Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Witch Hunts of Scotland

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

In 1603, James VI & I became the first king of Scotland and England. But this isn’t the only reason he was remarkable. Because he also had a big, no HUGE, fear of witches.He literally wrote a book on it in 1597. Daemonologie, which just scratched the surface of Scotland’s relationship with so-called witches.Today, Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Allyson Shaw to find out more about the witch trials of Scotland.You can find out more about Allyson's book here.WARNING: There is adult content and explicit words in this episode.Senior producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Siobhan DaleBetwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello there, my lovely betwixters. It's Kate Lister, jumping in with your fair do's warning. Fair do's. We are talking about adult themes in an adulty way. We're covering witches, which is inevitably going to mean torture and general horrendous treatment.

And swearing, obviously. But this is your fair do's warning, so if that is not your cup of witches brew, then please sit this one out. For everyone else, buckle up. Let's do it. Fearful abundance at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters.

In 1603, James the 6th and 1st became the first king of the United Kingdom of Scotland and England. Well done James. But that isn't the only reason why this king was remarkable. Because Jimmy had... How do I have even put this? A bit of a thing about witches. A bit of a fear, a witch phobia, I think that we could say this. A great big raging fear of witchcraft.

He actually wrote a book on it. Demonology, published in 1597. And you thought Prince Harry Spear was a scandalous royal book? You haven't heard anything yet. Well, actually, you did. You've just heard a line from the beginning of that book at the top of this episode. But this Scottish King's witchy book is just scratching the surface of Scotland's relationship with so-called witches. And today, we are betwixt the sheets to find out more about the witch trials of Scotland.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society. With me, Kate Lister. When you think of witch trials, what are you thinking of?

You're thinking of Salem? You'd be forgiven if you were. Maybe you're thinking of the English witch trials with the Witch Finder General. But during the 16th and 17th century, there were trials all across Europe. And between 3 and 4,000 of the... happened in Scotland. Today I am joined by Alison Shaw to hear more about these trials and how she came to be so interested in them.

Brimsticks at the Ready Kids, let's do this. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Alison Shaw. How are you? I'm brilliant. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. It's fabulous that you're here because this is a subject that I am so fascinated about,

endlessly fascinated about, the Scottish Witch Trials. Yeah. What brought you? you to this subject? Well, it's interesting. When I moved to Scotland six years ago, I knew very little about this history, but I would find these strange kind of markers that were in the land, like stones where an execution site might have been, or just a stone that was called a Carlin stone or a witch stone, and it's almost like they were finding me. So I would go on walks and I would just like, oh, here's another one. Here's another. And I thought, I really need to research these in the

archaeological record. And then I realized these were women whose lives were marked by these places. So I really got deep into reading not only the archaeological record, but their confessions and the places where those intersected. And it was really a crash course in this history that got darker and darker the farther I went into. it. What is it about the Scottish witch trials in particular? You're geographically there and it must have a very immediate feel for you, especially, you know, you said you've seen these markers everywhere. What is it about the Scottish witch trials in particular that's caught your attention? You know, they went on longer than witch trials in England or even continental Europe, which

in a lot of ways, the Scottish witch trials were more similar to ones in continental Europe. But they were really dovetailing with the misogyny of the Reformation. So King James I first and sixth and his tome on witchcraft demonology really points that women are the weaker sex. They're more susceptible to the devil's seductions. The idea of John Knox's treaties of the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women, which was a diatribe against women in power, but really trickled down to any sort of woman speaking out, being vocal. And the fact that these men in power thought the devil was recruiting and using sex, it was a sex crime and imagine sex crime.

To have sex with the devil was renouncing your baptism. So that was part of the interrogations if someone was accused. this was something men were asking about. It was evidence gathered against a woman of total fantasy. Total fantasy. I think one of the things I find particularly fascinating about the Scottish witch trials is that it was the king who wrote a book on witchcraft. People now are really shocked by Prince Harry writing Spare.

