Vulgar History

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is 0.73

00:00:14.980 Anne Foster. I'm a historian and an author and I've been curious about the Tudor era since I

00:00:19.880 was a small child. This season on the podcast, we're talking about the notorious Tudors,

00:00:24.660 who they were, the times they lived in and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same

00:00:28.720 time. Speaking of elsewhere in the world, this week we're talking about Scotland, which during

00:00:34.140 the Tudor era was not, there's not a United Kingdom. Scotland and England were just kind of

00:00:38.740 enemies. And every now and then like a king would marry a princess and they try to be friends,

00:00:43.580 but they were always kind of enemies. So Scotland is its own separate place.

00:00:47.120 And what was happening in Scotland during a lot of this era was a lot of witchcraft trials,

00:00:52.900 a lot of witch hunting. And so to talk about that this week, I have, I'm so excited for the guests

00:00:57.520 So I have today, it is Claire Mitchell Casey and Zoe Vintadozzi from The Witches of Scotland.

00:01:05.840 You might know The Witches of Scotland, or you might be familiar with Zoe and Claire

00:01:08.920 from their advocacy work, from their podcast, Witches of Scotland, and also especially from

00:01:13.320 their book, How to Kill a Witch, which is now just available in paperback.

00:01:18.340 So the book, How to Kill a Witch, subtitle, A Guide for the Patriarchy.

00:01:21.280 And they go through, they explain everything really like so well in this book.

00:01:24.540 this podcast is kind of like a quick quick bullet point of all the work that they've been doing and

00:01:29.380 what they have to explain about witch trials in this era about religion what was happening in

00:01:34.340 scotland anyway it's such a pleasure to speak with them so please enjoy this chat with claire

00:01:38.700 and zoe from witches of scotland so i'm joined today by zoe and claire from witches of scotland

00:01:48.800 welcome hello hi i'm so happy to be talking to you and it was such a funny coincidence i was

00:01:55.500 i just started reading your book and then i got an email from your publicist saying oh it's coming

00:01:59.700 on paperback do you want to have them on your podcast and i looked up from the book i was

00:02:02.880 actively reading and thought well that is we summoned you i summoned you not not to call

00:02:09.660 myself a witch but i am here with a cat who is kind of my familiar and and fate brought you to

00:02:14.760 me I'm so I'm happy that your book's coming on paperback you know that's going to be make it

00:02:19.240 accessible for for people who prefer that sort of format just going to be more widely available

00:02:23.980 we're here because of your book but people who don't know you and your work can you first of

00:02:30.160 all just explain which is of Scotland and who you are and how that all started okay well I can start

00:02:36.280 I'm Claire Mitchell I am to trade a lawyer and I am also from a very young age of goth

00:02:43.740 and so I love all things creepy and gothic and all those sorts of things and when I was working

00:02:49.460 a lawyer in the old town of Edinburgh I was living and working in a building that was from the 16th

00:02:57.200 century I get up and when I'm doing my cases I wear an 18th century horse hair wig and an 18th

00:03:03.640 century silk gown so I'm wearing stuff that men wore you know two or three centuries ago I'm

00:03:10.120 talking about case law and books and precedent that are hundreds of years old and I was also

00:03:15.380 living at that time full time in the old town in Edinburgh so I was steeped in history so it's

00:03:21.180 perhaps unsurprising with all those things going on that I started researching the witchcraft trials

00:03:26.940 and I wanted to know more about it because we're not taught anything about it in school

00:03:33.520 So I started researching and I found out that there was this whole world of history that we didn't know about.

00:03:44.040 And as a result of me seeing that there was no women's history in public spaces, like the statues are all to men and streets are named after men and buildings are named after men.

00:03:55.020 All these thoughts came together one day when I was in Prince's Street Garden, which is our main public space in Edinburgh.

00:04:02.440 And I looked around and I thought, there's not one statue, not one to a named woman.

00:04:08.260 There are statues of men, there are statues of artists, architects, authors, soldiers, generals, but nothing to any named woman.

00:04:19.300 There's a statue of a bear called Bum the Dog.

00:04:22.460 I got up to the top of Princess Street Gardens and I just thought, this is crazy.

