Status Updates From Borders Witch Hunt: The Sto...

Even when arrested, many warlocks were given bail and allowed to wait their time until trial at home. The courts, filled with male lawyers, prosecutors and juries, did not want to believe fellow men guilty and when the accused put up a robust defence, not guilty and not proven verdicts were frequently returned.

Scotland… like most European countries saw witchcraft in terms of a female crime. In contrast, most Scandinavian countries disputed the usefulness of women to the Devil. Why, they argued, if the Devil was really trying to attack the Godly would he use stupid women? In the Scandinavian witch trial records, the numbers of men accused is well over 60%… Around 16% of those tried in Scotland as witches were men.

A man who lost his wife in childbirth was to be pitied while a woman who lost her husband was to be avoided. Husbands who died of natural causes, unless very old, were assumed to have been bewitched to death. Accidental death raised the suspicion that the wife had ‘caused’ the accident. And death after an illness of a relatively fit healthy male could have been the result of poison.

There are very few instances of accusations of Scottish witches flying. It was considered a delusion in Scotland, although interestingly it was a relatively common accusation on the continent.

Most sheriffs and baillies spent the late autumn months moving vagrants out of their jurisdictions before winter arrived. The Kirk might preach Christian charity but most merchants did not want more beggars on their streets and it was the merchants that paid the sheriff’s wages. Beggars would be rounded up, spend a night in the tolbooth before being thrown out and told never to return the next morning.

The Commissioners that presided over witch interrogation and trials in the Borders were all local landowners. They were known to the local minister as ‘guid men’ and thus capable of sitting in judgment on others. What they were not was lawyers. Few, if any, of them had received any training in the law; that was not considered necessary. They were chosen …because they were men of good character….

For rural communities who frequently lived life on the precarious edge of starvation, childlessness was much more than a personal tragedy for those personally involved. A lack of children in a village meant a lack of hands to work the land and could mean the difference between the survival of an entire community and its destruction.

“It was a commonly held belief that women did not know how to be moderate in their goodness or their wickedness and when they passed the boundaries of their proper status, they became extremely wicked. Kramer [a Dominican monk in the late 16th century] quoted various sources for this belief, from Roman historians such as Seneca to Christian scholars such as St Augustine and then finally the scriptures themselves.”

For Catholics, the Protestants were attacking mother church, which had been founded by St Peter, and the pope, whose…apostolic succession came from St Peter. What else could Protestants be but the foot soldiers of the Devil? The Protestant camp viewed the Catholics as those who had betrayed Christ by allowing his church to be corrupted by wealth and power….This could only have been the work of the Devil.

To leave a tight-knit rural Borders community in the 17th century was, however, almost unheard-of, and to do so was to instantly arouse suspicion. If, after an individual left…, conditions improved, then the suspicion was that the emigrant had been the cause of the ill fortune. On the other hand, if conditions worsened, …the individual had caused the misfortune and then left to avoid its consequences.

Even without wars and religious upheaval, rural societies in Scotland had two great fears: plague and famine. Both could spell disaster for communities large and small and in the 17th century would stalk the rural families of the Borders again and again. Between 1600 and 1700, famine and plague occurred six times each. On three particularly harsh occasions, both occurred in the same year.

Even when the various armies were not fighting in the Borders, they wrought destruction as they passed through on the road to Edinburgh or Newcastle. Armies at the time lived off the land and a passing troop of soldiers could strip a community of all of its food stores in a day. Those who resisted were assaulted, as were any young women who caught the eye of the soldiers.