Right? Oh, my gosh. Like, imagine if Harry had published a book about how women should be executed for being witches. It wasn't just lone cranks doing this, was it, pointing the finger. The king was doing this. It was royal protocol. Wow. And the fact that this is kind of normalized is really disturbing that the king could say such over-the-top things. And that's just considered, well, that was normal for the time.

But actually, in my research, you realized it was not. There were lots of people who bravely were like, this makes no sense. This was actually in the 18th century, but a woman in Torrey Byrne, when her minister was like bullying women for being witches and had been executing women, she just took up her stool and was like, you're a fool. And so there are little mentions, especially later on, people questioning whether there were maybe natural reasons for the failure of crops or the death of a cow, things that were normally exploited. for a witchcraft trial, disagreements between neighbors that could be solved in any other way. Without executing people. That's right. We're exploited for this larger project of kind of siops.

It's fascinating that you said that there was people speaking out against this because that's not the popular conception of witchcraft. We have this idea of everyone grabbing, you know, pitchforks and there's a proper, quote, quote, witch hunt. So it's interesting that even at the time there were people going, slow down a minute, guys. Yeah. Maybe this isn't the devil. Maybe your cow's just sick. Right.

And I mean, these are little glimmers, tiny shards that I picked out of the record. So it isn't by no means a majority, but they were like glimmers of hope for me. Brave, right? So brave. Like in Moray, there were men who were supposed to sit in judgment and they were like, you know what?

We're just, we're not going to do that. And I mean, it was a kind of. cowardly backing away, you know, where it wasn't like a protest. It was just like, you know, this looks really bad for us. But still, you know, little evidence, which I kind of thread out in the book, that this wasn't a consensus reality in the way that's assumed today. Let's start at the beginning because the idea of witches have been around dimensioned in the Bible, for God's say, a long time. But something happened around the early modern period. And this is when medievalists get right. It was not as we didn't do it because people.

Right. Because people always say, oh, medieval, they were burning witches, and then the medievalists get very upset. It's like, no, we did not do that. It's early modern. It's the Renaissance. Something happens round about this period that suddenly this very old concept of a witch takes on legal precedents and there's a real fury.

And there's loads of debate amongst historians about, well, basically what the fuck was going on. Tell me about King James and what. made him so interested in witches, what happened? Well, he was very influenced by what went down in Norway and Copenhagen. And when he went to meet his bride, they had trouble getting back. And because of Brexit, I know. Brexit sounds a lot like Hexit, doesn't it? God, God, yes.

I digress. We're not too far away from that. No, it's not Brexit. It's witches. It's witchcraft. It must be. Brexit's fine. that I think there were very bad storms, which of course were blamed on women who were being accused of witchcraft, a vast conspiracy of Scandinavian, which is working with women in North Berwick.

Wow. So this wild fantasy of a conspiracy against the king himself and his new bride. Now, these were stories invented by higher-ups in Norway who were telling stories and say, yeah, this is how we do it here. So he took these ideas back with him. And the North Barrett trials are often seen as the kind of beginning, but there were trials before that. It's just that the North Barrett trial was almost like a performance, a theater. A theatrical event with the king there. I mean, that's going to up the ante, isn't it, when the king gets involved?

That's right. And, you know, Gellis Stonkin was one of the accused. She was asked to kind of perform her witchiness for him, even though she may have had broken songs. Jesus. She was asked to play her pipes, or perhaps the record's unclear. It might have been mouth music,

which is a kind of really interesting Scottish music of making sound, almost like a beatboxing, like back in the day, right? So it's whether she was making mouth music or playing her pipes. The king demanded this of her. So this theatrical trial set a precedence that really rippled out. So people who wanted to curry favor with the king, who wanted to look good in his eyes, were like, we got to find a witch. We got to look like good Christians.

It's like it's the worst royal influencing of all times. that one, isn't it? It really is. It really is. I mean, people think, oh, he was a poet. We have this beautiful translation of the Bible.

