Agnes Finnie E-Book

Mary Craig

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 375

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Witchcraft holds a continued fascination for readers around the world, and the Scottish witch hunts have recently received renewed media attention, especially with the BBC 2 show Lucy Worsley Investigates, bringing attention to Edinburgh's witches. Expert Mary Craig explores the unusual story of Agnes Finnie, a middle class shopkeeper who lived in the tenements of Edinburgh. After arrest, most witches were tried within a matter of days but not Agnes. Her unusual case took months with weeks of deliberation of the jury. Mary explains why and gives her expert insight into the political and religious tensions that led to her burning. The book will interest a variety of readers, academics and non-academics alike – those interested in witchcraft, British and Scottish history, religious studies and women's studies. Mary Craig works as a historian with museums, archives and schools and hosts regular, well-attended events on the subject of witchcraft in the Scottish Borders. We expect strong media coverage. The Witches of Scotland campaign has recently gained traction and the attention of first minister Nicola Sturgeon, calling for a pardon and apology to those accused during the witch hunts.

Leseprobe

MARY W. CRAIG is a writer and historian living in Scotland. She is a former Carnegie scholar and a graduate of the University of Glasgow. She writes about ordinary people and how they live their lives buffeted by the politics and economics of the elite. Mary also gives talks and lectures on various aspects of Scottish and European history to community groups across the country. She is the author of Borders Witch Hunt published by Luath Press in 2020. Some historians are known as hedgehogs, happily snuffling about rooting out the minutest of historical details. Others are known as eagles, soaring on high they see great vistas of historical events. A few are known as magpies: if something shiny and interesting catches their eye, they will try to capture it where possible. Mary is a magpie.

First published 2023

ISBN: 978-1-80425-099-0

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by Lapiz

© Mary W. Craig 2023

Contents

Note

Introduction

1 The Potterrow

2 Witchcraft and Magic

3 Halting Hame

4 Bad Herrings

5 The Buchannans

6 Broken Legs

7 The King, the Covenanters and the Cordiners Corporation

8 Salt

9 Haunting

10 A Witch’s Gett

11 Imprisonment

12 The Trial

13 Verdict and Sentence

14 Aftermath

15 Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

References

Note

ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK is based on Agnes Finnie’s trial records as well as other primary source material, not every aspect of life in Edinburgh and wider Scotland in the 17th century can be known exactly. Some of the following chapters contain descriptions of reactions to the political and religious events of the century as well as events in Agnes’ life; some of these descriptions come directly from contemporary records, others are imagined responses based on those contemporary records.

Introduction

AGNES FINNIE was a ‘witch’ who lived in Edinburgh during the 17th century. Her entire trial records are held in the National Library of Scotland. As such, her story can be examined in some detail. Her alleged witchcraft spanned 1628 to 1644, a turbulent time in Scotland’s history. The start of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms affected people across Scotland and its consequences were possibly most intense in the capital, making the political and military machinations of the age central to understanding Agnes’ life. The battle for supremacy between Royalists and Covenanters combined with the religious fervour of the Kirk impacted on ordinary people’s lives across Scotland. The rising political and religious tensions of the times mirror the increasing number and intensity of the alleged incidents of witchcraft in Agnes’ case.

The Scottish witch hunts occurred within five major ‘panics’: 1590–1; 1597; 1628–30; 1649 and 1661–2.  Agnes Finnie was not arrested in any of these, but in 1644. The stereotype of a witch is of a poor, elderly healer gathering herbs in the countryside to care for a sick child. Agnes undermines that stereotype. Although not rich, Agnes was not very poor – she was a middling sort. She was not principally a healer: she was a shopkeeper. She did not live in a country cottage, but in the tenements of Edinburgh.

Most ‘witches’ were arrested after an accusation from a neighbour who had been the victim of their ‘witchcraft’. The accusations against Agnes finally numbered 20 and yet the initial complaint came not from one of her victims, but from another individual in the neighbourhood.

After being arrested, ‘witches’ were usually tried within a matter of days. Agnes spent several months in Edinburgh’s Tolbooth between arrest and facing the courts. Most juries found ‘witches’ guilty within hours, or at least a couple of days of the trial. The jury in Agnes’ case took several weeks to deliver a verdict. Few ‘witches’ were defended at their trials, but Agnes employed two advocates to plead her case.

During Agnes’ trial, her daughter Margaret was named as having also been a witch and yet, unusually, was not arrested. The trial records of other ‘witches’ detail several mothers and daughters who were arrested. So, the question remains: why did Margaret not follow her mother to trial?

