Abstract
Rev. John Mill, minister of Dunrossness in Shetland from 1740 to 1803, expressed the belief that the Devil had the power to raise the wind, accusations that were frequently made against witches. Mill was heard grumbling, “Well, let him [Satan] do his worst; the wind aye in my face will not hurt me.” His words were in response to a threat he claimed was made by the Devil to the effect that wherever Mill went the wind would always be blowing “in his teeth,” the explanation given when he could not get passage off the island.2 Mill, from the oral traditions and legends surrounding him, seems to have been quite the sagacious character when it came to Auld Nick, whom he had seen and conversed with on many occasions. He had also assisted those who were demonically possessed. People who overheard him speaking with his “unseen foe” said that he spoke in a language unknown to them.3 One informant claimed that his father and grandmother were at Dunrossness Kirk when “Satan came in” but was seen off by the Rev. Mill:
He [Satan] dared not come in at the west door facing east; but came in at the east door, and took his place at the table [communion table]. Mr. Mill knew him, and began to speak in all the deep languages, last of all it may be in the Gaelic, and that beat him altogether. So he went off like a flock of doos [pigeons] over the heads of the folk out at the west door. Many people swooned.4
There remains hope, however, that the grosser faults of our ancestors are now out of date; and that whatever follies the present race may be guilty of, the sense of humanity is too universally spread to permit them to think of tormenting wretches till they confess what is impossible and then burning them for their pains.
Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830)
Haply ’tis weened that Scotland now is free
Of witchcraft, and of spell o’er human life;
Ah me! — ne’er since she rose out of the sea,
Were they so deep, so dangerous, and so rife.
James Hogg, “Superstition” (1815)1
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Notes
Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Company, 1830; London: Wordsworth Editions, 2001) 233;
James Hogg, “Superstition,” The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd: Centenary Edition, 2 vols. (London: Blackie and Son, 1878) vol. 2, 394.
Gilbert Goudie, ed. The Diary of the Reverend John Mill, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1889) xxix.
Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, “The Life of Martin Martin,” in Martin Martin — 300 Years On: Proceedings of a Major 3-Day Event to Mark the Tercentenary of the Publication of Martin Martin’s Book on the Western Isles (Ness, Isle of Lewis: The Island Book Trust, 2003) 6.
Johnson’s interest in the supernatural is downplayed, for example, by W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York and London: HBJ, 1977) 352–3, as stemming from Charles Churchill’s rather extreme portrayal of Johnson as a credulous believer in ghosts. Churchill, author of The Ghost (1763), based his comments on Johnson’s involvement with the investigations into the notorious Cocklane Ghost and his subsequent publication, “Account of the Detection of the Imposture in Cocklane,” Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1762).
On Churchill, see The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. D. Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).
Fiona J. Stafford, “‘Dangerous Success’: Ossian, Wordsworth, and English Romantic Literature,” in Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991) 49–72, at 61.
Howard Gaskill, ed., The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) 356, 123.
On this, see Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989);
James Reed, Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: Athlone Press, 1980).
Kamchatka peninsula is in the Russian Far East. Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland in 1769, intro. B. Knight (1774; Perth: Melven Press, 1979). Pennant’s autobiography qtd in intro.
Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (2001; Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011) 207–8.
John MacTaggart, The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia; or, the Original, Antiquated, and Natural Curiosities of the South of Scotland (London, 1824; Strath Tay: Clunie Press, 1981) 25–30;
John Burnett, Robert Burns and the Hellish Legions (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2009) 47–8.
Jason Marc Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth Century British Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932) 161.
F. J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston and London: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1882–98).
David D. Buchan, “History and Harlaw,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5/1 (1968): 58–67.
James Hogg, Anecdotes of Scott, ed. Jill Rubenstein (1834; 1999; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) 38; Gilbert, “Scottish Ballads and Popular Culture,” 2.
Hugh Shields, “Varieties of the Supernatural in Song,” Béaloideas 60/61 (1992/93): 161–72.
See David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (1972; East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997) 76;
M. E. Brown, “Old Singing Women and the Canons of Scottish Balladry and Song,” in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. D. Gifford and D. McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) 44–57;
Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
Edward J. Cowan, “Sex and Violence in the Scottish Ballads,” in The Ballad in Scottish History, ed. E. J. Cowan (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000) 95–115.