But really, this lasting legacy of mass femicide can't really be painted over. No. Gillis was very young, wasn't she? She was a servant girl

in someone's house, wasn't she? That's right. Seton was his name. And he, again, wanted to find a witch. She liked to go for evening walks. Well,

I've heard enough. is really... I know. It's an outrage, you know. My God. And, you know, she had a talent for healing, which especially modern neo-pagan, people like to think that it was healers who were attacked. But it really was, oh, small minority, the most interesting confessions have those details in them, like, oh, use a bit of herbs and wine. She was a healer. And David Seton used this image information. The way, if you're accused of witchcraft, maybe in the court session or in the church courts, you would be held indefinitely as you were questioned with sleep deprivation or maybe other tortures like being shaved and print for the mark, the devil's mark. So

you'd be held indefinitely as evidence was gathered, which was words these women would say. And so he held her in his home. I've always wondered if he had sexual motivations for what he was doing, because there's a lot of description about how he takes all of her clothes off and searches a body for this mark and that mark, and what she's being accused of is very sexual as well. And you do see, even in the trial of Isabel Gowdy, Forbes, the nobleman had sex scandal, unpayable debts, and a witch obsession, right? You do see a bit of a Weinsteinian thread in terms of the interrogation.

The fact that for 200 years, women are talking about what the devil's penis was like and what his semen was like inside them, this is leading the witness, right? Where the loaded question is being asked of them by men empowered. It's really surreal that this has been normalized or even the shame has been like brought on to the women themselves. Sometimes newspapers at Halloween will dust off a story about an accused. woman and it's like, you know, she had sex with the devil. So these fantasies persist and are pressured up for our enjoyment. Yeah, but I mean, we still enjoy this kind of lurid sensationalism today. And thankfully, it doesn't normally involve somebody being tortured and executed, but sex and scandal and, you know, all this stuff still sells. So take me back to sort of

Scotland, early 17th century, so like your 1600s, King James is wandering around with this which paranoia and people are suddenly starting to point fingers. What kind of person is likely to be accused? Well, I think originally when I started doing this research, I kind of thought, oh, it was like a woman in a cottage who was a healer and a soothsayer, someone who could interpret dreams. Well, I had to kind of set that fantasy aside, that myth. Really, if you were a woman, you were at risk. Wow. So the confessions are full of women who are like brewing beer, having babies, they like to go out walking at night. There were some healers.

There were some midwives. But really, 85% of the accused were women. Many were vulnerable, but that wasn't the rule of thumb, right? Vulnerable in terms of being older, a widow, maybe being a vagabond, being an incomer is sometimes still the word used where you're not from the village where you end up. so people don't know your people. Often people like that would be accused. Sometimes it was someone who had accrued a bad reputation, more quotes, over many decades, right?

That's me out then. Right? I mean, they would have a stool where someone would sit to be shamed in the church. They just didn't mess around, did they? Like the actual naughty step. Jesus. Full on. So it was perhaps something.

who over years had been reprimanded by the church many times. So I had accrued a reputation that made them quite vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. I think that's the thing, isn't it? It's vulnerability. I suppose you can see parallels with the modern legal system, not that we accuse people are witchcrafts, but if you've got money and power, it's much easier to negotiate that. Whereas if you don't have any money, you can't afford a lawyer, you can't afford to defend yourself, you can't afford any of this stuff, and now you're super vulnerable because of it.

That's right. We'll be back after this short break. There was really fascinating moments of women who did defend themselves and were able to apply for mercy from the Privy Council or a department in the central government that would normally give permission for a trial, and they were able to afford an advocate who said, if this person's being tortured, they might die in custody, you have to do something. You have to fine her captors and demand her release. I mean, this is a very small percentage of women who were able to do this, but some were.

And the language they used to defend themselves was quite eloquent, you know. And it's exciting to see that some were able to actually. And in doing so, sometimes freed other women. with them as perhaps not intentionally. But, you know, the Privy Council is like, you're messing it up. Just get rid of all of them and start over. You can kind of see how it's like this legal Venus fly trap is once the accusation is made, because what you're dealing with is basically invisible made up crimes that there's no evidence

for how in the hell do you defend yourself against that? Like, you can't defend yourself against that because it's just, It's made up. Yes. It's a total nightmare scenario if you imagine yourself as the victim, because there is absolutely no way out once you've been accused. And the confession is being extracted from you under torture. Let's talk about the torture.