***

Agnes’ story is much more nuanced and more interesting than that of the stereotypical poor defenceless woman persecuted by the Kirk. Through Agnes’ story, the everyday lives of ordinary people struggling to survive are revealed. The religious and political upheaval in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom impacted such ordinary people as Scotland became increasingly seen as a land under threat from the Devil and his handmaidens: witches. The women and men who were accused of witchcraft were much more than the stereotypical ‘witch victim’; they were real people with real lives. This is just one of their stories.

1

The Potterrow

ON 18 DECEMBER 1644, Agnes Finnie was brought into the courtroom at the Edinburgh Tolbooth to face her accusers. Scotland was in the grip of the Civil War, plague and harvest failure were affecting many and the General Assembly of the Kirk had recently passed a series of Condemnatory Acts against witches. The town was boiling with fear and hysteria: Auld Nick was stalking the land devouring all in his way. Agnes Finnie would pay the price for that fear and hysteria. A widow with a grown-up daughter but no other family to support her, it had been her own neighbours that reported her to the Kirk minister. Faced with 20 charges of witchcraft and sorcery, Agnes was in a perilous state, not least because she had confessed at her first examination before the south-west Kirk Session of Edinburgh that she had been ‘ane rank witch these twenty-eight years bygane’.1

Standing alone and reviled in the courtroom, Agnes’ trial would expose a world of social, political and religious upheaval where superstition, belief, fear and greed mingled with money-lending and murder. This was no old woman from the farmlands of Midlothian curing her family’s ailments with herbs and charms. Agnes did not climb a Borders hill to sup with the Devil in the pale moonlight. Agnes was a shopkeeper in the capital city selling fishcakes, lending money and wreaking revenge on those who wronged her. But was she also a witch?

Agnes lived and worked in the Potterrow Port, Edinburgh. Less than a mile from the castle, the parliament and St Giles, it was, nonetheless, a world apart: a dark corner of the town that sprawled south of the Royal Mile running for a fair distance along the southern edge of the city wall where the working poor and the destitute rubbed along together. It was the sort of area no one visited unless they had a reason to, and certainly never after dark. But it was also home to a few middling folk: shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans, those who thought themselves a step up from the working poor, but for whom poverty was only a wage or two away. The middling sorts who made real money left the old neighbourhood as soon as possible: Agnes was not one of those.

Part of the parish of Greyfriars Kirk, the tall tenements crowded together along the Potterrow just as they did on the Royal Mile, but for all the similarity and close proximity, life in the Potterrow was more secretive. No ministers walked along the Potterrow to go to St Giles, no advocates hurried to the law courts, no Lords of the Privy Council walked the streets as they did the Royal Mile: the Potterrow lived a life of its own, unseen, unheard and undisturbed.

Greyfriars Kirk had been built in 1620 and was one of the first new Kirks to be constructed in Scotland after the Reformation. When the diocese of Edinburgh was created within the Scottish Kirk, the parish of Greyfriars was incorporated into the new structure. Previously, the congregation had worshipped in the western portion of St Giles until it had grown too large. A new Kirk and manse were built on the potterrow the site of the friary of the old Greyfriars. The new building was ‘comfortable and commodious, ane true house of God’.2 It was quickly populated by the pious members of the parish, as well as those whose attendance was motivated primarily by social standing. The lack of Potterrow inhabitants on its pews on the Sabbath was barely noted. For those that bothered to climb the hill, the new Kirk had none of the easy familiarity of old St Giles. There were no shadowy corners in which to hide and perhaps sleep through the sermon or sit and gossip with your friends. The Sabbath was the day of worship, but, for the working poor of the Potterrow, it was also their only day of rest and enjoyment.

That day of rest was needed. Life in the Potterrow was tough. A lucky few had apprenticeships as carpenters or butchers or worked as weavers, but most scraped a living as day labourers, as servants scrubbing floors at the parliament building or as messengers for merchants and shopkeepers. The local tradespeople, cordiners, tailors and bakers, were only one or two steps above them. Most of the shops were on the ground floor of the tenement buildings with the family living in the backroom which often served as the shop’s storeroom. The goods sold were not high quality – who in the Potterrow could afford that? The community was relatively closed – apart from the few that worked in the High Street or the courts as cleaners, residents had little need or desire to go elsewhere. Occasionally, the children would wander down to the great expanse around Arthur’s Seat to catch rabbits for their dinner. Sometimes there would be a gala day high up at the castle when someone was executed. But other than that, the Potterrow residents regularly left the area for only one thing: attendance at the Kirk on a Sunday. But not everyone went to the Kirk; in fact probably fewer than half of those in the area did, and that was the problem with the Potterrow. Located at the very edge of the city boundary, the Potterrow was not physically close to Greyfriars Kirk.