00:04:26.900 I'm now up standing beside a life-size statue of a bear called Wojciech and I know everything he did

00:04:32.760 in the second world war I don't know the stories of any woman so all these things came together at

00:04:37.700 the same time and I looked up where Edinburgh Castle is above Wojciech's head and I thought

00:04:42.760 we're not only we're not celebrating brilliant things women do and putting up statues to them

00:04:48.780 and telling their stories we're not also recording when really really horrific things happened to

00:04:54.080 them and it was at that moment the kind of idea of Witches of Scotland was born and then as feet

00:05:01.180 would have it I met Zoe Vendtotsi at a wedding. Yeah we met at a wedding and realised during our

00:05:08.040 initial conversation that we had not only a very similar sense of humour but quite a similar

00:05:12.980 outlook on life you know particularly in terms of feminism and the way that women are treated

00:05:18.220 in society and we talked about what we each did and I'm an English teacher by trade but I also do

00:05:24.860 a lot of interviews with writers you know at festivals and book events that sort of thing

00:05:29.380 and I'd said to Claire that I wanted to start a podcast but I didn't want to do a straightforward

00:05:34.200 book podcast I wanted to do something that was a little bit different to the interviewing that I

00:05:38.240 did on stage but I wasn't really sure what that would be and then I realized that Claire at that

00:05:42.780 point kind of had an idea I know what her face looks like now we're just having an idea that I'm

00:05:46.940 going to be involved with and she said to me oh do you mind if we meet you know I get in touch we

00:05:50.800 meet for a coffee and I said yeah of course that'd be great and we did and at that coffee some weeks

00:05:55.660 later Claire said to me right I've got an idea now bear with me because it's it's not a usual

00:06:02.240 topic of conversation and she told me about her plan to look at the whole background of the

00:06:08.140 Scottish witch trials and specifically to do a podcast to support the campaign that she had in

00:06:13.680 mind. And I signed up thinking our plan initially was to have six podcasts. But I mean, that was

00:06:20.600 85 podcasts ago, and 86 will be out in a couple of weeks. And it's kept us busy for the best part

00:06:28.480 of I think maybe seven years now. I think it was 2019 that we met. Yeah. So that's, that's where

00:06:37.080 we started so and i do want to direct everybody to i mean not only your book but also your book

00:06:44.240 how to kill a witch and then also your podcast witches of scotland and just to get everybody

00:06:48.320 sort of caught up with scottish witch trials so just for context on this podcast like we've just

00:06:55.100 started doing a series talking about the tudor era but not just in england but what's happening

00:07:00.820 during those years and other places this is our first dipping our toes into scotland and what

00:07:05.680 Scotland was up at that time so can you set the scene for actually actually first let's just like

00:07:12.280 shock everybody with how many how many people would you estimate were killed during the Scottish

00:07:17.680 witch trials overall not just in the Tudor era but overall okay well in Scotland between 1563

00:07:25.580 and 1736 that's the period of time when the Witchcraft Act was in force a very very modest

00:07:33.160 approximation, 4,000 people were accused and 2,500 were executed. There were five peaks of execution

00:07:42.340 and the first peak, and I'm doing inverted commas here, bunny ears for anyone who's listening,

00:07:47.340 the first peak got out of control. So our Privy Council, like our cabinet, our inner government

00:07:54.820 said you can't do any more prosecutions now after this first great peak unless you come to us and

00:08:01.320 we grant authority to do so in that first great peak there could have been so many people executed

00:08:07.760 as witches that we don't know about and also even the ones that we do know about say sometimes in

00:08:13.760 records because they're very very poorly kept not like not like Salem sometimes they say things like

00:08:20.000 on this day sundry witches were executed they don't even give them a name so what does sundry

00:08:26.140 mean? Is it one? Is it two? Is it five? Is it ten? So the ones that we actually know the names of

00:08:33.000 or have a date or have something like that, there is approximately 4,000 of those. But the chances

00:08:39.780 are that the amount is much higher. And we know that because one of our good friends researched

00:08:45.620 it, didn't we, Zoe? Yeah. Do you mean Julian Goody or do you mean when Judith was? Because

00:08:52.060 there's two things there so the big big resource that people use for what happened in scotland

00:08:57.340 was the survey of scottish uh which witches which is where the edinburgh university team which

00:09:04.380 comprised of amongst others professor julian goodair who's seen as being sort of the leading

00:09:08.680 the leading light about this in scotland and also christina larner and a team of other people as well

00:09:14.320 use the archives that they could find and have created this tremendous database where you can

00:09:19.640 go on and you can look by area or by name and various other things to try and find people that