Because if my memory serves correctly, in England, torture was illegal, although there were witch finders who managed to get around that conveniently. In Scotland, was that the case? or can you use torture to extract a confession? You had to have permission from the Privy Council. You had to petition for it. Now, this is a gray area, right? Of whether permission was obtained,

often torture wasn't actually documented unless somebody was arguing on behalf of the accused, like, she's going to die or I'm going to die, you have to stop. So if that didn't happen, often the torture was not documented. But you have women like when they're actually being tried saying, why were you in league with the devil? And she was like, look at my back.

Meaning look at I've been beaten. The only reason why I'm saying this is have a look. So you have this, again, very small minority of women saying, I didn't say this. Yeah. I was made to say this. Many women kind of extracted their confession later, but it was then again, like what you're saying, this Venus flytrap, her accusers were like, the devil's making her say that. The devil's making her retract her confession.

So it became very difficult to actually articulate your innocence. What kind of tortures we're talking about here? So let's say that I am a woman walking around the streets at night with a terrible reputation in, I don't know, Banachshare or something. in the 1600s, and someone said she's a witch. Like, what kind of tortures are we talking here to get that confession? Well, there was this thing called waking the witch, which is sleep deprivation. So there would be men hired from the village to watch the witch to keep her awake. Sometimes we see this scolds bridle, which is a metal cage for the head that had a barb that went inside the mouth.

This could be just for, if you're having a heat, exchange and the marketplace, right? Talking about things exchanging political ideas, you might be forced to wear this anyway. But it was also a way, if you were chained wearing this, you couldn't slump down. You couldn't sleep because it would pierce you. And you can see these things online, can you? If anyone's listening and thinks, a skulls bridle, give it a Google and just see this contraption. It is really, really disturbing what went into this technology of suffering. But also, often this is not described as torture, but being shaved and pricked for the mark. So a woman would be completely shaved in order to find a mole or a freckle. Why are they looking for that? It was seen as

a supernumerary nipple, something that was used to actually feed the devil. That's like whether devil suckled? Is that what we did right? Right. And the devil actually created this site. Okay. So it's a mark. It's not an actual nipple. I mean, this could be anything, right? This, this could be a mole. This could be a wot. This could be a scar. This could be a skin tag. If you're not like alabaster from your head to your ass, you are in trouble. Everyone's got one. Yeah. Somewhere. So you would be shaved completely and searched naked for the mark. And in my eyes, these were women who were very modest. If they were married, their hair was covered all the time.

They bathe every once in a while, you know, parts of themselves, not naked all at once. So this was, especially in Protestant Reformation, Scotland, this was... This is torture. Incredibly psychological torture. Sexual assault as well, right? That's right. And the pins... Oh, yeah, what are they doing with the pins?

The brass pins would be put into the... suspected mark, right? Prickers who, this was their profession, and they were paid almost like mole catchers for how many witches they could find, paid per witch. Professional witch prickers. Right? So some would put the pin in and ask the person to find the pin.

And because they were kind of maybe disassociating or numb, sometimes they couldn't find the pin. Or they didn't seem to suffer pain, and this was seen as guilt. Wow. Right. Science. Right.

If it was numb enough that they couldn't find it or they didn't seem to suffer, this was evidence of guilt that was, again, gathered and then taken to the Privy Council. So then they would be tried. So this wasn't even a trial. This was just the gathering of evidence. This just sounds horrendous. And sleep deprivation is still used as a torch tactic. Today, I think that that would crack most people pretty quick.

