In the summer of 1597, a woman known to history only as Margaret Aitken made an extraordinary bargain. Arrested in Fife and tortured until she confessed to witchcraft, she offered the authorities a tantalizing proposition: spare her life, and she would identify witches throughout Scotland. For four months, the “Great Witch of Balwearie” traveled the country, pointing out alleged servants of Satan. Before her credibility collapsed—she eventually identified the same people as both witches and innocents—she had helped condemn dozens to death. Her story encapsulates the terrifying logic of Scotland’s witch hunts: once set in motion, they became self-perpetuating machines of destruction, fueled by fear, coerced confession, and the peculiar certainties of religious reform.
The sixteenth century witnessed Scotland transform from a Catholic kingdom into a Protestant nation, and this spiritual revolution carried a terrible cost. Between the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1563 and its eventual repeal in 1736, an estimated four to six thousand Scots faced trial for witchcraft—a prosecution rate four times the European average and three times that of neighboring England, despite Scotland having only a quarter of England’s population. More than fifteen hundred people were executed, most strangled and then burned, though the psychological torture of interrogation and the physical agony of “pricking” for devil’s marks meant that even those who escaped the flames bore permanent scars.
To understand how an entire nation could embrace such sustained persecution, we must first grasp the cultural upheaval that preceded it. When the Scottish Parliament formally adopted Protestantism in 1560, it did far more than change official doctrine. It inaugurated what historian Christina Larner termed a “godly state,” wherein ecclesiastical and secular powers intertwined to regulate not just public worship but private morality, social behavior, and ultimately, spiritual allegiance. The reformed Kirk, heavily influenced by Calvinist theology and Presbyterian structure, operated on the conviction that Scotland had entered a covenant with God—a sacred contract that required the nation to maintain spiritual purity or face divine punishment.
This theological framework made witchcraft more than a crime; it became a form of treason against both Crown and Creator. The Witchcraft Act of 1563, passed just three years after the Reformation settlement, reflected this new worldview. Surprisingly brief and lacking precise definitions, the Act nevertheless declared that “na maner of persoun” should “use ony maner of witchcraftis, sorsarie or necromancie,” making such practices—and even consultation with practitioners—capital offenses. What constituted these crimes remained deliberately vague, allowing communities to project their anxieties onto anyone who seemed to possess what Scots called “smeddum”: spirit, mettle, resourcefulness, or quarrelsomeness. These qualities, particularly in women, challenged patriarchal ideals and marked individuals as potentially dangerous.
The cultural transformation wasn’t merely religious. The mid-sixteenth century brought economic distress, crop failures, and plague to Scotland. In such times, frightened populations seek explanations for their suffering and scapegoats to bear their rage. The reformed Kirk provided both: suffering resulted from God’s displeasure with hidden evil in the community, and witches represented that evil made manifest. Many accusations followed the withdrawal of charity from marginal figures—elderly women, single mothers, beggars—suggesting that witch-hunting sometimes functioned as a brutal form of social cleansing, eliminating those deemed burdensome to struggling communities.
Yet for the first three decades after 1563, witch prosecutions remained relatively sporadic. A handful of cases appeared in the late 1560s, including an unsuccessful hunt in Angus and the Mearns where authorities attempted to prove a “diabolic pact” but failed to sustain momentum. The Earl of Argyll executed people for “common sorcery” in 1574, but these remained isolated incidents. Scotland had passed legislation against witchcraft, but the machinery of mass persecution had not yet engaged.
Everything changed in 1590, and the catalyst was royal. When King James VI sailed to Denmark to collect his bride, Anne of Denmark, his fleet encountered violent storms. The Danish admiral attributed the tempest to witchcraft—specifically to witches angry at him for insulting someone. James, recently educated by Danish Lutheran theologian Neils Hemmingsen on the dangers of demonic magic, found this explanation compelling, particularly since his own vessel seemed especially battered. The King returned to Scotland convinced that witches had attempted to murder him, and he possessed both the authority and obsession to act on that conviction.
The resulting North Berwick witch trials of 1590-91 marked a watershed moment in Scottish history. Over seventy people in East Lothian faced accusations, beginning with a servant named Geillis Duncan. Her employer, David Seton, tortured her into confessing and naming accomplices, including Agnes Sampson, a midwife and healer, and John Fian, a schoolmaster. Under interrogation—with James himself participating—Sampson allegedly confessed that two hundred witches had sailed in sieves to North Berwick church on Halloween 1590, where they met with Satan and plotted the King’s destruction through storm-raising.