David Buchan, “Taleroles and the Witch Ballads,” in Ballads and Other Genres, ed. Zorica Raj Kovic (Zagreb: Zavod za Istrazivanje Folklora, 1988) 133–40.
SCA, Stirling Holy Rude Kirk Session Records 1597–1968, 30 April 1633; Charles Rogers, Social Life in Scotland, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Grampian Club, 1884) vol. 2, 199. The weaver’s wife may have suffered from agalactosis, an inability to lactate. For additional comment on Margaret Chapman see p.110, Chapter 3 above.
T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds., The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1874–5) vol. 4, 93.
James M. MacKinlay, Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs (Glasgow: William Hodge, 1893) 219–20.
John Brims, “The Ross-Shire Witchcraft Case of 1822,” Review of Scottish Culture 5 (1989): 87–91.
Wilkie MS in William Henderson, Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1886; London: The Folklore Society, 1879) 143–4.
John Jack, An Historical Account of St. Monace, Fifeshire, Ancient and Modern (Coupar: J. S. Tullis, 1844) 32–3; Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, esp. chapter 1.
Michael Shortland, ed., Hugh Miller’s Memoir: From Stonemason to Geologist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995) 38–9.
Edinburgh Annual Register (1814) cxxxi, qtd in William G. Black, Folk Medicine; A Chapter in the History of Culture, The Folk-Lore Society (London: Elliot Stock, 1883) 24.
Letter by F. A., Glasgow Weekly Herald (1876), in James Napier, Folk Lore in the West of Scotland (Paisley, 1879; Wakefield: EP, 1976) 37–8. Napier claimed that a woman in his village, c.1820s, was scored above the breath because it was believed she had put the evil eye on a neighbourhood child, causing it to have convulsive fits. He does not recall whether or not the child recovered.
William Grant imprisoned for attack on the wife of Walter Munro, 8 October 1845, Jury Court, Tain, reported in Inverness Courier, 23 October 1845, but see also Aberdeen Journal, Notes and Queries, VII, 50, and J. M. Macpherson, Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929) 224.
MacKinlay, Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs, 220; R. Menzies Fergusson, Rambling Sketches in the Far North and Orcadian Musings (Edinburgh and Glasgow: John Menzies and Co., 1883) 35–8.
James Napier related a similar story of a witch who was shot, c.1828, while she was in the shape of a hare. Thereafter she had to use a crutch to get around. Folk Lore in the West of Scotland, 70. William Ross, Aberdour and Inchcolme. Being Historical Notices of the Parish and Monastery in twelve Lectures (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1885) 327.
Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1958) no. 3045;
Willem de Blécourt, “Sabbath Stories: Towards a New History of Witches’ Assemblies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 88.
Rev George Sutherland, Folk-Lore Gleanings and Character Sketches from the Far North (Wick: John O’Groat Journal, 1937) 49–86.
Allan Ramsay, ‘The Gentle Shepherd’, in The Poems of Allan Ramsay, 2 vols. (1800; Paisley: Alex. Gardner, 1877) 42–134, act 2, scene 2.
John H. Dixon, Gairloch in North-West Ross-shire; Its Records, Traditions, Inhabitants, and Natural History, with a Guide to Gairloch and Loch Maree (Edinburgh: Cooperative Printing Company, 1886) 163–73.
Peter F. Anson, Fisher Folk-Lore. Old Customs, Taboos and Superstitions among Fish Folk, Especially in Brittany and Normandy, and on the East Coast of Scotland (London The Faith Press, 1965) 46.
Erskine Beveridge, The Churchyard Memorials of Crail (Edinburgh: J. and A. Constable, 1885) 61;
Raymond Lamont-Brown, Discovering Fife (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988) 145.
Nancy Foy Cameron, Witches in Atholl (Clunemore: Atholl Brose, 1999) 32–3;
David Milne Home, The Estuary of the Forth and Adjoining Districts Viewed Geologically (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871) 49;
Maurice Fleming, Not of This World: Creatures of the Supernatural in Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2002) 161.
Joyce Miller, Myth and Magic: Scotland’s Ancient Beliefs & Sacred Places (Musselburgh: Goblinshead, 2000) 118.
Hugh Miller, Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland or the Traditional History of Cromarty, ed. J. Robertson (1835; Edinburgh: B and W, 1994) 80–1.
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Henderson, L. (2016). The Persistence of Witch Belief. 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_9
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