The Survival of Witchcraft Prosecutions and Witch Belief in South-West Scotland

Abstract

During the era of the Scottish witch-hunts, Dumfries and Galloway was one of the last regions to initiate witch prosecutions, but it was also one of the most reluctant to completely surrender all belief in witches until a comparatively late date. In the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries southwest Scotland, better known for the persecution of covenanters, took the practice of witchcraft and charming very seriously indeed, and for perhaps longer than other parts of Scotland, though the area has received surprisingly little scholarly investigation. The trial evidence is not incompatible with that found elsewhere though there is less demonic content. Accusations of witchcraft in this region were mostly concerned with the troubles of everyday life, agricultural problems, family tensions and disagreements between neighbours. From 1670 to about 1740, the very decades that were giving birth to the Scottish Enlightenment, learned interest in the supernatural was actually on the increase and the topic received an unprecedented level of questioning, investigation, and scrutiny. Ironically, the 'superstitions' that both church and state had been attempting to eradicate for some two hundred years were now being used to defend religion against the growing threat of atheism. The zeal of the ministers does seem to have contributed to the endurance of witch beliefs in the South West, as elsewhere. Against this backdrop, the survival of witch belief and the continued prosecution of witches in southwest Scotland is examined, thus contributing to our understanding of the individualistic nature of witch persecution and the various dynamics at play within the Scottish witch-hunting experience.

Review of periodical literature published in 2006

“…Although English law prevailed in Wales after 1542, Parkin suggests that English attitudes to the use of that law did not, to the benefit of most accused witches there. Henderson reveals a less benign situation in south‐west Scotland, where there was a late upsurge in witchcraft prosecution in the final quarter of the seventeenth century. This was linked, in part, to the survival there of a vigorous covenanting Presbyterianism.…”

3. Folk Belief and Scottish Traditional Literatures

“…This is an example of where folk narrative merges with documentation, for one of the crimes with which Elspeth McEwen (1698), a convicted witch from Balmaclellan, Galloway, was charged, was using a wooden pin to steal milk from her neighbours' cows by placing the pin on their udders. 19 Cunningham also discusses fairies and brownies. Unlike the fairies who were notably gregarious, the brownie was a solitary creature, usually male, 'living in the hollows of trees, and recesses of old ruinous castles'.…”