which correspond in a remarkable manner with some of the evidence in the Mora trials. About thirty trials appear on the record between this last date and the Restoration, only one of which appears to have terminated in an acquittal; while at a single circuit-court, held at Glasgow, Stirling, and Ayr, in 1659, seventeen persons were convicted and burnt for this crime.
Numerous however as are the cases in the Records of Justiciary, it must be kept in view that these afford an extremely inadequate idea of the extent to which this pest prevailed over the country. For though Sir George Mackenzie doubts whether, in virtue merely of the general powers given by the act, 1563, inferior judges did at any time, of their own authority, try and condemn criminals accused of witchcraft, the same end was managed in a different way. The Court of Justiciary was anxious to get rid of a jurisdiction which would alone have afforded them sufficient employment; and the Privy Council were in use to grant commissions to resident gentlemen and ministers, to examine, and afterwards to try and execute, witches all over Scotland; and so numerous were these commissions, that Wodrow expresses his astonishment at the number found in the Registers. Under these commissions multitudes were burnt in every part of the kingdom. In Mercer’s Manuscript Diary, Lamont’s Diary, and Whitelock’s Memorials, occasional notices of the numbers burnt are perpetually occurring.
In every case of the kind it would appear that the clergy displayed the most intemperate zeal. It was before them that the poor wretches “delated” of witchcraft were first brought for examination,—in most cases after a preparatory course of solitary confinement, cold, famine, want of sleep, or actual torture. On some occasions the clergy themselves actually performed the part of the prickers, and inserted long pins into the flesh of the witches in order to try their sensibility; and in all they laboured, by the most persevering investigations, to obtain from the accused a confession, which might afterwards be used against them on their trial, and which in more than one instance, even though retracted, formed the sole evidence on which the convictions proceeded. In some cases, where the charge against the criminal was that she was “habit and repute a witch,” the notoriety of her character was proved before the Justiciary Court by the oath of a minister, just as habit and repute is now proved in cases of theft by that of a police officer.
Though the tide of popular delusion in regard to this crime may be said to have turned during the reign of Charles II., its opening was perhaps more bloody than that of any of its predecessors. In the first year after the Restoration (1661), about twenty persons appear to have been condemned by the Justiciary Court, two of whom, though acquitted on their first trial, were condemned on the second on new charges. The numbers executed throughout the country are noticed by Lamont. Fourteen commissions for trials in the provinces appear to have been issued by the Privy Council in one day (November 7, 1661). Of the numbers of nameless wretches who died and made no sign, under the hands of those “understanding gentlemen” (as the General Assembly’s overture styles them) to whom the commissions were granted, it is now almost impossible to form a conjecture. In reference however to the course of procedure in such cases, we may refer to some singular manuscripts relative to the examination of two confessing witches in Morayshire in 1662, in the possession of the family of Rose, of Kilravock; more particularly as the details they contain are, both from their minuteness and the unparalleled singularity of their contents, far more striking than anything to be found on the Records of Justiciary about this time.
The names of these crazed beldames were Isobel Gowdie and Janet Braidhead. Two of the latter’s examinations are preserved; the former appears to have been four times examined at different dates between the 13th April and 27th May, 1662, before the sheriff and several gentlemen and ministers of the neighbourhood; and on one of these is a marking by the Justice Depute Colville, as follows:—“Having read and considered the confession of Isobel Gowdie, within contained, as paction with Sathan, renunciation of baptism, with divers malefices, I find that a commission may be very justly given for her last trial.—A. Colville58.” The confessions are written under the hand of a notary public, and subscribed by all the clergymen, gentlemen, and other witnesses present; as would appear to have been the practice where the precognitions were to be transmitted to the Justiciary, with the view of obtaining a commission to try and punish the crime. What the result of Isobel Gowdie’s “last trial” was, it is easy, from the nature of her confessions, to conjecture.
“Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.”
Though examined on four different occasions, at considerable intervals of time, and undoubtedly undergoing solitary confinement in the interim, so minute and invariable are the accounts given by Gowdie in particular, of the whole life and conversation of the witches to whom she belonged, that a pretty complete institute of infernal science might be compiled from her confession. The distinctness with which the visions seem to have haunted her, the consistency they had assumed in her own mind, and yet the inconceivable absurdity and monstrosity of these conceptions, to many of which we cannot even allude, furnish some most important contributions to the history of hypochondriac insanity.
Her devotion to the service of the devil took place in the kirk of Auldearn, where she was baptized by him with the name of Janet, being held up by a companion, and the devil sucking the blood from her shoulder59. The band or coven to which they belonged consisted of thirteen (whose names she enumerates, and some of whom appear to have been apprehended upon her delation), that being the usual number of the covens. Each is provided with an officer, whose duty it is to repeat the names of the party after Satan; and a maiden, who seems to hold sway over the women, and who is the particular favourite of the devil, is placed at his right hand at feasts. A grand meeting of the covens takes place quarterly, when a ball is given. Each witch has a “sprite” to wait upon her, some appearing “in sad dun, some in grass green, some in sea green, some in yellow.” Those of Gowdie’s coven were, “Robert the Jakes, Sanders the Reed-Reever, Thomas the Fairy, Swein the Roaring Lion, Thief of Hell wait-upon-herself, MacHector,” and so on. Some of these spirits, it would appear, did not stand high in Isobel’s opinion; for Robert the Jakes, she says, was aged, and seemed to be “a gowkit glaikit spirit.” Each of the witches too received a sobriquet, by which they were generally known60. Satan himself had several spirits to wait upon him; “sometimes he had boots and sometimes shoes upon his feet, but still his feet are forked and cloven.” The witches, it appears, occasionally took considerable liberties with his character, on which occasions Satan, on detecting the calumny, used to beat the delinquents “up and down like naked gaists” with a stick, as Charon does the naked spirits in the ‘Inferno,’ with his oar. (Cant, iii.) He found it much more easy however to deal with the warlocks than with the fair sex. “Alexander Elder,” says the confessing witch, “was soft, and could not defend himself, and did naething but greit and crye while he will be scourging him; but Margaret Wilson in Auldearn would defend herself finely, and cast up her hands to cape the blows, and Bessie Wilson would speak crustily with her tongue, and would be bellin again to him stoutly.”
The amusements and occupations of the witches are described with the same firmness and minuteness of drawing. When the devil has appointed an infernal diet, the witches leave behind them, in bed, a besom or three-legged stool, which assumes their shape till their return, a feature exactly corresponding with the Mora trials. When proceeding to the spot where their work is to be performed, they either adopt the shape of cats, hares, etc., or else, mounting upon corn or bean straws, and pronouncing the following charm,—
“Horse and hattock, horse and go,
Horse and pellats, ho! ho!”
they are borne through the air to the place of their destination. If any see these straws in motion, and “do not sanctify themselves,” the witches may shoot them dead. This feat they perform with elf-arrow heads, which are manufactured by Satan himself; and his assistants the elf boys, who are described, like the Scandinavian trolls, as little humpbacked creatures who speak “goustie
