The High Street

 History of Witchcraft  Comments Off on The High Street
Oct 102024
 

329 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1SG

Euphemia MacCalzean (pronounced ‘Macall-yon’) owned property on Edinburgh’s High Street and was a victim of the so-called North Berwick witchcraft panic of 1590–92. She inherited wealth from her father, Thomas MacCalzean of Cliftonhall, and from her father-in-law, John Moscrop, both leading Edinburgh lawyers. But Moscrop had two children – not only Patrick Moscrop, married to Euphemia MacCalzean, but also Katherine Moscrop, married to David Seton, bailie of Tranent – and Katherine’s inheritance was much smaller than Patrick’s. David Seton probably resented this. And it was David Seton who initiated the entire witchcraft panic in 1590 by interrogating and torturing his maidservant Geillis Duncan. Duncan in her confession named various names of fellow-witches – including Euphemia MacCalzean. Presumably it was Seton who suggested this name to her.

Color painting of the Royal Mile; St. Giles Cathedral seemingly the subject of the painting.

Edinburgh High Street
©J.M.W. Turner,
Wikimedia Commons

MacCalzean was found guilty, and executed on 25 June 1591 at Castlehill, now the Esplanade. The king granted her estate of Cliftonhall to his favourite Sir James Sandilands of Slamannan, while her house on the High Street was granted to John Shaw, an officer in the royal stables. However, MacCalzean’s execution seems to have been unpopular, and the prosecutions stalled. When the original suspect, Geillis Duncan, was eventually led out to execution on 4 December 1591, she made a public declaration that her confession against Euphemia MacCalzean and other witches had been false. MacCalzean’s husband was among those who witnessed this declaration.

Black and white sketch with women being beaten with a stick as two powerful men look on.

Woodcut depicting accused witches kneeling before King James
©Wikimedia Commons

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The Tron Kirk

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Oct 102024
 

Craigour Gardens, Edinburgh EH17 7NX

The Tron Kirk is a former parish church in the High Street, built in the 1630s. One of its ministers was William Colville (c.1612–1675) who served at the church between 1641 and 1648. He was also a scholar, and he went on to serve as Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1662 to 1675. In 1643, he was one of the investigators who interrogated the accused Edinburgh witches Janet Barker and Margaret Lauder. Both were named as witches by a previous confessing witch, Janet Cranston, who was Barker’s next-door neighbour. Their confessions, probably obtained under torture, included stereotyped tales of renouncing their baptism and having sex with the Devil. These ideas came more from educated demonology than from popular belief, indicating the role of educated ministers like William Colville. Lauder later tried to retract her confession, but the court convicted her anyway. Both Barker and Lauder were tried in the Old Tolbooth and sentenced to be strangled and burned at Castlehill on 29 December 1643.

Photograph of a church taken at dusk with some illumination from nearby buildings visible.

The Tron Kirk from
Hunter Square
©N. Chadwick,
Wikimedia Commons

The Tron Kirk was closed as a church in 1952. In recent years the building has been used as a tourist information centre and as a craft market. The name comes from the weighing beam (‘tron’ in Scots), serving the public market.

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The Mercat Cross

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Oct 102024
 

High St, Edinburgh EH1 1RF

The Mercat Cross (market cross) was the symbolic centre of urban government. A few witch-related executions took place here. Richie Graham, the magician and necromancer whose confessions in the North Berwick trials incriminated the Earl of Bothwell, was executed by burning here on 29 February 1592. Then, in 1613, three out of the four siblings from the aristocratic Erskine of Dun family accused of witchcraft were beheaded here. Anna, Helen, Isobel and Robert Erskine were convicted of obtaining poison from an alleged witch in order to kill their nephews and gain the Dun inheritance. The witch who allegedly provided the poison, Janet Irvine, was never caught. Helen Erskine was banished, while Anna, Isobel and Robert were beheaded at the Mercat Cross.

The present structure is a nineteenth-century replacement for the earlier one.