00:09:24.980 are there but they've got a caveat where they said you know we're bound by time and money so they

00:09:30.060 recognize themselves they made it quite some years ago that it wasn't completely comprehensive

00:09:34.480 and that there would be other outlying um archives that either hadn't been available or had been

00:09:41.380 lost or had been misplaced or they just weren't able to get to them so i think claire what you're

00:09:46.360 talking about is judith langland scott who's a friend of ours who is an independent historian

00:09:50.980 and she's been researching the area that she is from which is a small town in scotland called

00:09:55.740 farfar and she's been able to identify i think round about another 10 people that aren't on the

00:10:00.760 official records and that's because she went about in a slightly different way she looked at money

00:10:05.560 that was being spent by the by the town to to hold them and then to execute them so she was able to

00:10:12.400 find another 10 so if we kind of extrapolate from that right across all the activities in scotland

00:10:17.080 there's probably quite a lot more there's been some pretty outlandish claims made in the past

00:10:21.500 about there being you know a million but that's definitely not the case so there's there's more

00:10:26.160 probably than the 4 000 but i mean i don't think not a million but in scotland certainly it was it

00:10:32.700 was really shocking numbers and we when we first started doing this project in the campaign i

00:10:37.940 didn't know anything at all about the scottish witch trials even though i've grown up in scotland

00:10:42.940 and i went to school in a town called st andrews which you may have heard of which is steeped in

00:10:48.120 history i mean that's one of the the locations that when people are coming to scotland to look

00:10:52.640 at the history st andrews is the stop-off point john knock spent time in st andrews but we were

00:10:58.640 never taught at school about the scottish witch trials at all so i knew nothing about it and even

00:11:03.620 know I'm an English teacher I've taught Macbeth lots of times but I hadn't put together the fact

00:11:08.440 that I knew Macbeth was written by Shakespeare to curry favour with King James but I didn't really

00:11:13.820 think beyond that so I thought it was just entirely made up it was a fantastical story you know like

00:11:19.000 say any any of his comedies might have been but I didn't realise that there was a kind of a factual

00:11:24.460 basis for this idea about witches in Scotland so it's it's been a really big steep learning curve

00:11:29.880 for me and there was certainly lots of myths that I would have believed when we first started this

00:11:34.400 that I now know are not true. Can I just ask for just comparatively Scotland in this time period

00:11:42.500 at least 4,000 people were executed during the bushcraft trials how would that compare to

00:11:48.140 another country like because part of what your book was talking about is Scotland was

00:11:53.400 doing this a lot more than other places?

00:11:57.300 Well, we can give you an example.

00:11:59.680 One of the examples we quote is England.

00:12:03.160 For the whole time the Witchcraft Act was in force in England,

00:12:06.580 they killed less people than we did in one year,

00:12:11.140 that year being 60-61.

00:12:13.500 So it really is extraordinary because, you know,

00:12:17.440 given the fact it's only down the road from us

00:12:19.640 that it had such a different effect.

00:12:22.300 The other example that we always give is Salem, because, of course, without a shadow of a doubt, they are the most famous witchcraft in the Western world, I imagine.

00:12:31.900 And Salem, 300 people were accused and 19 were executed and one died when they were being tortured.

00:12:39.600 I think that's the right stat.

00:12:43.060 So Scotland, it's so interesting to me, Zoe, that just that you grew up there, like in St. Andrews, in Scotland in general.

00:12:50.080 and this is just not something that you know about so it's clearly not so I can see the

00:12:54.400 importance of this campaign when it's such a major part yeah Scottish history to be fair we

00:13:00.380 weren't taught very much about Scottish history and I think that that part of that is because

00:13:04.760 we're part of the United Kingdom and you know cynics amongst us would would say that there

00:13:12.020 was more focus given to the empire the part of the British empire maybe in the days we were in

00:13:18.020 school rather than um and specific to scotland and often when you got something that was specific

00:13:24.420 to scotland it wasn't really from the point of view often about people's history people's stories

00:13:29.980 certainly not women's stories it was more you know we did the industrial revolution and we

00:13:34.780 looked at the machinery and we looked at you know what improvements were made there wasn't an awful

00:13:39.480 lot about the people that actually worked in the factories or when we did the first world war a lot

00:13:44.140 of time was spent looking at the trenches and how the trench systems worked and that sort of thing

