Abstract
While the Devil does not figure prominently, and sometimes not at all, in earlier witch trials, by the end of the sixteenth century he had become a conspicuous presence, a figure that hovered close to every good and godly citizen in the land, a position reinforced from a theological standpoint and, by extension, through the teachings of the church. He leapt out of the printed pages of the Bible and walked among us, stalking and waiting for his opportunity to seep into human minds, bodies and souls. In the post-Reformation era, images and iconography of the Devil had been destroyed and almost entirely erased, yet he loomed large in the collective consciousness of Scottish society, instilled into the psyche through sermons and instruction by the clergy. In the near absence of native visual depictions of the Devil, it was left to the human imagination, verbal communications from the pulpit, and to centuries of traditional tales and legends, to put meat on his incorporeal bones. As a consummate shapeshifter, liar and deceiver, the form by which the Devil might appear to mortals was potentially limitless, guided only by the boundaries of our imaginative processes. The lack of a visual culture — which lasted until at least the eighteenth century when his image began to quietly surface once again — may only have served to drive the Devil deeper into the Scottish soul, forcing everyone, regardless of their social status, to examine their internal conscience, and not just their outward actions, with a closer degree of scrutiny than ever before.
Here Mausy lives, a witch that for a sma’ price
Can cast her cantraips and gi’e me advice;
She can o’ercast the night, and cloud the moon,
And mak the deils obedient to her crune.1
Allan Ramsay, The Gentle Shepherd (1725)
There sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast;
A towzie tyke [shaggy dog], black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He scre’d [screwed] the pipes and gart them skirl [squeal],
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl [ring].
Robert Burns, “Tam o’Shanter” (1790)
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Notes
Other designations used in Scotland include Donald Dubh (Gaelic), the Goodman, the Halyman (in the North East), Auld Sym, the Auld Ane or One, the Auld Carl or Chiel, Auld Harry, Auld Sandy, Whaupneb and the Earl of Hell. Mahoun, from Mahomet, was used in Scotland since 1475 but probably dates from the time of the Crusades. John Burnett, Robert Burns and the Hellish Legions (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2009) 29;
Edward J. Cowan, “Burns and Superstition,” in Love & Liberty: Robert Burns, A Bicentenary Celebration, ed. K. Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997) 234.
Darren Oldridge, The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 40–1.
Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell (2000; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003) 2–3.
There is a wide literature on the changing faces of the Devil. See, for instance, Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977);
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984);
Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christianity Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (New York: Vintage, 1996);
Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (London: William Heinemann, 1996);
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
St Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 481 (Book 1).
Robert J. Edgeworth, “Milton’s ‘Darkness Visible’ and ‘Aeneid’ 7,” The Classical Journal 79/2 (1984): 97–9.
W. Tod Ritchie, ed., The Bannatyne Manuscript, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1928–34), vol. 2, 282–3;
Priscilla Bawcutt, “Elrich Fantasyis in Dunbar and Other Poets,” in Bryght Lanternis: Essays on the Language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. J. Derrick McClure and Michael R. G. Spiller (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989) 162–78.
Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Montague Summers (1586; 1930; New York: Dover, 1972) 86.
See, for instance, Coleman O. Parsons, listing of the black motif in “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in Thrawn Janet,” Studies in Philology 43/3 (1946): 551–71, at 561, and his description of a witch suspect, Isabel Heriot (who may be the same person as Isabel Elliot, executed in 1678), who had a “black complexion” and when she died her face “became extremely black,” 566–7.
On Scottish attitudes and involvement in slavery, see Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
Edward J. Cowan and Mike Paterson, Folk in Print: Scotland’s Chapbook Heritage 1750–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007) 101–11.
Stuart MacDonald, “In Search of the Devil in Fife Witchcraft Cases, 1560–1705,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. Julian Goodare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) 45–6.