Gilly Duncan's, she was subjected to some. screws as well, wasn't she? Was that coming? Well, it's hard to say because it wasn't recorded. The only reason we know about Gellie is because of news from Scotland, a very sensational pamphlet, which it turns out when you match like Agnes Samson's is also mentioned in that pamphlet, another accused woman. When you match what's the pamphlet said versus her trial record, it's very different. So the minister of the parish where Agnes Sampson would go to church wrote that pamphlet. And he claimed that her devil's mark was on her privities, her genitals.

But the truth of the matter is it was on her knee. So here we see again the intense, sexualized nature of this male fantasy imposed on the accused. and that this is kind of ignored and normalized even now is deeply troubling. It's highly sexual. And as a sex historian, I am guilty of seeing sex like everywhere. When I look at these trial records, it's like they're being accused of like fornicating with the devil, of drinking the devil's semen, of kissing the devil's ass, of having orgies in the woods.

I mean, in Scotland for fucks. Really, that should have been enough evidence for people to go. That's not happening. then make them say, what was the devil's penis like? What was it? And it's always cold for some reason, well, he's in Scotland.

But it's so sexualized. What's your take on that? What is that? Why is that happening? I mean, probably there's a lot of repression. I mean, my personal theory is that during the Reformation, you see a complete burial and destruction of any ideas of the Virgin Mary or female saints,

or even femininity in the landscape, like sacred wells that maybe were devoted to Bridget or female entities, all of that just within a breath disappears, right? And so people have no vision of sacred womanhood or divinity that's in a female form. And the rampant male desire then suddenly becomes very like wicked and satanic. that what moves into the vacuum is Satan and a satanic woman. And her force, right, is if she is no longer sacred, she's satanic. Right. It is a great mystery and that is a fantastic question because the intensely sexual, wildly,

polymorphously perverse lines of questioning are a mystery to me. and the fact that we neutered them for Halloween for children. I think is a very strange development of this history as well, that it negates at its heart, men who were so troubled by women that they had to actually see Satan as their love interest. In Iceland, it was 90% men who were accused. I've always found that fascinating. But when you look at that through those records, they're not intensely focused on sex.

It's like weird stuff like men are being accused of cursing each other with fart rooms, which is, I love that. It's just, I shouldn't laugh because they were executed. But that's the kind of stuff. Whereas in Scotland and in England, it's much more you suck the devil's dick. It's so bizarre. But let's talk about one of the cases that you do write about in your book. Tell me about Isabel Gowdy.

Well, Isabel Gowdy is absolutely irresistible. I mean, she is the witch-class. Queen of Scotland, even though she wasn't actually a witch. I mean, she was accused in Aldern and Woree in 1662 and interrogated. We have no record of her execution or her ultimate fate, but her confessions are the longest and the most protracted. She was interrogated four times and left an outstanding document that was transcribed in the first person, which is unusual. So the notar writing down her words described them in the first person, which is unusual, but gives them a kind of agency.

So she comes across to me as a kind of force to be reckoned with. She's going out with a swan song. She's speaking truth to power. Now, this is my interpretation of her troubling confessions, that she's, She's almost satirizing the men who sit in judgment of her. Now, she was a storyteller. So she had a way of weaving ballads into her confessions, rhyming couplets, iambic pentameter.

That's clever. I wouldn't be able to do that in a police confession. Well, that's right. Under immense pressure, she was tortured. She was held in solitary confinement, perhaps in the steeple of the Alderman Church. So by the time you get to the fourth confession, you see things unraveling, almost like, do you know those Louis Wayne cats as he becomes more unraveled? They become abstract.

Her confessions begin to seem like that, like, okay, I'm going to tell you again, I'm going to tell you again. And while it's tragic, there are moments where she's like writing on straws in the air and saying, oh, begging the devil, like, give me another chance. I think I can hit Harry Forbes this time with this elf shot, you know, and turning into her hair chant is famous, right? Hair, hair, God send me care. I'm in hair's likeness even now. And now I'm in a woman's likeness. Oh, she was in like the rabbit type animal. That's right.

Yeah. And so she transformed into a jackdaw. Not in front of people, though, because that would, like, they'd actually caught a witch. That would have been quite impressive. Even I would have to concede that, yeah, she can do that. Might be. You know, but when she was asked about the devil's member, she said it was as cold as well water inside me.