The North Berwick trials introduced elements that would define later prosecutions: the diabolic pact (an explicit agreement with Satan), the witches’ sabbath (gatherings for devil worship), and maleficium directed not at neighbors but at the state itself. James became obsessed, writing his treatise “Daemonologie” in 1597, which provided intellectual justification for witch-hunting and influenced not only Scottish prosecutions but also English witch-finders and possibly even Shakespeare’s depiction of the weird sisters in Macbeth. In “Daemonologie,” James argued that women’s supposed intellectual inferiority and moral weakness made them particularly susceptible to Satan’s seductions—a misogynistic premise that would doom thousands.
The Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597, occurring from March to October, represented the full flowering of this persecution. Unlike the North Berwick trials, which centered on alleged attacks against the monarch, the 1597 hunt swept through communities nationwide. At least four hundred people faced trial; approximately two hundred were executed. The hunt’s scale reflected both the influence of James’s “Daemonologie,” published the previous year, and the decentralized nature of Scottish justice. The King issued royal commissions authorizing local authorities to investigate and prosecute witchcraft, transforming witch-hunting from a centralized royal concern into a community-wide preoccupation.
The 1597 trials revealed how witch-hunting could become a self-sustaining phenomenon. Once suspicion fell on an individual, torture—including sleep deprivation, thumbscrews, and the particularly Scottish practice of “pricking”—almost inevitably produced confessions. So-called witch-prickers, who could be professional or amateur, would pierce suspects’ bodies with needles, searching for the “devil’s mark”: an area allegedly insensitive to pain, supposedly left when Satan sealed his pact with the witch. Since any birthmark, mole, scar, or even an area numbed by trauma could serve as “evidence,” pricking virtually guaranteed the discovery of diabolical signs.
Even more insidious, confessions typically included naming “accomplices”—others who attended the sabbath or participated in maleficium. This created cascading accusations: one witch implicated dozens, who under torture implicated dozens more. The case of the Wischert family in Aberdeen illustrates this brutal logic. Johnnet Wischert faced accusations spanning decades, charged with shapeshifting and various misfortunes befalling her neighbors. Her son, Thomas Leyis, was accused of leading a witches’ sabbath at Aberdeen’s Mercat Cross. Both were burned. Her husband and three daughters faced charges merely for “associating with known witches”—their own family members—and were banished from Aberdeen.
The geographical pattern of prosecutions reveals the relationship between witch-hunting and state power. The overwhelming majority of accusations and trials occurred in the Lowlands, particularly in areas like Fife and Lothian, close to centers of governmental and ecclesiastical authority. The Highlands, despite—or perhaps because of—stronger persistence of folk magical beliefs, saw relatively few prosecutions. This suggests that witch-hunting flourished where the reformed Kirk exercised greatest control, where the “godly state” most fully penetrated daily life.
The church’s role in sixteenth-century witch-hunting cannot be overstated. Kirk sessions—parish disciplinary committees run by local elites—became the front-line investigators. While technically not criminal courts, kirk sessions could arrest and interrogate suspects, gather evidence, and refer cases to secular authorities for prosecution. They wielded this power enthusiastically, often targeting “superstitious” practices and Catholic remnants alongside alleged witchcraft. In this context, witch-hunting served multiple purposes: it demonstrated godly zeal, reinforced Protestant orthodoxy, attacked Catholic survivals, and regulated social behavior, particularly of women.
Indeed, seventy-five percent of those accused were women, and the gendered nature of witch-hunting reflects deep anxieties about female autonomy and power. Midwives, healers, and women who practiced folk medicine—roles that gave them authority and knowledge—frequently faced accusations. So did quarrelsome women, those who refused to perform expected deference, and women who lived independently without male protection. The witch-hunt functioned as a tool for enforcing patriarchal control during a period of significant social upheaval.
Yet we must resist the temptation to view accused witches as helpless victims without agency. Many of those charged had reputations as cunning folk—people believed to possess knowledge of charms, cures, and future events. In a world without modern medicine or reliable institutions, such individuals provided valuable services: healing sick children, finding lost objects, protecting against misfortune. Their neighbors consulted them regularly, at least until something went wrong—a child died despite the healer’s ministrations, a charm failed to work, a client felt cheated or frightened. Then the cunning person’s reputation could reverse catastrophically, transforming protector into threat, healer into poisoner.