Known as the haunt of undesirables and troublemakers, it held more than its fair share of drinking dens and mean, low shops and was barely visited by the minister at Greyfriars. Attendance at the Kirk might be the required custom, but it was barely observed in the Potterrow. Even those who did attend did so infrequently. This was partly because, for many, Sunday was their only rest day and to climb the hill to Greyfriars was quite an undertaking. In addition, the harsh life in the Potterrow was such that the majority of the residents drank heavily when they could to escape from the sheer drudgery of their lives. The Sunday morning climb to the Kirk was even less appealing when combined with a hangover. For many of the parishioners, therefore, attendance at the Kirk was not a priority. These matters were complicated by the sheer number of residents in the area. No one knew exactly how many people lived in the Potterrow. There were families with multiple children, not all of whom had been christened by the Kirk. Many of the couples in the area lived together without the sacrament of marriage. George Hickes, in his chronicle of the trial of the conventicle-preacher Mr James Mitchel, wrote that in Scotland in the 17th century there were ‘more bastards born within their country […] than in all our nation besides.’3 Then there were masters with apprentices who slept in workshops. The tall tenements housed tenants who sublet rooms, and in some cases single beds, to lodgers who may or may not have used their real names. There were peddlers and itinerant traders who came and went with the fairs and holy days. And finally, there were the destitute that slept in back alleyways and the stairwells of tenements.4 It was estimated that there may have been as many as 20,000 souls packed inside Edinburgh’s city walls; the numbers in the Potterrow remained unknown.

In addition to the normal residents, there were the travellers that passed through the Potterrow on a daily basis. The Potterrow, with its Port, was a bustling thoroughfare which led into the city. The old medieval walls of Edinburgh were still in existence with their four ‘ports’ or gates into the city. Originally, the ports had towers at either side where the city guard controlled entry into and out of Edinburgh. These were still used as toll gates where traders paid a tax on their merchandise. At busy times, a queue would form as people waited to have their papers checked and their carts and goods examined. This was a prime location for pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes and others to gather to see what business could be done. It was here, beside the bustling port, that Agnes had her shop. But for all its prime location, Agnes’ shop did not have the pick of the merchandise that arrived. Most traders, once their papers were checked and their tax paid, drove straight up to the High Street. Few in the Potterrow could afford their goods. Those who traded in cheaper goods, or were opportunistically seeing what was what, stayed in the Potterrow. One final class of frequent visitor to the port were those who traded in stolen or counterfeit goods. Mingling with honest tradespersons, they would hawk their wares while trying to avoid paying tax, hiding from the harassed clerks at the port and avoiding notice from the city baillies. It was probably from those sorts of traders that Agnes supplied her shop.

When the port ‘closed’ for the evening and after the honest traders and city clerks had left for the day there was still plenty of activity at the Potterrow. Agnes’ shop traded well into the evening with plenty of customers calling to buy her goods or borrow some money.

Despite the fact that the Potterrow was in Scotland’s capital city, life was a struggle for all but the rich and buying cheap, counterfeit goods or borrowing money was in many cases the only way to survive. Death rates among children were high, with around 50 per cent failing to make it past their tenth birthday. The food supply was unpredictable, with around one in every ten harvests in the surrounding area failing; harvest failures in the Highlands were even more frequent. The better-off merchants and nobility may have had food stores, but for everyone else one bad harvest could mean starvation. For the rest of the time, the population survived on a diet that left them chronically undernourished with deficiencies in several vital minerals and vitamins. Such food as was bought and sold in neighbourhoods like the Potterrow was of poor quality. In such a perennially weakened state, any illness or injury could be, and frequently was, fatal. Those doctors who existed were too expensive for the likes of the Potterrow residents and, in an era before modern medicine, had little to offer in the face of infectious diseases. Herbal remedies supplied by the mother or grandmother of the house gave some relief where they could.