00:13:49.060 and it was more about movement across the map so I I love history but it's very much from

00:13:54.600 the human story side of history and in fact I went through school and took history as electives right

00:14:00.800 until the end of my high school career and still didn't learn much about Scotland and and partly

00:14:06.040 that's because in my final year when we did the deepest historical research I chose to look at

00:14:11.160 the american civil war so i could tell you probably more about that well i could have i can't now i

00:14:16.480 don't retain the information there none of it but i could have told you more at one point about that

00:14:20.980 than i certainly could have told you about my own country's history well and when we're talking

00:14:25.280 about the the scottish witch trials and you first mentioned claire like the about there's not many

00:14:32.560 statues of women and things like that so can you clarify and you talk about this in your book as

00:14:36.880 well. It was mostly women who were executed, but it was some men as well. It was. It was. The

00:14:43.040 numbers in Scotland are also higher than in England. In England, 80% were women. In Scotland,

00:14:49.520 85% were women. And again, that's an approximation because we don't know exactly,

00:14:54.940 but certainly the vast majority of people who were executed in Scotland were women.

00:15:00.320 And the interesting thing about that is that the Witchcraft Act didn't actually gender anybody in relation to witchcraft.

00:15:09.880 It just said that you'd be guilty of witchcraft if you committed an act of witchcraft, committed an act of necromancy, that is speaking to the dead, and committing an act of sorcery, that's obviously, or that is a spell.

00:15:22.840 But it didn't specify that you were a woman or a man.

00:15:26.360 So when we looked at the people that were executed, one of the questions we kept asking

00:15:32.960 ourselves was, why was it that were women that were being accused and not men? And from what we

00:15:38.880 could see, the men that were being accused usually weren't independently being accused. What would

00:15:45.220 happen is a family member who was a woman was being taken in. They would confess, in inverted 0.74

00:15:51.500 commas and then they would be forced to confess who else was a witch and they would name family

00:15:59.000 members and that is occasionally that men sort of got dragged into the story as well but for the

00:16:05.140 most part it was women and it took a long time for us to get to the bottom of why it was women

00:16:12.040 well do tell

00:16:14.420 well two things so that the first thing was that when we um we first started the podcast we were

00:16:22.220 really fortunate because it was during lockdown so it meant that there were lots of um historians

00:16:27.080 that wouldn't have normally spoken to us or certainly not in such a straightforward way

00:16:31.600 they'd been busy teaching and researching and that sort of thing but it meant that because

00:16:35.760 everybody was sitting at home and people got used to using zoom that they agreed to talk to us for

00:16:39.420 an hour and so they could actually i suppose keep talking about their subject and audience

00:16:43.420 and the majority of the people that we spoke to initially not deliberately it's just the way that

00:16:49.280 it kind of it shook out were men and we we kept saying to them if it was 84 85 percent of them

00:16:55.060 that were women like why was it women was it deliberately that they were going after women

00:16:59.660 and the historians kept saying to us oh no it's much more complicated than that it wasn't you

00:17:05.300 know it wasn't uh people sometimes use the word femicide it wasn't that it was that it was just

00:17:10.480 complicated right and not necessarily in a patronizing way but they were just saying there

00:17:14.360 were various drivers and it was only when we spoke to professor marian gibson who's a tremendous

00:17:19.180 really fantastic historian on witch trials particularly in england that we said to her

00:17:25.040 oh is it gendered and she went of course it was gendered like of course it was she actually said

00:17:30.340 it in much more strong terms than that are we sweet are we able to speak on this you you can 0.99

00:17:35.160 you can swear on this podcast okay well what she said was of course it fucking was you know like 0.98

00:17:40.060 you know it's so obvious it's obvious to women it's and it's bizarre to me that a man wouldn't 0.97

00:17:44.900 look at that and go oh that's peculiar what is it but and the answer is really straightforward

00:17:49.300 and really really obvious right so king james he of the king james bible which by the way i only

00:17:56.020 realized while we were working on this that like put that together as well that king james the sixth

00:18:01.720 of scotland and the first of england was the guy that commissioned that bible um interestingly but

00:18:07.920 King James he was somebody like a really interesting person to me so when we first 0.79

00:18:14.360 started doing this I was like oh King James he was he was a swine because he drove the witch trials

00:18:19.560 and I think he's much more he's much more complicated than that you know he'd been kind 0.99

