The site of the Old Tolbooth is marked by a heart-shaped mosaic in the pavement outside St Giles’ Cathedral. The Old Tolbooth, demolished in 1817, had been known as the ‘Heart of Midlothian’ (Midlothian was the old county in which Edinburgh was located). The phrase was popularised by Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and was later adopted by the Edinburgh football team Heart of Midlothian F.C.
The Old Tolbooth was an important municipal building for more than four hundred years. It was the location for imprisonments, interrogations, and trials of many suspected witches. The building, located at the northwest corner of St Giles’ Cathedral, was first built in the 14th century. It served a variety of purposes such as housing the Burgh Council, the Parliament of Scotland and the Court of Session. The Tolbooth was also the burgh’s main jail where, in addition to incarceration, physical punishment and torture was conducted in interrogations of accused witches.
The ‘Mackenzie Mausoleum’ in Greyfriars Kirkyard is the tomb of Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (c.1636-1691), a lawyer who was influential in discouraging the prosecution of witches in the 1670s. Early in his career, Mackenzie served as a justice depute (junior judge) during the witchcraft panic of 1661-62. He presided over numerous trials and issued numerous death sentences, but the experience caused him to have doubts over the evidence that had been presented. In a speech published in 1672 he wrote of witchcraft trials: ‘poor Innocents die in multitudes by an unworthy Martyredom, and Burning comes in fashion’. Mackenzie’s book The Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal (1678) included a chapter on the crime of witchcraft that warned against indiscriminate prosecutions and demanded higher standards of evidence for conviction. As Lord Advocate, the crown’s chief law officer (1677-86, 1688-89), Mackenzie generally discouraged the prosecution of witches. He was a zealous prosecutor of presbyterian dissidents (a memorial to these presbyterians may be seen on the other side of Greyfriars Kirkyard), seeing them as threatening enemies of the state – but, to him, witches were not such a threat.
As well as his legal writings, Mackenzie also wrote on politics and philosophy, and published the first Scottish novel, Aretina. In 1682 he initiated the Advocates’ Library, which later became the National Library of Scotland; his name is commemorated in a window on the staircase of the Library in George IV Bridge.
Janet Boyman (d. 1572), lived in the Cowgate, and was married to William Steel. She had a visionary relationship with various spirits including the ‘good neighbours’ (fairies), and the fairy-like ‘seely wights’ (a phrase meaning ‘magical beings’). She performed rituals to summon spirits at an ‘elritch’ (spooky) well on Arthur’s Seat. It was there that she first learned her ‘craft’, when Maggie Denholm in Potterrow healed her of an illness. Boyman used her visionary powers in healing ‘supernatural’ illnesses, fortune-telling and finding lost and stolen goods; at her trial she was said to have practised for twenty-four years.
She became involved in 1568 in a political conspiracy by Sir William Stewart of Luthrie and Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston, providing prophecies to the conspirators who hoped to free the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots. Boyman predicted that Mary would escape and would regain her throne and marry Stewart, but that Stewart would ultimately be overcome by his enemies. The conspirators also employed a Norwegian witch, who contradicted Boyman’s prophecies. On the conspiracy’s exposure in 1569 she fled to Irvine but was captured and executed for witchcraft in 1572.
Sources:
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, January 2003.
Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, Jane Rendall and Siân Reynolds (eds.), New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 50.
Major Thomas Weir, and his sister Jean Weir, were both executed in 1670 for crimes including incest with each other. Jean was also accused of witchcraft; this charge was later dropped, but she told an elaborate story of witchcraft and fairies. The two Weirs lived in a house on the Upper Bow. This was accessed through a tenement building at the top of West Bow, an area located around present day Victoria Street and Victoria Terrace. The building was later demolished, but its approximate location is thought to equate in modern terms to the inner courtyard of Riddle’s Court – near where you are standing now.
Thomas was a retired soldier with a reputation for extreme piety, and Jean was a retired schoolteacher. Thomas fell ill in 1670, and from his sick bed began to confess to a secret life of crime and vice, including not only having coerced his sister into incest, but also bestiality. Jean confessed to having experienced visions of the Devil and fairies.
Sources:
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, January 2003.
The Witches’ Well is a monument to accused witches burned at the stake in Edinburgh. It is attached to a wall at the lower end of the Castle Esplanade. The bronze sculpture around the drinking fountain was commissioned by Sir Patrick Geddes in 1894, and designed by renowned Victorian artist, John Duncan. The waterspout, now dry, is located beneath the snake’s head. In the top left and bottom right are the Roman numerals for the years 1479 and 1727 respectively, the dates of the earliest and latest known executions of Scottish witches.
The plaque above the fountain was mounted on the wall in 1912 and has been criticised for being historically inaccurate, as it assumes that the executed witches had ‘exceptional knowledge’ which they used for ill or good. The idea that some accused witches really ‘used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes’ is regarded today as historically incorrect. The courts that convicted the witches thought that they had either harmed their neighbours by wicked magic, or made a pact with the Devil, or both. These accusations are not credible today, though they seemed credible at the time. A minority of the accused witches had used what they saw as good magic, for healing or divination. This in itself was not considered to be witchcraft, but it could be misinterpreted as evidence of harmful magic. To modern viewers, the image of the snake might conjure associations with the Devil (as the serpent in the Garden of Eden). Accused witches though, were victims of demonology, falsely accused of serving the devil, so having a serpent on a memorial to them, however it was originally intended, is unfortunate.
The open ground between Edinburgh Castle and the built-up area was Edinburgh’s main execution site. It is now called the Esplanade but was then known as ‘Castle Hill’. Castle Hill was the most prominent execution site for accused witches in Scotland. Most Scottish witches were executed in their own localities, but about one-tenth of them were sent for trial in the capital, Edinburgh. If they were convicted, they were then usually executed on this site. They were tied to a stake at the top of a pyre and strangled to death; then their dead body was burned. Following the execution, ashes of the pyre and the accused would be raked into the ground as the remains could not be buried. Ashes that were probably from these burnings were uncovered between 1816 and 1820, during the construction work for the present Esplanade.
King James VI of Scotland (reigned 1567-1625) was born in Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566. James was an important figure in Scottish witchcraft, particularly during the infamous North Berwick witch trials between 1590 and 1592.
The Scottish parliament had passed an act against witchcraft in 1563, but the North Berwick witch trials were the first occasion on which a persecution of a group of alleged witches resulted in a large number of executions. The panic began when a local witch-hunt in East Lothian became linked to royal misfortunes. The fleet of ships that was carrying James’s bride Princess Anna of Denmark to Scotland ran into storms in 1589 and had to turn back. James himself crossed the North Sea to fetch her and also encountered treacherous sea conditions. In Anna’s native Denmark this was blamed on witches, and in Scotland the local witch-hunting in East Lothian came to be imagined as part of an international witch conspiracy. Several dozen witches were executed, including healer Agnes Sampson, maidservant Geillis Duncan, schoolmaster John Fian, and magician and necromancer Richie Graham. The alleged ringleader of the conspiracy, Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle in 1591 but managed to escape.
These sensational trials placed witch-hunting firmly on the agenda in Scotland. The idea of witches conspiring with the Devil was adopted in many Scottish localities, and there were further panics from time to time over the next century. James himself was inspired to write a treatise about witchcraft, Daemonologie, published in 1597.
Sources & Additional Resources:
Brian P. Levack, ‘Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion (London: Routledge, 2008), 34-54.
Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland : James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).