Housing conditions were equally dire. There was rampant overcrowding in the tenements of the Potterrow, partly from the large size of the families and partly from the necessity of taking in a lodger or two to be able to afford the rent. The tenements had no running water and no sanitation. The picturesque expression of ‘gardyloo’, the customary Edinburgh warning cry when slops were thrown from the windows into the streets, belies the realities of life with no sanitation when human excrement was thrown into the street. Night soil men, who were paid to dispose of such excrement, would not be seen until the 18th century and the streets had to be swept clean by the residents of the Potterrow themselves. Water for cooking and cleaning had to be carried up flights of tenement stairs and for those elderly or infirm living on the top floors, washing often became a luxury for high days and holidays only. There were also, of course, the other residents of the Potterrow tenements; the fleas, lice, bed bugs, cockroaches and rats. All of these contaminated water, ate food supplies and acted as vectors that spread disease and general ill health among the local population.

The houses were also cold and damp with all the mould and other health hazards that that entailed. Those who could afford it bought coal and logs, although they were in the minority. Those who could not afford coal or logs burned animal dung, but although this supplied some heat it could not fully dispense with the damp that settled on weak chests and arthritic bones and further debilitated the population. Many windows were kept tight shut to keep out the cold, increasing problems with smoke, soot and dust in the air. Lighting was another perennial problem. Other than natural light, households used tallow candles made from the fat of cows or sheep. Foul smelling, these candles gave minimal light unless several were used – which of course was too expensive for most households. The lack of lighting inside the tenements, especially in the Scottish winter, gave rise to frequent accidents. The resulting injuries could, in turn, cause health problems if any wounds became infected or broken bones were set incorrectly, leading to permanent disability which affected the individual’s capacity to work. There were also, of course, severe accidents which resulted in death.

Underlying all of these issues was the fear of destitution. The stark reality of life for almost everyone below the better-off middling sorts was to find enough money to buy food and pay your rent or risk eviction. Therefore, everyone had to work. If you could not work due to illness, injury, exhaustion, old age or malnutrition then death from starvation or hypothermia in the Scottish winter was a very real prospect unless you had a relative who would care for you. The Kirk did help in certain cases, but this was at the discretion of the minister and was generally only a matter of a few shillings that would last barely a week. Offered mostly to widows and orphans, church charity was seldom if ever available to men. The duty of church-goers to donate to the poor that had been prevalent in the Catholic church had been replaced by a strict Calvinist work ethic that condemned many to penury.

With little, and in most cases no, practical help to alleviate their living conditions, many used alcohol as a means of escape. While this initially proved a temporary solution, in the long term it increased the pressure on the family’s finances. Despite this, alcohol consumption rose alongside its consequences: violence and increased ill health.

Given the living conditions in the Potterrow, the people in the area needed a shop that sold the everyday essentials at an affordable price, a means by which to borrow money when necessary and a source of basic health care. All three were supplied by Agnes Finnie.

While the poor of the Potterrow struggled to survive, the ministers and councillors up on the High Street were consumed with the ongoing religious and political turmoil that characterised the mid-17th century. When the high politics of Edinburgh and London collided, Agnes Finnie of the Potterrow Port would become one of its victims.

2

Witchcraft and Magic

WITCHCRAFT AND WITCHES were a perfectly common fact of life in Scotland in the 17th century. Despite the very loud protestations of the Kirk that they were God’s Elect and that Calvinism was the purest form of Christianity, older beliefs remained stubbornly present. Belief in the power of magic was more or less ubiquitous among ordinary people and co-existed alongside their Christian beliefs. For the Kirk, magical practices performed by witches could only come from the Devil.

The world of the early Scots was a bewildering and potentially dangerous place. Events outwith an individual’s control could mean life or death. The harvest might fail, disease could kill entire families, winter storms and floods could devastate whole communities. Perhaps magic could be used to help. The world of magic was shadowy. It lurked unseen in many places. A frequent sacrifice was a metal object cast into water: metal was precious and water was thought of as a gateway to the world of the gods. But not everyone could perform magic. Some were better able to make contact, some seemed to have more power to appease the gods. Magical amulets bought from such a person offered protection from the wrath of certain gods. A supplication made by such a person might gain an individual good luck.

While various peoples arrived in Scotland as settlers or invaders, these beliefs remained relatively unchanged for several centuries. By the time the first Christians arrived in the 5th century, belief in the supernatural was deeply embedded. Christianity took some time to establish itself and belief in the old gods and Christianity co-existed for some considerable time. Syncretism, the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, allowed a blending and cross-fertilisation between the old and the new that gave the people enough spiritual solace to ensure ongoing followers for both. The festivals around the winter solstice on 21 December mixed with new celebrations of the birth of Christ. Celebrations at the rebirth of spring were subsumed into the Easter celebrations of the resurrected Christ.