And these details, yeah, full on that the devil demanded she say, yes, my lord, and how do you do my lord? She's almost satirizing the hated Lord of Park, who she just hated this man who she paid rent to, who had power over her. You know, she would sneak into people's houses who had more ill than her, drink it, and then top it up with her piss.

And she's bragging about this. And it becomes so punk rock to me. It's almost like, like she went, if you want a story, me motherfuckers, I'm going to give you a story. That's right. The people who had the power of life or death over her, she refused to be meek.

And she told wild stories. She's often painted as insane. But I think there's such a clever kind of irony in what she's saying, almost waiting for people in our era to read it and understand. Right? Read it with a feminist perspective, which is something that couldn't have even been imagined back then. Wow.

And I think that is, while the confessions are so troubling, they waited for us in this age. To look at them again. To be understood. I guess one of the downside, well, there are many downsides about Isabel's confession, but a lot of other people got implicated in them, didn't they? I guess I can understand that if you are locked in a dungeon deprived of all your rights, you tortured, you brutalized, that you might just go, well, fuck it then. If you want this story, I'm going to give it to you, I'm going to give it to you,

like full pornographic, everything in everywhere. one's involved, but other people were arrested because of what she said. Quite often that was the case where what they wanted were details about the trist with the devil, specific details, personal, and then they wanted names. And in Isabel's case, the people who were considered part of her coven were arrested alongside her, and their confessions are very similar even though they weren't held together. So that suggests that the questioning went on with the same questions of leading the witness. And Isabel's are more elaborate, but they're very similar to the other women being held.

And this is how a witch hunt turned into a panic is that women and men would name others under duress and terror. And sometimes, like this wasn't the case with Isabel, but other people, People like Gellis Duncan said, everyone I named is innocent. Wow. Tried to rescind that. And it didn't do any good. Helen Guthrie and Forfar named quite a few people. And often she's painted as this villain like, oh, she was responsible for the deaths of all these people.

But the missing part of the story is her daughter was also in prison with her. So the pressure she must have felt to save her daughter. Maybe those names were offered up. I'll give you some names if you spare my daughter. I mean, this isn't written down. This is my guess. So the motivations women had to betray their neighbors and other people. I think most of us would crack, right?

It's easy when you're not being tortured for months on end. But under those conditions, eventually, I think everybody would crack. Maybe, you know, like, I think there's a couple of cases of when people didn't give them what they wanted. But by and large, I mean, you just have to show me the pincers and I would be like, it was my neighbor. Absolutely. She's the one. Like a whole list of people. Especially if it feuds went back many years, you know?

I mean. Right. I might have got a bit clever and just, you know, tried to say it was the accusers. We've been like you, I saw you. And just to see what would have happened there. That's what. I mean, Lillis Addy was a woman who was accused. Tori Byrne just a few years before,

which hunting was made illegal. But she said, when they asked her initially, she said, you know, there were many people there, but they were marrying masks. So I couldn't see their faces. And then they asked her again, and she said, okay, you've killed them all already. Oh, that's smart. Okay.

We were dancing when we were younger, and you executed them the first time you were doing this. So she tried very hard with each round of questionings to not name anyone on. alive. In the end, I think she did name someone. She very cleverly evaded this for multiple rounds of torture and questioning. Some of these women were so brave in the way they resisted and so clever. And it's buried in this history. It's buried in the confessions that are really hard to read. They're very troubling. So, but you do see glimmers of resistance and profound choices of

integrity. So I mean, the other thing that's particularly interesting about the Scottish witch trials, interesting and horrifying, is that it's generally inaccurate to say that we burnt witches alive because in almost everywhere they did not. That's right. They hung them except Scotland. Scotland, they would strangle them. So it was worried W-I-R-E-T. So they would strangle them at the pyre and then burn them. So women were not burnt alive. They were strangled first. Now, there were occasions where it didn't work out. The strangling didn't. So sometimes, and this is grim, you have gentlemen witnesses there for their little pint of beer, which they would serve people to watch the, you know, watching. And then they're like, whoa, she's not dead yet. You can't burn her. Right. watching this horrific scene of a woman who is actually being burnt alive. And that was not the intention they were supposed to have been strangled first. There still was this moment of the pyre, which is in fiction often seen as this moment where a woman's yelling out her curses or whatever, sometimes even in the folklore around this history.