The case of Janet Boyman, executed in 1572, exemplifies this ambiguity. Charged with sorcery, witchcraft, and consorting with fairies, Boyman allegedly predicted the death of Scotland’s regent, bore five children without experiencing pain, and appealed to elvish spirits to cure a sick man. To modern eyes, she appears to have been a traditional healer drawing on Scottish fairy belief—a cosmology wherein fairies occupied a parallel realm and could be petitioned for assistance. To Protestant authorities, however, such beliefs were intolerable. The reformed Kirk rejected the entire apparatus of Catholic sacramentalism—holy water, relics, priestly blessings—as “vain superstition.” It equally rejected indigenous folk beliefs about fairies, charms, and cunning craft. Boyman’s trial became one of the earliest comprehensive examples of Scottish witchcraft prosecution, establishing precedents that later trials would follow.
The intensity of witch-hunting waxed and waned throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with major waves occurring in 1590-91, 1597, 1628-31, 1649-50, and 1661-62. These peaks often coincided with periods of political instability, religious conflict, or economic crisis—moments when collective anxiety sought outlets and explanations. The 1628-31 hunt, for instance, probably spread to Scotland from Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, suggesting that witch-panic could be contagious, transmitted across borders along with news of foreign persecutions.
Local courts, run by laypeople rather than professional lawyers, delivered execution rates around ninety percent—far higher than the circuit courts’ sixteen percent or the Judiciary Court’s fifty-five percent. This disparity reveals how witch-hunting intensified when controlled by community members personally invested in outcomes, rather than by distant legal professionals. In villages where everyone knew everyone else, where grudges festered and suspicions multiplied, the machinery of accusation could accelerate with terrible efficiency. Neighbors testified against neighbors, servants against employers, even children against parents. The social fabric tore under the strain of suspicion.
By the time the seventeenth century progressed, however, skepticism began to grow. King James himself, despite his earlier zeal, apparently became more cautious about witch prosecutions, eventually taking steps to limit them. The Privy Council of Scotland began restricting arrests, prosecutions, and torture, particularly after the Restoration in 1660 brought renewed witch-hunting that caused alarm even among authorities. The discrediting of Margaret Aitken in 1597—when she identified the same people as witches and innocents depending on when she saw them—had demonstrated the unreliability of expert testimony. As Enlightenment rationalism gradually displaced earlier certainties, the evidentiary standards that had sustained convictions began to crumble.
Methods once considered infallible—pricking for devil’s marks, extracting confessions through torture—came under scrutiny. If torture produced unreliable testimony, if devil’s marks could be natural blemishes, if “evidence” rested on the unverifiable testimony of confessed witches implicating others, what actually proved witchcraft? Without such proof, prosecutions became increasingly difficult to sustain. The last recorded executions occurred in 1706; the last trial took place in 1727, when Janet Horne was convicted in Dornoch for allegedly transforming her daughter into a pony and riding her. Both were condemned, though the daughter escaped. Horne became the last person executed for witchcraft in the British Isles.
In 1736, when the unified British Parliament finally repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1563, it marked the formal end of an era. Yet the cultural legacy endured. For nearly two centuries, Scottish communities had lived under a system that encouraged suspicion, rewarded accusation, and empowered the state to invade the most intimate aspects of life. Thousands had died, strangled and burned, for crimes that existed primarily in the terrified imaginations of their accusers. Thousands more had suffered torture, imprisonment, banishment, and social destruction.
In 2022, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology for the historic persecution of accused witches, describing it as “injustice on a colossal scale.” The Church of Scotland similarly acknowledged the terrible harm inflicted on those—mostly women—who faced accusations. These contemporary recognitions matter, not merely as symbolic gestures but as acknowledgments of how religious certainty combined with state power can generate systematic persecution. The witch-hunts weren’t aberrations or medieval superstitions stubbornly persisting into modernity. They were products of early modern state-building, religious reformation, and social transformation—processes we typically celebrate as progressive.
The sixteenth-century Scottish witch hunts reveal uncomfortable truths about how societies construct deviance and eliminate those labeled as threats. They demonstrate how moral panics can become institutionalized, how torture makes truth irrelevant, and how quickly neighbors can turn against each other when authority sanctions suspicion. They show us that some of humanity’s greatest cruelties emerge not from chaos but from order—from legal systems, religious convictions, and communal certainties.
Margaret Aitken’s four-month journey through Scotland, pointing out witches until her credibility collapsed, stands as a parable for the entire phenomenon. She was both victim and perpetrator, caught in a system that demanded witch-finding and punished failure to provide it. Her story, like those of Geillis Duncan, Agnes Sampson, Janet Boyman, and thousands of others, deserves remembering not as a curiosity from a superstitious past but as a warning about what we remain capable of when fear overcomes compassion and certainty eclipses doubt. The flames that consumed Scotland’s accused witches were lit by human hands, justified by human laws, and cheered by human crowds. We forget that history at our peril.