Even as Christianity became more dominant, most people, especially women, continued with the magical and superstitious traditions and practices from their pre-Christian past. The church, which was male dominated, dismissed the spiritual role of women in communities. By doing so, however, they did not remove the beliefs and practices, but merely shifted them to sit underneath Christianity.

The early Christian church in Scotland had problems. The church stated that there was a single Christian God rather than several pagan gods: one God, God the Father, who was good (and male) and that there was one evil Devil. But the one God was also Christ the son and the Holy Spirit, which sounded suspiciously like three gods to the old believers. And why, if there was only one good god, would that good god create an evil devil? To add to the confusion, the Virgin Mary was human but had given birth to a god. She was not herself divine although she was in heaven and could be worshipped. Was she not a female god?

For most early Scots, although this was confusing it was not their most pressing concern. Their lives continued to be dominated by the need for a good harvest, to be free of disease and to make it through the winter. While the church was further developing its theological arguments, ordinary people continued to appease the gods for a good harvest by asking the local priest to bless the fields at spring sowing. As time went on, the belief in ‘the gods’ faded and belief in the Christian God became the norm, but the supernatural creatures – such as faeries and kelpies – were still there in the shadows. They could be thanked for abundant crops both in homes and the harvest thanksgiving festival at the local church. Or they could be blamed for the birth of a baby with a ‘hare-lip’. As long as the community came to church on a Sunday, most Catholic priests turned a blind eye to what happened behind closed doors. In some more remote areas of the early Catholic church, and this included Scotland, the priest was not the well-educated, theologically articulate evangelist for Christ that we might expect. It was unlikely that he was literate and he probably did not speak Latin. The mysteries of the sacraments were delivered by rote. These ‘Mass priests’ could sing the Mass in Latin, but with no understanding of it and lived like everyone else. Thus, the local superstitions were not alien concepts to be condemned from the pulpit or ignored in a well-meaning attempt to attract a congregation, but, in most instances, were part and parcel of the priest’s own life and internal beliefs. Attendance at the church on Sunday to hear the priest say mass did not stop you visiting the local witch on Monday to help a sick child. A blended, simple faith, which in some cases bore little resemblance to Rome’s theological tenets, was accepted.

That is not to say that the early church did not try to stamp out superstition and magical practices. Sacrifices to the ‘old gods’ such as leaving offerings at Holy Wells that had previously been pagan wells, fortune telling and charming were all anathema to the church. However, it took time and effort to quell such practices. It was all very well for ‘the church’ to send out an edict forbidding such practices, but it was quite another matter for a local priest to do so. A single priest might have a parish that spanned the entire length of a river valley that was well-nigh impassable for at least four months of the year. What was going on in remote settlements could continue unseen for years. Local priests had to live with their parishioners. Telling people repeatedly that they must not do what their mothers and grandmothers had done for generations and that such practices were sinful and evil could cause, at best, ill-feeling and, at worst, downright hostility. The other problem was the difference between legitimate and illegitimate magic. Ringing the church bells to dispel a storm and leaving cheese out for the faeries to ensure good weather were both magical rituals, but only one was legitimate. What was and was not magic was determined by the church. The female practitioners of magic did not determine its legitimacy. Holy water was made holy, and thus able to perform miracles, by the recitation of the priest’s Latin prayers. That same priest could condemn a local woman for washing a baby in water from a local spring while saying a rhyme over the child. The theological arguments behind such distinctions may have made sense to the priest, but probably not to anyone else.

This situation could not continue forever. By the 16th century, a simplistic non-questioning belief that left room for magic was no longer acceptable and the Reformation shook Europe, including Scotland, out of its religious torpor. The new faith gave primacy to personal salvation; an individual had a personal relationship with God, with no priest or bishop to intercede. The mystical element – the Latin mass, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood – was lost. But those were the very elements of Catholic faith which had, albeit unwittingly, allowed the ordinary man and woman to profess their Christian faith while firmly holding on to their belief in magic and magical supernatural creatures. The Catholic Church, under threat, reformed many of the practices that had caused Martin Luther’s protest in the first place, but retained the mystery of faith in ritual. The new Protestants saw in that the work of the Devil. Neither, however, greatly changed the belief in magic and the supernatural that underpinned most people’s lives. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation challenged theology across Europe; new ideas sprang up and for a brief, very brief, time in some small pockets of Europe women found their voice to discuss faith and spirituality. However, as the Protestant Reformation advocated study of the Bible, women’s voices were considered to be controversial and were soon suppressed because of the edict in the Bible for women to be silent: ‘Women are to be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.’5 The men in the Protestant churches dictated what practices were magical. After the upheaval of the split from the Catholic church, Catholicism itself was now viewed as diabolical, as were all other practices not sanctioned by bible teachings. After the Reformation, the Kirk fulminated against such ‘diabolical’ practices and thus fundamentally failed to understand the beliefs of their flock, who saw magic as a way to deal with the uncertainties of life. People had not worshipped the Devil, or any devil; they had merely understood that the faeries were capricious and, on occasion, had to be appeased. That they could help you, if you asked in the right way, to cure your child or to lay illness on your enemies.