But that really wasn't the case. They were strangled at the pyre. so you didn't have someone screaming out or anything. I mean, it's an ultimate, pathetic and a horrific way to die. Do we know how many people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland? Well, around the numbers are not hard and fast because the documents are either destroyed or sometimes they didn't even write down people's names.

Probably around 4,000 were accused. Two-thirds of those were executed. So the math is roughly around 3,000. It's a lot. I mean, often people think, oh, Salem, Massachusetts, you know, must have been horrible. There were only 20. So by comparison here, it really dwarfs the statistics of Salem, which has a much higher profile because of probably Arthur Miller play and witch tourism there.

Yeah. But it's really shocking to think about that number. I mean, this isn't a very fair question because historians are still trying to debate this. But like, what happened to bring these things to an end? Because thousands and thousands of people being executed, like it was a real panic and hysteria, which is everyone just wake up one day and gone, actually, I think we might have got this one wrong. Like, what was the shift that suddenly people went, let's not execute people and women for walking out at night anymore? Right. I mean, in 1735, the laws changed so that which

hunting was now illegal and you couldn't actually pretend to be someone who had special powers. So a lot of historians think that perhaps more scientific and rational notions were being attributed to phenomenon like sleep paralysis, which is where you're thinking someone's on top of you and you're half awake and you're paralyzed. But also, you know, in the later trials, It seems like people just don't have the stomach for it anymore. I mean, it's a lot of people got killed. I'm not surprised that they just ran out. I mean, to witness that repeatedly, my God.

Yeah. And it became harder to actually get permission from the Privy Council. So you see fewer and fewer trials. And what actually ends up happening is more extrajudicial trials, more lynchings or violence that's happening against women who are suspected of witchcraft by local men who are just taking, you know, loan justice, you know, taking the law to their own hands, that starts to happen instead of more legal trials. It's interesting that into the 18th century, though, there's evidence of still debate going on,

like the church should have never stopped doing this. Some people are still really devoted to the idea of stamping out witchcraft in their midst and longing for these days. So there was still an active debate going on into the 18th century about this. Do you think it could be money as well? That's a very bleak view. I know that, you know, scientific advancement, things changed, attitudes changed. But also these trials must have been expensive.

Yes. How many people did you say were accused? How many thousands of people? 4,000. 4,000. You've got to hold them in jail. You've got to interrogate them. You've got to have the judicial process.

You've got to hire the lawyers, the judge. And if you're going to torch them or execute them, that all costs money. It's a lot of money to do it. That's right. The truckloads of peat, you know, wagon loads of peat and men to build the fire. And sometimes the only evidence for a woman's death is the cost it took to kill her, right? Oh my God, that's brutal.

But yeah, I think you're right. Like, it cost money even to petition the government, the central government for a trial. So it was very costly for local governments to pursue this. I think you're right. that it was part of the reason for it dying out. Alison, you have just been amazing to talk to. Thank you so much for talking to me about this today. It's such a fascinating subject.

And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Thank you so much for having me. I have a website, Alison Shaw.com. I have a book that just came out this January called Ashes and Stones, a Scottish journey in search of witches and witness. that's out by Scepter in the UK, anywhere you can buy a book. In the US, it's coming out in October this year. So in North America, you'll be able to buy it there in the fall. And are you on social

media at all or are you smarter that? I am. I'm North Sea underscore which on Instagram and North Sea Witch on Twitter. Thank you so much for joining me today. You've been an absolute treat. Thank you so much. It's been a thrill to talk to you. you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Alison for joining me. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again, The Twix the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.