Witch 1 Were You?
Witch 1 Were You? Witch-hunting in Haddington.
‘Witch 1 Were You?’ is a temporary mural commissioned by Made in East Lothian. It will be situated in the centre of Haddington for two months. The mural draws attention to the 219 residents of Haddington who are known to be accused of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries, at least fourteen of whom were found guilty and put to death. These were ordinary people just like you and I, the only difference being that we, unlike them, are fortunate to live in the 21st century.
The Witches and Haddington
Haddington’s John Knox referred to witches as ‘enemies of God’. At least 3800 individuals in Scotland were accused of witchcraft under the Witchcraft Act between 1563 and 1736. This act of the Scottish Parliament was enacted following the reformation settlement and was one of several pieces of legislation intended to help create a godly society in Scotland. Religion was the main official motivation behind Scottish witch prosecutions. Witchcraft entailed making a compact with the devil; stamping out witchcraft and demonic activities was crucial to help establish and maintain a godly society. The Witchcraft Act did not allow for non-capital punishments for convicted witches. This was one of the reasons why a Scottish woman was twelve times more likely to be executed for witchcraft than her contemporaries south of the border in England. The usual method of execution, strangulation followed by burning at the stake, reflected the witches’ status as heretics in the eyes of the church and secular authorities; witches were not only to be killed for their crime but all evidence of them was to be destroyed. The religious aspect of witch-hunting meant that many suspected witches were initially investigated by church ministers and kirk sessions who gathered the necessary evidence to put any subsequent trial on a sure footing.
Records relating to witchcraft in Scotland are patchy, so it is impossible to tell how many of those accused were found guilty; it is estimated that 1000 to 2000 people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland. A large proportion of the number of witches accused and convicted in Scotland were from Lothian (32%), whilst Haddingtonshire was the county with the highest number of accused witches. Women over the age of forty made up the majority of those accused of witchcraft in Scotland; however, popular history often fails to mention that 15% of cases involved males. By no means were these people from poor or marginalized sections of society; most were drawn from middling socio-economic backgrounds and found themselves accused due to falling foul of local politics or as a result of disputes with neighbours and acquaintances. The other main source of accusations in Scotland was from other witches’ confessions. For example, Alexander Hamilton of Haddington denounced twenty-one others at his trial for witchcraft in 1630, three of whom were tried and executed in Haddington.
As with most court cases in Scotland, witchcraft trials were conducted by untrained amateurs: local landowners, baron and burgh bailies and clergymen took it upon themselves to search out and prosecute enemies of God in their communities. License to try witches was obtained by petitioning the privy council or parliament for a commission of justiciary to pursue and try suspected witches. Central government thus decided who to name in commissions and which cases should be pursued. This official sanction was usually only granted in instances where successful prosecution was likely to be successful.
Witch-hunting in Scotland peaked in the years from 1590-1, 1597, 1628-30, 1649-50 and 1661-2. Accusations and prosecutions soared in these years which are often described as witch-panics. Panics tended to coincide with moments of political unrest or crisis (of which there were many in Scotland during this period) it being believed that these crises reflected the ungodly state of society in Scotland. Witches became a scapegoat but one which many people truly believed in.
An example from Haddington
There were 3000 to 4000 people living in the burgh of Haddington in the 17th century. Haddington was a royal burgh and also the head town of the shire of Haddington. The town thus had both burgh and sheriff courts, which handled civil and criminal cases, including witchcraft trials. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft records that 219 men and women of Haddington were accused of witchcraft. Below is an example of a case tried in Haddington from the East Lothian witch-hunt of 1628-9.
On March 24 1629 the privy council granted a commission to the burgh bailies of Haddington to try Alexander Sinclair, a man described as a vagabond, who moved around the shire of Haddington. Sinclair had been accused of witchcraft by other recently convicted witches, namely William Davidson a sixty-year-old healer from Saltoun(who had himself been accused by Margaret Muirhead) and Bessie Little, in a witch-hunt which had begun the previous year. Both Bessie Little and William Davidson had named Sinclair prior their own executions in Haddington. On 3 April 1629 Alexander Sinclair's trial was held in Haddington’s burgh court. Sinclair’s indictment listed several demonological activities, including that he was a sorcerer, consulted with the dead, invoked devils, had renounced his baptism, and had become the devil's servant. Among several accusations, Bessie Little claimed that Sinclair kept a bee in a small tin which he sustained with drops of his own blood. It was claimed that this bee had been gifted to Sinclair by the devil and was replaced each year during a meeting that Sinclair held with the devil in Norham, just beyond the English border. Sinclair was also accused of using his powers of sorcery to destroy a local landowner, John Sinclair of Hermiston, at the behest of Hermiston’s sister Susanna. Alexander Sinclair achieved this by placing a curse on Hermiston’s house. Sinclair subsequently used spells to help Susanna to murder her husband; Sinclair wore one of the husband’s shirts to place a curse upon it. The husband subsequently wore the shirt and perished. Besides the evidence presented by other witches, two neighbours of Sinclair also presented evidence which effectively sealed Sinclair’s fate. They claimed that he could heal, charm, and see into the future. Sure evidence that he was implicated in witchcraft.
Having been imprisoned and confronted with these accusations, Sinclair, unlike many suspected witches, refused to confess and would not name any other witches; however, his denials had no effect, and he was convicted of all the indictments against him by the burgh court in Haddington on 3 April 1629. He was strangled at the stake and then his remains were burned.
The Artwork
The mural is based on one of the only contemporary images of Scottish witches. The witches in the mural are taken from a woodcut believed to have been produced in 1591 by Mr James Carmichael (1543-1628), minister of Haddington, for the pamphlet Newes from Scotland. The illustration is of the North Berwick witches who Carmichael helped to interrogate during the infamous witch-hunt of 1590-1. Carmichael rose to become a leading cleric in the reformation state, he helped to publish several important ecclesiastical works, and enjoyed royal favour under James VI. Carmichael’s rise to become a leading cleric was achieved despite spending three years in political exile for his support of the failed Ruthven coup of 1582. Upon his return to Scotland, Carmichael went on to play a prominent role in witch-hunting.
‘Witch 1 Were You’ was a mural produced for MADE in east lothian’s ‘Bored Board’ mural series. The mural is in place from October-December 2021. Three of the four ‘witches’ were associated with MADE, the other was a local radio DJ and artist. All four are based in Haddington.
Bibliography
Newes from Scotland (1592)
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft witches (ed.ac.uk)
Christina Larner, Enemies of God: the Witch-Hunt in Scotland (1981)
Brian P Levack, Witch-hunting in Scotland (2008)
D Allan Orr, ‘God's hangman’: James VI, the divine right of kings, and the Devil’, Reformation and Renaissance Review 18 (2016)
Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (2002)
Harriet Cornell, ‘Gender, Sex and Social Control: East Lothian, 1610-1640’ (2010)
Elizabeth J Robertson, ‘Panic and persecution: witch-hunting in East Lothian, 1628-1631’ (2010)