The Protestant faith in Scotland swept away Catholicism, but in that religious zeal completely failed to see that it was leaving ordinary believers bewildered in a sea of predestination and personal salvation that did nothing to help when your child fell ill or you were too poor to pay your rent. The lack of understanding by the Kirk of the continuing belief in the magical world was one thing, but their conflation of that magical spirit world with worship of the Devil would prove disastrous for Agnes Finnie and thousands like her. The minister of Greyfriars Kirk might thunder in his pulpit about the demonic paganism of Halloween, but the few residents of the Potterrow listening in the pews would probably just nod their heads and then go home to bob for apples to divine the future and tell ghost stories by the fire. It was a clash of beliefs that could not be easily resolved. Protestant and Catholic ministers alike railed against the superstition and magical beliefs of their parishioners. Especially when those same parishioners hesitated to fully believe the Holy Sacraments. Richard Greenham, the great English puritan, wrote in the late 1600s, ‘there are many who hearing in the Word of the wonderful creation, redemption, and preservation of man, and of the matter of the Sacraments, cannot believe them, yet afterwards go to witches.’6

But if witches were not pagans believing in the old gods, who didn’t exist, and were women and so not supposed to wield power on their own, the only place the superstition and magic could come from was the Devil. The Calvinist Kirk knew they were God’s Elect and as such would be attacked by Auld Nick. This meant, however, that not only did they fear witches but that they actively sought them out. What minister worth his salt would not be attacked by the Devil? The more holy one was, the more likely to be attacked. The more one was attacked, the more it proved one was holy. With this circular logic, the Scottish Kirk developed an almost delusional mindset about the Devil. The Kirk firmly believed that witches were the Devil’s handmaidens; that these women had renounced their faith and had made a pact with the Devil. This was not, however, what the people thought. The separation of good and evil into two supernatural entities had never made sense to them. As human beings were flawed, with both good and bad in their characters, so too the magical world was inhabited by creatures that were changeable and unpredictable. The world of magic was more complex than the binary division of good and evil preached from the pulpit, and was more believable because of that. Navigating that world might involve wearing an amulet to protect from illness or casting a charm to ask for a successful childbirth. It certainly made more sense than the cold concept of personal salvation and was the done thing in this period. It was as natural as breathing or walking. To have their congregations wear their Christianity so lightly horrified the Kirk and further ‘proved’ the diabolical nature of witches through the ease with which they could undermine the faith of the people. What tripped up many ‘witches’ in the early interrogations was the lack of understanding of the concept of a good god and an evil devil. Practices that had been innocently pursued were given a diabolical basis to the complete bewilderment of many of the accused. They would confess that, yes, they had left an offering to the man with the black hat or, yes, they had looked in water to find stolen property. The confessions were true because these were common practices. The problem for the women was that what was a normal procedure for them, and had probably been practised in their families for generations, had become an act of evil to the Kirk.

As in all faiths and beliefs, what constituted witchcraft and a belief in the supernatural varied between individuals. Although everyone in Scotland was Christian and they were repeatedly told that Calvinism was the purest form of Christianity, how did an individual navigate the everyday when the Kirk minster was either unapproachable or less than understanding? Those who believed in the old ways of magic would attend the Kirk on a Sunday, but still seek out the likes of Agnes when their child fell ill. The Kirk was one thing, but an accommodation with the little people was the only way to survive. Many accused witches confessed to making a pact with the Devil. For some, this confession was made in order to stop whatever interrogation and possible torture was happening. In most cases, it was drawn from them by repeated questioning by the minster who held the fervent belief in the diabolic element of witchcraft and framed their questioning accordingly. For many, however, a contract with the Devil was perfectly reasonable. Their ‘Devil’ however, was not the evil antithesis of Christ, but Auld Nick. He was the man in the black hat who could offer help in punishing your enemies. He was part of the spirit world, one of the supernatural creatures with whom an individual could easily bargain. The Devil held a special almost, it could be argued, friendly place in the lives of most ordinary Scots. He was Auld Harry, Auld Clootie, Auld Sandy and even Auld Horny. He lived across the country in places like the Devil’s brig, the Devil’s dyke, the Devil’s beef tub, the Devil’s elbow, the Devil’s lum and even the Devil’s arse. With such long standing and easy familiarity, the new Kirk’s obsessive focus on his malevolence was confusing. For most accused witches it was not necessarily even Auld Nick with whom they had communed. It could equally have been a charm said to the little people to help find lost property, or to one of the now-disgraced medieval Catholic saints. Prayers and offerings said to the Virgin Mary for a healthy baby were the same prayers and offerings that had probably been said for years.