00:18:23.700 of ripped away from his mother's breast he'd been raised by these these dreadful guys we'd now look

00:18:29.060 back and see as fairly dreadful there's evidence that he was at least emotionally abused by his

00:18:34.100 tutor that he spent a lot of time with John Knox was really involved in bringing him up they hated

00:18:39.560 his mother so I'm sure there was lots of really horrible chat about his mum and he was brought up

00:18:44.200 in this very kind of paranoid sort of situation where he genuinely believed as they all did

00:18:50.480 that the king was put there by God he was God's emissary on earth and as such if you believe in

00:18:56.500 God you believe in the devil and that the devil was out to get him because he was God's number

00:19:00.820 one man on earth he'd also been kidnapped as a as a youth and the jameses that had gone before him

00:19:06.860 most of them had died young so you can understand why i was quite paranoid now i as a modern day

00:19:11.860 trauma-informed teacher look at what happened to him and see well i mean he had been really

00:19:16.740 traumatized i mean there's so many things that have happened there that would be horrendous

00:19:20.940 so it's no wonder he was paranoid but the the overwhelming religious view at that point was

00:19:26.720 very much looking backwards about women looking back to Adam and Eve you know and women were

00:19:32.600 lesser than men and James showed that that was his mindset when he wrote and published his best

00:19:38.740 selling for over a hundred years book Demonology. So Demonology was the book that he wrote that was

00:19:45.100 a how-to guide for how to identify and question and you know and put through court and then dispatch

00:19:54.300 those people accused of being witches it's a really interesting book it's three parts i'll

00:19:59.240 not go on too much about it but our book is an homage to his book so his book was a how-to guide

00:20:04.000 and that's why we've got our books called how to kill a witch but he wrote in that book one of the

00:20:09.220 sections says words the effect of i'm paraphrasing but words the effect of who are witches and why

00:20:14.580 are they usually women and he makes the strong case that women are mostly it's mostly women

00:20:19.620 that are witches because women are intellectually inferior spiritually morally inferior they don't 0.96

00:20:26.220 know their bible as well as men do and therefore the devil can sort of glamour them and talk them 1.00

00:20:32.360 into and seduce them into joining his side because women are too stupid to realize what the devil is 0.99

00:20:37.940 doing so i think he himself made a very clear case that it was mostly women now i don't think that's 1.00

00:20:44.060 terribly complicated I think that he signposted to people look out for witches they're likely to

00:20:50.660 be women so of course people found witches and they found women who were witches well and what

00:20:56.220 I really want to to have you both explain to the listeners because just when I've been talking

00:21:02.400 about that I was going to be talking to you for this podcast and explaining telling everybody to

00:21:06.660 read your book because it's so good um and so in popular culture um you have things like the movie

00:21:13.100 Hocus Pocus or more recently like Agatha all along which kind of like shows places like those

00:21:18.440 are both showing Salem and it's like oh well there's actually these characters in these like

00:21:22.420 fantasy properties that were witches that were like you know flying on broomsticks and like

00:21:28.020 casting spells the witch trials were not going after people who were running around being like

00:21:32.860 hey I'm a witch like watch me catch it was so can you explain what sorts of things people did

00:21:37.840 that were seen as suspicious that Gotham arrested?

00:21:40.960 Yeah, so what you have to understand about Scotland at the time,

00:21:44.300 and this is one of my favourite parts of the book,

00:21:47.100 is that magic was real in that epoch.

00:21:50.720 Everybody believed it.

00:21:52.120 From the person begging in the street to the king,

00:21:56.340 everyone knew that magic was real.

00:21:59.240 And one example we often give of that is

00:22:01.460 if you got a magic spell from someone and it didn't work,

00:22:05.360 you could take them to the local court and sue them.

00:22:07.840 so the belief system was already there that magic was real I can buy a piece of magic from someone

00:22:14.140 and I can get that magic to work and if it doesn't work I can get my money back can you imagine magic

00:22:19.820 spells 14 days or you get your money back yeah so so at that time the reformation the church

00:22:28.020 of Scotland as it became had taken over Scotland and the government had taken over Scotland

00:22:34.560 and one of the things it wanted to do was get rid of the ideolatory and the magic that was in the 0.52

00:22:42.560 Catholic Church. So the Catholic Church was as it was the Catholic Church but a lot of the ideas of

00:22:50.180 Catholicism and the stories had become interwoven with magic. So you get stories of saints meeting

00:22:58.920 people from the other world and all sorts of fantastical stories. So they wanted to make sure

00:23:04.840 that witchcraft and this Catholicism that had things to do with the other world was firmly

00:23:13.420 stamped out. So that was really the starting point for making sure that witchcraft wasn't done.