Of 420 known cases in Fife the Devil is explicitly mentioned in 83, which represents approximately 20 per cent of cases. MacDonald, “The Devil in Fife Witchcraft Cases,” 36; Stuart MacDonald, The Witches of Fife: Witch-Hunting in a Scottish Shire, 1560–1710 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002) 180–1;
Lauren Martin, “The Devil and the Domestic: Witchcraft, Quarrels and Women’s Work in Scotland,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. Julian Goodare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 77;
Joyce Miller, “Men in Black: Appearances of the Devil in Early Modern Scottish Witchcraft Discourse,” in Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, ed. Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 144–65, at 145.
Trial of Catherine Sands, Culross, 1675, in John Ewart Simpkins, County Folk-Lore vol. VII. Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning Fife with some Notes on Clackmannan and Kinross-shire (The Folklore Society. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1914) 99–100.
David Patrick, Statutes of the Scottish Church, 1225–1559 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1907) 6.
Thomas James Salmon, Borrowstounness and District being Historical Sketches of Kinneil, Carriden, and Bo’ness c. 1550–1850 (Edinburgh and London: William Hodge and Co., 1913) 118.
Trial of servant-girl, Irvine, February 1682, in Arnold F. McJannet, The Royal Burgh of Irvine (Irvine: Civic Press, 1938) 196–7;
William Fraser, Memorials of the Montgomeries, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1859) vol. 1, 81–2;
Alastair Hendry, Witch-Hunting in Ayrshire: A Calendar of Documents (May 1998; unpublished) case no. 159.
For a modern retelling, see Anna Blair, Tales of Ayrshire (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1983) 177–8. This case is not in Black’s Calendar, Larner et al., Source-Book, or the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database.
The men of Glakmarres were brought before the Elgin Kirk Session in 1602 for reserving a piece of “land to the devill callit the Gudmanis.” William Cramond, The Records of Elgin, 1234–1800, 2 vols. (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1908) vol. 2, 105.
William Cramond, The Annals of Banff, 2 vols. (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1893) vol. 2, 31.
Peter F. Anson, Fisher Folk-Lore: Old Customs, Taboos and Superstitions among Fisher Folk, especially in Brittany and Normandy, and on the East Coast of Scotland (London: The Faith Press, 1965) 89.
George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, ed. Coleman O. Parsons (Edinburgh: John Reid, 1685; Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969) 207–12.
Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013) 261.
William McCulloch, Examination of Persons under Scriptural Concern at Cambuslang during the Revival in 1741–2 by the Revd. William McCulloch, Minister of Cambuslang, New College Library, Edinburgh, ‘The McCulloch Manuscripts’ MS. W 13.b.212. On the Cambuslang Revival, see T. C. Smout, “Born Again at Cambuslang: New Evidence on Popular Religion and Literacy in Eighteenth Century Scotland,” Past and Present 97 (1982): 114–27;
Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” The American Historical Review 91/4 (1986): 811–32; Matthew Smith, “Distinguishing Marks of the Spirit of God: Eighteenth-Century Revivals in Scotland and New England,” STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) Project Archive (April 2004).
Michael Wasser, “The Western Witch-Hunt of 1697–1700: The Last Major Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” in The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, ed. Julian Goodare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 146–65.
For example, see Julian Goodare, “Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” Social History 23 (1998): 288–308; Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 30–2;
Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (2001; Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011) 121.
Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684–1830 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998) 3.
Garthine Walker, for instance, notes that in England there is little evidence that the branks were regularly applied, whereas the pillory and whipping were relatively common. Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 108–11.
John G. Harrison, “Women and the Branks in Stirling, c. 1600 to c. 1730,” Scottish Economic and Social History 18/2 (1998): 114–31.
Anne-Marie Kilday, “Hurt, Harm and Humiliation: Community Responses to Deviant Behaviour in Early Modern Scotland,” in Shame, Blame and Culpability: Crime, Violence and the Modern State, 1600–1900, ed. Judith Rowbotham, Marianna Muravyeva and David Nash (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013) 124–40.