Witches were special because they had not lost their links to the world of magic and so could tap into its power. If your child was ill, the witch could help; if your neighbour had wronged you, the witch could summon a punishment. These were ordinary everyday matters, but mundane though they might be, they could also encompass life and death. They were the ordinary and mundane matters that the minister in his pulpit often could not or would not help in overcoming. The minister was remote, alien and male – and in most cases unbending in his Calvinist faith. He did not live in the dirt and the poverty of the Potterrow Port, but in his ‘big hoose’ the manse. He did not understand the scramble for necessities that went on in the back tenements, but sat drinking good claret with members of the Privy Council in furnished rooms in the city chambers. He was a man; how could he know of the pains of childbirth or the misery of a miscarriage? The cold theology of predestination gave scant comfort to those already cast out by its reasoning. If the Christian God had already decided who was saved and who was damned, then what was the point of prayer? At least you could bargain with the supernatural beings of the magic world. Given this reality, it is little wonder that even those who did attend the Kirk of a Sunday still turned to the local witch to help them get through the working week.

For those who did visit the local witch, there was ample proof of her magical power. Most who helped with illnesses did so using herbs with a great deal of efficacy. White willow bark is a very effective pain killer. The active ingredient, salicylic acid, is found in modern aspirin. Foxglove, containing digitalis, could be used to calm a racing pulse. Camomile tea can soothe the nerves. In addition to the potions the witch might give you, she might also use some comforting words. A prayer, a supplication, a rhyme or a spell: whatever the name, it reinforced belief in the witch’s power and in the potency of the potion. A similar phenomenon has been demonstrated in the modern placebo effect. Research has shown that some individuals can experience a measurable improvement in a medical condition when given an inert substance for treatment while being told it is an active drug. The authority of the doctor and the understanding that the treatment has been tested and authorised outweighs the lack of active drug in the substance. The improvement is caused by the person’s expectations about the treatment.7

Similarly, if that witch had the reputation and power to help you and cure your illness, then she would equally have the reputation and power to harm you if she so wished. Stress is known to be a contributory factor in several medical conditions including strokes.8 Those with an underlying condition such as high blood pressure, may, if faced with an extremely stressful situation, have a stroke. If the local witch is known to be powerful and an individual angered that witch such that she cursed them to their face, it is possible they could be ‘seized with a palsie’. Trial records show multiple cases of ‘witches’ accused of causing palsies, loss of power in one side of the body or loss of speech.

This, then, was the world of Agnes Finnie. A world where life could be, and frequently was, precarious. A world where the authority of ministers and doctors was as alien as the world of the spirits was familiar. And a world that was increasingly under stress from the high politics of the court of the King in London.

3

Halting Hame

ON 27 MARCH 1625, James I of England and VI of Scotland died and his son Charles ascended to the throne. A very different man from his father, Charles’ reign would cause political turmoil across Great Britain and strain the relationship between King and subjects. It would also heighten fears about witches and witchcraft across the country but most notably in his northern Kingdom.

His reign was barely two months old when Charles married Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic. It was a marriage that upset everyone. Charles had been raised in the Protestant faith, the Thirty Years War, fought over political and religious differences, was raging in Europe and the form of Protestant faith across Britain was still not settled. In the eyes of many, ‘popery’ remained a very real danger, thus for Charles to marry a Catholic princess was considered a threat to the country and an insult to the new faith. The Kirk in Scotland was outraged: as far as they were concerned the old enemy, popery, was now sitting on the royal throne. Even before his father’s death, Charles’ relationship with the Scottish Kirk had been extremely fraught. Raised in the hierarchy of the English royal court, Charles had no time for the presbyterian denomination north of the Borders. He had been brought up to become the defender of the faith: the Anglican faith. The predominance of the Calvinist faith in Scotland was problematic for both King and Scots. Charles could not understand why his northern Kingdom had not accepted Anglicanism and the fact that he was not head of the Scottish Kirk offended his sense of royal dignity. Moreover, Charles had been able to reconcile the Catholic faith of his wife with his own Anglicanism and he could not understand why the Kirk could not accept this. The Kirk was equally puzzled as to why Charles could not see the problem of his Anglicanism and the danger of having a Catholic wife. Unfortunately, Charles was advised by and sought support from William Laud, who would later become Archbishop of Canterbury. As an advisor to the King, Laud had little to no understanding of the Scots and even less inclination to learn. Neither Charles nor Laud understood the manner the Reformation had taken in Scotland. They failed to grasp the intricacies of Scottish life and how the battle between Catholic and Protestant had been fought on top of the existing and longstanding division between Highland and Lowland Scotland.