00:23:21.220 So they brought about the Witchcraft Act and they started persecuting people for acts of witchcraft.

00:23:28.540 And as I've said, there were acts of witchcraft, sorcery and necromancy.

00:23:33.880 What is really strange is at the exact same time as they were persecuting people for witchcraft,

00:23:39.720 you could still be a magic practitioner who wasn't using witchcraft and not get into any trouble at all.

00:23:48.380 So it's like there's magic. So are you using it for witchcraft or are you using it just for general everyday magic?

00:23:54.680 Correct.

00:23:55.000 Not witchcraft.

00:23:56.320 even more sort of clear than that which is that that it was that you derived your powers

00:24:02.920 exclusively from the devil and they were they were it was only the only reason you had the

00:24:08.120 power of witchcraft is because you had signed your soul over to the devil so it wasn't that

00:24:12.800 you were doing different types of magic and a bit of bad magic it's that you belong to the devil

00:24:18.120 which is which is something that we explain a lot to people today because sometimes people

00:24:22.920 struggle a bit with the idea of like well why do you want them to get a pardon why should they get

00:24:26.800 an apology there's nothing wrong with them being a witch but it's not the witches that we know and

00:24:31.380 think of today so it's not the modern idea of you know finding the divine in nature or you know

00:24:37.060 thinking about sort of maybe a more female centric you know religion or spiritual practice

00:24:43.020 there was very very explicitly clear that the witches that we're talking about for a pardon

00:24:48.240 an apology were those people who had signed their souls over to the devil and remember this isn't a

00:24:53.580 really overwhelmingly christian society everybody pretty much would have identified as being a

00:25:00.220 christian you know that was there was there wasn't really another option there's the odd case of a

00:25:04.780 person who calls himself a witch but broadly absolutely 99% of the time these were people

00:25:10.580 who had been horrified horrified to be thought was being anything other than christian yeah so

00:25:16.860 you would get christians who were performing magic in scotland they were called um chairmers

00:25:22.140 and that's old scots word for charmers using charms and they might have for example um they

00:25:29.680 might be farmers who'd farmed for many many years and they'd found you know good ways of doing

00:25:35.540 things you know plant your seed early in the morning and do this ritual over it and you'll

00:25:40.020 get good crops now it might have had nothing to do with the ritual it might have been that

00:25:44.180 if you plant seeds early in the morning the birds don't take them and therefore you get better crops

00:25:48.660 you know it it might have been things that were otherwise useful that came down so you might get

00:25:53.200 people who had a history of selling different types of charms and telling people how to do things

00:25:58.220 but then you would have accusations of witchcraft now witchcraft was you got all your powers from

00:26:04.920 the devil exactly as Zoe has said and what's important about it was what you did with those

00:26:09.960 power what you did with those things is that you caused harm to society because you wanted to bring

00:26:17.200 down the godly society that King James was making that the reformation was making and therefore at

00:26:24.080 the same time we had the church and the king saying if bad things are happening in society

00:26:31.100 if your crops are failing if you are if stuff is being spirited away and stolen from you

00:26:38.180 if your child has become ill then think is it in fact witchcraft that's causing this

00:26:46.140 and if it is witchcraft we have to root out the witches and we have to get rid of them so a very

00:26:51.680 long way to answer the question as in what were they what were they doing what they were doing 0.60

00:26:57.900 was nothing they were not possessed with the devil they were not doing his bad work

00:27:02.560 what were they accused of was very, very mundane things. We give an example of perhaps you go to a

00:27:09.880 market and you have a fight with someone because they've shortchanged you for your butter.

00:27:15.580 You have a standing fight with them and you get your butter and you go away muttering in one

00:27:21.020 direction. That's terrible. They've done that to me. They've shortchanged me out of that.

00:27:26.800 And then the butter seller goes home and the butter seller's animal takes sick, their cow takes sick and dies.

00:27:37.480 Society, the church and the state was saying, well, who could be to blame for that?

00:27:43.300 Who would be to blame for your cow dying and thus place you in peril because you didn't have a form of income and you didn't have any welfare to assist you?