Black and white sketch of old Edinburgh buildings and busy plaza.

The site of the Mercat Cross in 1791
©S. Hooper (1791),
Wikimedia Commons

Sources:

  • Julian Goodare (eds.), Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
  • Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, January 2003.

John Knox’s Grave

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Oct 102024
 

Parliament Square, Edinburgh EH1 1RQ

Protestant reformer John Knox died on 24 November 1572 and was buried in Parliament Close (now called Parliament Square). Nine years earlier, on 4 June 1563, the Scottish parliament passed the crucial act against witchcraft that made the offence a secular crime. Knox’s relationship with the act was a close one. The witchcraft act itself, and other acts on godly discipline, were drafted and presented to parliament by a committee of the general assembly of the church; Knox was a member of the committee and may well have drafted the witchcraft act himself.

Flat grave marker with the number 23 painted nearby.

The plaque marking the approximate location of John Knox’s grave in a car park in parliament square
©Kim Traynor, Wikimedia Commons

Knox stands at the threshold of the Scottish witch-hunts. He had a clear view of the Devil as the great enemy of humankind, and was bitterly hostile to the Catholic church, but human witches were less important enemies to him. The text of the 1563 witchcraft act was confusing; it seemed to imply that witches were public practitioners with clients and gave no clear definition of witchcraft that the criminal courts could use. However, the act did state clearly that witchcraft was a crime punishable by death, and it was duly cited as the legal basis for thousands of executions over the next century and a half.

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The Heart of Midlothian

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Oct 102024
 

197 High St, Edinburgh EH1 1RE

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.

Bricks in a heart-shaped arrangement on the ground; inside the heard there is a circle and cross emblem.

The Heart of Midlothian
©Kim Traynor, Wikimedia Commons

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The Old Tolbooth

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Oct 102024
 

Edinburgh EH1 1RF

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.

Black and white sketch of old Edinburgh buildings.

The Old Tolbooth can be seen here next to St. Giles Cathedral
©Wikimedia Commons

The Old Tolbooth was demolished in 1817. Its ground-plan is indicated on the street today by brass markers among the cobblestones.

Sources:

  • Julian Goodare (eds.), Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
  • Wikipedia: Old Tolbooth – Edinburgh

Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Mackenzie Mausoleum

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Oct 102024
 

26A Candlemaker Row, Edinburgh EH1 2QQ

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.

Round, stone structure with a dome roof, grey doors, and plants growing off the roof.

George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s mausoleum in Greyfriars Kirkyard
©Kim Traynor,
Wikimedia Commons

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.

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Cowgate

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Oct 102024
 

Cowgate, Edinburgh EH1 1RP

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.

Black and white photo of an archway over a road; buildings on the left side.

Cowgate Arch of George Iv Bridge, built in the 1820’s. Prior to the bridge Cowagte was simply a dip between the royal mile and old town
©National Galleries of Scotland Commons, Wikimedia Commons

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.
  • Wikipedia: Janet Boyman
  • Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, Jane Rendall and Siân Reynolds (eds.), New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 50.

Upper Bow

 History of Witchcraft  Comments Off on Upper Bow
Oct 102024
 

1 Upper Bow, Edinburgh EH1 2JN

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.

Black and white sketch of an uphill road with tall buildings lining the narrow street; horse and cart in the foreground.

‘Major Weir’s House’ in the West Bow, illustration from Walter Scott’s ‘Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft’, 1830
©James Skene,
Wikimedia Commons

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.
  • Wikpedia: Jane Weir
  • Wikipedia: Thomas Weir
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The Witches’ Well

 History of Witchcraft  Comments Off on The Witches’ Well
Oct 102024
 

Castle Hill, Edinburgh EH1 2ND

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.  

Metal installation on a stone wall with an engraved plaque above; pink flowers in a trough.
The Witches’ Well at the foot of the Castle Esplanade
©Kim Traynor,
Wikimedia Commons

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.

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