cluster of trials took place in the towns of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne and
Berwick-upon-Tweed as well as in the surrounding villages in Northumberland, in which Scottish witch hunters were involved. Some 612 records of accusations of witchcraft are known for Scotland in the years 1649 and 1650. Of these most, 399, are from 1649. They include 556 named persons and another 243 unnamed persons. According to Christine Larner, 1649 was "the year which may have seen the greatest number of executions in the whole of Scottish witch-hunting". with as many as 200 executions in Lothian alone. The Newcastle witch trials involved 30 persons, claiming 20 victims, and was the last intense hunt in England.
Accusations Most of the witches were women, the majority of whom were of relatively low social status. The only high-status woman known to have been accused in the hunt was Margaret Henderson, Lady Pittadro, who was accused by Walter Bruce the minister of Inverkeithing in 1649. She fled to Edinburgh, where she was arrested and probably committed suicide before her trial. Such accusations were usually linked to local power struggles and usually unsuccessful as the families of the accused had reputations to defend and resources to mount a legal and political challenge. Mentions of the Devil appeared relatively rarely in Scottish witchcraft trials, which were mainly concerned with perceived harm through witchcraft, as with Jean Craig of
Tranent, who was accused of laying an illness on Beatrix Sandilands, causing her to become "mad and bereft of her naturall wit". Divination was also a common accusation, often with lesser penalties, like the case of Marjorie Plumber, who was debarred from the sacrament by the presbytery of
Cullen in
Banffshire in 1649 for trying to determine if her ailing child would live by laying it between two holes, a "living grave" and a "dead grave", and seeing which way it turned. However, there were total of 69 confessions of demonic pacts in the court records and the Devil was an important figure in the Inverkeithing hunt, where several women confessed to associations with the Devil, renouncing their baptism and even to having sexual intercourse with him. As a result of these confessions five women were rapidly executed in 1649.
Legal procedures , who expressed doubts about confessions of alleged witches in 1650 Most of the hunts were initiated by the local minister and his session or
consistory, who aimed to obtain proof or a confession from the accused person. If a confession was forthcoming then a commission was sought, which would usually empower the gentlemen of the district, leading to a trial of the accused. Accused witches would often name other persons who were then tested for the crime, widening the hunt. This limited the hunt at Inverkeithing in 1649, when the local magistrates found their own wives accused of witchcraft. There is evidence of judicial doubts about the validity of the legal process. In April 1650 as the hunt began to subside, the
Chancellor,
John Campbell, 1st Earl of Loudoun, writing to local commissioners about to try three
Berwickshire witches, advised that they did not rely on any first confession before an ecclesiastical judge, but that they obtain a new confession before proceeding, suggesting that he thought previous prosecutions may not have been legally rigorous. In the later stages of the hunt the Parliament and its representative body the
Committee of Estates supervised the trials more closely, and instead of issuing commissions of judiciary to local gentlemen, it began to send Sheriff Deputes to hold special justice courts in the localities. The expense and difficulty of managing witch trials meant that local authorities often asked for help from the government, as the overwhelmed presbytery of Dunfermline did in 1649. After 1650 witch trials entered a new phase, with a reduction in the total number and the abandonment of local trials in favour of mixed central-local trials.
Pricking Scottish witchcraft trials were notable for their use of
pricking, in which a suspect's skin was pierced with needles, pins and bodkins as it was believed that they would possess a
Devil's mark through which they could not feel pain. This was often undertaken by professional witch prickers. such as John Kincaid from
Tranent, who was active in finding marks on Patrick Watson and Manie Halieburton at
Dirleton Castle before June 1649. His bodkin was known in
Scots as a "brod". Kinkaid was paid £6 for "brodding"
Margaret Dunholm from Burncastle, with £4 expenses for wine and food at Lauder. George Cathie operated in
Lanarkshire in November 1649. The
Newcastle trials began after the town council engaged a Scottish witch pricker, who was paid 20s for each guilty witch, but his methods raised the suspicions of the English Lieutenant-Colonel Hobson and he was eventually forced to flee. According to Newcastle notable Ralph Gairdiner, he continued to operate in
Northumberland, was arrested, escaped and fled to Scotland. There he was again arrested and later executed, having admitted to having caused the death through fraudulent means of 220 women accused of witchcraft in Scotland and England.
Torture Pricking could turn into a form of torture in which a subject could be repeatedly pricked until they confessed; many of the confessions gained in the 1649–50 trials were obtained in this way. In 1649 the Committee of Estates passed an Act that prevented torture in cases of witchcraft, but it was probably never implemented. In 1652, after the English occupation, it was reported in England that six witches had been whipped, their feet and heads burnt with lighted candles while they were strung up by their thumbs with their hands behind their backs. This, like most torture, was carried out by local clergy and magistrates without a warrant from the central courts, usually in trying to obtain an initial confession. B. P. Levack argues that torture was more common in "panic years" like 1649, leading to a growth of hunts as confessions and the names of other potential witches were obtained. ==References==