00:27:52.000 and you'd think back and you'd think it was that woman that I argued with in the market

00:27:57.100 she was angry at me and she has put a spell on me and that or put a spell on my animal to kill my

00:28:04.580 animal and to to get revenge on me or whatever and that's why it was so people were being accused

00:28:11.360 with a sort of reverse engineering logic for things that were going wrong in society why did

00:28:17.800 someone's house burned down? Well, was it because the house is highly flammable and you have an

00:28:23.480 open fire in it? Or was it because you'd had a fight with your neighbour two days before?

00:28:29.500 So it was these sorts of things that women found themselves being blamed for mostly natural

00:28:36.260 events, for example, very poor weather. There were weather witches allegations. And that's the kind

00:28:42.540 of thing that women found themselves being blamed for. Bad things happen. Look around. Who can 1.00

00:28:47.760 we blame that's the act of witchcraft they've done well and that's where in other countries

00:28:55.000 at that time and probably at other times a similar thing might happen where you're like oh my gosh my

00:28:59.560 cow died and that woman was muttering i bet it was her but the thing in scotland was they had

00:29:03.420 the witchcraft act that empowered that butter salesperson to report them where there wasn't

00:29:10.240 that that's the difference right there wasn't that mechanism in other places where they could

00:29:14.040 yeah it wasn't just as straightforward as you know this is this is a problem that we've got

00:29:18.960 with the devil it was also a very useful social control method you know it made everybody try and

00:29:26.260 behave in the way that the church wanted them to behave so this was at a time when you might have

00:29:31.100 had church maybe up to as much as three times a day on a Sunday and the minister in the in the

00:29:36.680 town or the parish or the village or whatever he really was in everybody's business so everybody

00:29:42.940 followed the rules as laid down by the minister as laid down by the bible then if you were straying

00:29:49.340 out with that then there was a punishment mechanism that was there for you but it was also kind of it

00:29:55.940 could be kind of mundane as well you know the idea that it was done through the courts and

00:30:00.820 there was different rules to follow and there was you know you had to gather evidence now some of

00:30:06.000 that evidence we would immediately say today well what load rubbish you can't use that as evidence

00:30:10.720 in court but at that point they were like these are these are you know reasonable things so a

00:30:16.000 confession was was needed and i think in the modern day i think that's you know something

00:30:20.960 that's that's quite straightforward as evidence but also other things too like one of the things

00:30:25.220 that they did was like proof that you were a witch was if you were what they called a quarrelsome

00:30:29.800 dame so if you were a woman that kind of spoke out a bit too much that could be evidence that

00:30:35.360 you were a witch because you're not following the social rules are you if you do that you should be

00:30:39.020 meek and mild and bowing fast yeah buying bowing down to the male and you know whatever environment 0.97

00:30:45.500 you're in so if you weren't doing that that could be evidence that the devil had turned you

00:30:49.540 and and it's just it's there was also the mark that the devil supposedly left a mark upon your

00:30:54.760 body so called the devil's mark where when you met with him and you agreed that you were going

00:31:00.720 to sign yourself over to him your soul was going to be working for the devil he left a mark upon

00:31:05.420 your body to show you that you were his and to remind you that you were his and that was one of

00:31:10.800 the things that they looked for for quote-unquote evidence so when you got accused and you were

00:31:15.760 brought in they'd shave your head they'd strip you they'd search every inch of your body and

00:31:20.680 they brought in somebody who was an expert witness called a witch pricker and his job and it was

00:31:25.600 it was always a man really was to jab you with a needle in any marks that that were upon your body

00:31:32.200 that looked quote-unquote unnatural and that then would quote-unquote again prove that you had had

00:31:38.020 the mark of the devil left and that you belonged to the devil so that was one of the pieces of

00:31:41.320 evidence i mean like we think about that today and we're sort of like but that's crazy but that

00:31:45.600 was one of the things that they that they thought was actually very unconcerning evidence that was

00:31:50.560 really good black and white evidence i i just want to point out you know i am you're both in

00:31:56.980 Scottish people and I am of primarily Scottish heritage and I think a lot of people with my

00:32:02.720 complexion have a lot of freckles and moles like it wouldn't be hard to find a mark on any given

00:32:09.460 person in that country at that time I've got a port wine stain like it's not a port wine stain

00:32:16.320 but it looks like that in the back of my head so if I have my hair really short you can see it