Kilday, “Hurt, Harm and Humiliation,” claims that there are no recorded instances of men being “branked” after 1570. However, Patrick Pratt in Aberdeen was ordered to sit “bound to the croce of this burgh, in the brankis locket,” in 1591, Aberdeen Burgh Records, II. 71. An Inverness man was ordered to pass through the four ports of the town and then the tron wearing the branks, following an altercation with another man whom he insulted and threatened with a knife. William MacKay and Herbert C. Boyd, eds., Records of Inverness, 2 vols. (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1911–24) vol. 1, 59.
See also Elizabeth Ewan, “‘Hamperit in Ane Hony Came’: Sights, Sounds and Smells in the Medieval Town,” in A History of Everyday Life in Medieval Scotland, 1000 to 1600, ed. Edward J. Cowan and Lizanne Henderson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) 109–44.
13 August 1546, R. Renwick, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1887–9) vol.1, 43. Another early example was in 1567, when a Bessie Tailiefeir or Telfer was sentenced in Edinburgh to be put in the branks and fixed to the town cross for one hour. She had apparently slandered the local Baillie, Thomas Hunter, by claiming he had been using false measures. Chambers, Domestic Annals, 37.
Tain Presbytery Records, 25 July 1750, qtd in Colin MacNaughton, Church Life in Ross and Sutherland, from the Revolution (1688) to the Present Time, Compiled Chiefly from the Tain Presbytery Records (Inverness: Northern Counties Newspaper Printing and Publishing Company, 1915) 199–206.
See also J. M. MacPherson, Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929) 223.
Pennant, Tour 1769, 141. The practice was fairly prevalent in parts of England also. It was also carried out on suspected werewolves in Brittany, Normandy and Germany. See, for instance, Henderson, Folk Lore of the Northern Counties, 144–5; Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Werewolves, being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (New York: Causeway Books, 1973) 107.
See Larner, Enemies of God; Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997);
Anne-Marie Kilday, “Maternal Monsters: Murdering Mothers in South-West Scotland, 1750–1815,” in Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland since 1400, ed. Y. G. Brown and R. Ferguson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002) 156–79;
Lynn Abrams, “From Demon to Victim: The Infanticidal Mother in Shetland, 1699–1802,” in Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland since 1400 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002) 180–203;
Anne-Marie Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007);
Anne-Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain, c.1600 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Sandra Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 41, 52; Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, 20.
Brian P. Levack, “Judicial Torture in Scotland during the Age of MacKenzie,” in Miscellany IV, ed. Hector L. MacQueen (Edinburgh: The Stair Society, 2002) vol. 49, 191, 196.
MacDonald, Witches of Fife, 137. The torture of keeping the suspect awake was possibly invented by Hyppolytus de Marselis of Bologna. The Scots were credited with favouring this particular torture, see Edward J. Cowan, “The Darker Vision of the Scottish Renaissance: The Devil and Francis Stewart,” in The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson, ed. I. B. Cowan and D. Shaw (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983) 127, and Black, Calendar, 15.
Liv Helene Willumsen, “Seventeenth Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway,” Ph.D, University of Edinburgh (2008) 78–84, 104, 204;
Liv H. Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden: Brill, 2013) 85–90.
Beatrix Laing, petition to the privy council, 1 May 1705, in David Cook, Annals of Pittenweem; Being Notes and Extracts from the Ancient Records of that Burgh (Anstruther: Lewis Russell, 1867) 124–5; MacDonald, The Witches of Fife, 161.
Levack, “Judicial Torture in Scotland during the Age of MacKenzie,” 187. On torture, see also R. D. Melville, “The Use and Forms of Judicial Torture in England and Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review 2 (1905): 225–48.
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Henderson, L. (2016). Darkness Visible. In: Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313249_5
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