The unease felt in Scotland upon the King’s marriage was further intensified when, shortly thereafter, he passed the Act of Revocation. This Act gave all church or royal property that had been alienated since 1540 back by the crown. This greatly alarmed the Scottish nobility, many of whom had received lands previously held by Catholic religious houses, and it was seen as a wholesale attack upon property rights. The Kirk supported the nobility in their protests: partly because members of the Kirk had themselves received land, partly because they were supported, in turn, by the nobility and partly because this early example of heavy-handed royal authority rang alarm bells with those who knew of Charles’ antipathy towards Presbyterianism. Charles, who had little knowledge of the culture of Scotland, further antagonised both Kirk and nobility by sending a Roman Catholic adviser, Lord Nithsdale, to enforce the measure. The leaders of the Kirk and the Scottish nobility closed ranks and Nithsdale had to spend several weeks coaxing, cajoling and horse-trading before a compromise of sorts was agreed by both sides. Even Lennox and Hamilton, Charles’ two most loyal Scottish courtiers, only agreed to transfer the lands their fathers had received from the church for a price. It was an inauspicious beginning to Charles’ reign. The Scottish Kirk, mindful of its status as ‘God’s Elect’, eyed their new monarch with barely-disguised suspicion. Was Auld Nick starting to rise? And the Kirk had, in their own eyes, more reasons to be wary.

In 1623, the harvest had failed across most of Lowland Scotland. There was famine across the Lothians and the Borders, and food shortages in Edinburgh. The Divines of the Kirk sitting in St Giles saw the harvest failure as a sign from God that all was not well with the world. The Town Council were more mindful of the Edinburgh mob and how easily they could rise up when riled. For the most part, the poor of the city would stay in their neighbourhoods and not bother the ‘good’ citizens, such as merchants, but when food supplies ran low, they could become unpredictable and violent.

The events of 1623 were compounded the following year with an outbreak of plague in the Lothians and the Borders. Plague could mean one of several diseases – cholera, typhoid or even the bubonic plague – but in a time before antibiotics the name was largely irrelevant to most people. All were equally lethal in the 17th century and, whatever the actual disease, panic gripped the city. Travellers and traders from the south were barred from the city and the city ports locked. The Town Council looked to the city baillies to keep order. The Kirk looked to their bibles for answers: many found them in the book of Revelations. Having faced famine, pestilence before the King’s marriage and now a wedding to a Catholic, it was no wonder that the Kirk started to feel itself under threat from the Devil himself. And if Auld Nick was abroad then he would be calling his handmaidens, witches, to help him attack good Christians everywhere.

The King married his Catholic wife in 1625 and by 1626 witches were seen across Scotland. In March, Jonett Budge of Caithness was ‘long suspected of witchcraft’.9 Patrik Landrok, Helene Darumpill, Jonnet Pedie and Helene Dryburgh were arrested and imprisoned in the Dysert Tolbooth in April, having confessed to being witches.10 Up in Scone, Bessie Wright was arrested in May suspected of curing sick folk by witchcraft.11 In June, in West Wemys, Jonnet Demspart confessed ‘the renunceing of hir baptisme, ressaveing of the devillis mark, and giving of hir soule and bodie over to the devillis service’.12 By September, Auld Nick was back in Fife and Annas Munk and Elspet Nielson were tried for ‘the crymes of witchcraft, sorcerie, and using of charmes and otheris divilishe practices’.13 The year finished with a trial in Aberdeenshire when, on 14 December, Johnne Davie; Agnes Cairil; Issobell Leslie; Cummer Mutton; Johnne Propter; William Young; Agnes Forbes and her sister; Agnes Durie; Johnne Findlaw; Gowane Andersoun; Marioun Quhite; Elspet Herald; Margaret Turnour; Margaret Cleroch; Jonnet Robbie; Annabell Cattenhead; Helene,