00:32:21.440 through my daughter has a mark like that and my grandmother had a mark like that and that's the

00:32:26.720 kind of thing that they would think well there's significance in that so if we brought if they

00:32:30.760 brought me in and they found that mark then they might then start looking at my family members you

00:32:35.420 know do you know i mean and it's that kind of thing where it it can it can get bigger it can

00:32:39.500 snowball because one of the things that they did when they brought you in to elicit a confession

00:32:43.620 from you was keep you awake until basically you broke and they didn't view that as torture

00:32:48.800 but we know today of course we've known for quite some time that sleep deprivation is an extremely

00:32:54.360 effective method of torture that it doesn't take very long for many people to break and then they'll

00:32:59.580 say whatever they need to say to make it stop and because there was an idea across Scotland of what

00:33:04.720 a confession should sound like they'll ask leading questions often and that when people eventually

00:33:10.600 confess they seemed quite similar now at the time they probably would have argued that confessions

00:33:15.500 are similar because it's the same thing that's happening to all these people we'd maybe look at

00:33:19.600 it in a slightly different psychological way which is they were asking questions that they

00:33:23.560 had particular answers that they wanted and people across Scotland had in their mind what a confession

00:33:28.240 sounded like so they would they would confess and during the confession they would then prod them

00:33:33.500 for more names so you know I might be brought in and I might be sleep deprived until I started to

00:33:38.720 just make up a confession and then they'd ask me for names so I might name my daughter my neighbor

00:33:44.740 my brother you know and sometimes that's how men got caught up in it is that they were named in

00:33:50.140 confessions as other people and they wouldn't stop until they felt satisfied that they had enough

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00:36:24.420 Welcome to the realms of peril and glory.

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00:38:26.740 so just putting it together and this is again you spell this out so well in your book like

00:38:30.300 people are brought in because maybe you know they're a quarrelsome dame or whatever um then

00:38:35.240 they find a mark on their body and then they're sleep deprived or other methods of torture until

00:38:40.200 they confess okay you got me yeah i'm a witch this this is what i did but confessing doesn't

00:38:45.820 mean like okay well you you pled guilty so you got a lesser punishment no no the punishment for

00:38:52.780 being a witch was death was very clear there wasn't like a kind of a sliding scale it was 0.94

00:38:57.640 that if you were found guilty being a witch you had to be put to death it was because the devil 0.77

00:39:01.880 and the devil said jesus it was because the bible said thou shalt not suffer a witch to live 0.96

00:39:07.460 so it was the christian thing to do if you had found a witch to execute the witch strangely

00:39:15.220 enough it does seem as the witchcraft act got older and older there were more people and we

00:39:23.480 wonder it's pure speculation on our part we're not experts and we make that very clear in the book

00:39:28.620 we talk to experts and we've had the stuff fact checked but we ourselves aren't experts so it's

00:39:34.980 the experts that are telling us but we have maybe a theory that the longer the witchcraft act went

00:39:41.040 on and the later it got we see sometimes that people were banished very occasionally it just

00:39:48.720 says banished or is that the right word Zoe banished and we wonder whether or not people

00:39:56.440 were starting to get a wee bit queasy about the fact that they were executing people perhaps or

00:40:01.200 because we can't really work out why someone would be banished but even if they were banished

00:40:06.680 I think sometimes it would be just if the evidence wasn't quite strong enough but there

00:40:10.640 was enough of a suspicion that they were kind of like this person's not innocent because you know

00:40:14.780 four thousand people were accused and two and a half thousand people were executed so there were

00:40:19.080 people in between that who weren't found guilty necessarily originally but then sometimes people

00:40:24.780 were accused they were kind of like oh we don't have enough evidence and then some years later

00:40:28.680 or some months later they might be accused again and this time they might have enough

00:40:32.800 you know so-called evidence but the difficulty was as Zoe and I have sort of thought about

00:40:38.720 like what would happen if you were like a middle-aged woman you had no visible means of

00:40:43.040 support and you turned up in a new village distraught possibly your head had been shaved

00:40:48.220 because they'd been looking for the devil's mark and other parts of their their body their private 0.98

00:40:51.940 parts but from what people could see a shaved head woman um looking particularly raggedy might

00:40:58.200 turn up and say oh hello i've i'm just coming to start a new life with you well of course people

00:41:03.480 would know or at least have a good suspicion that these people were coming because they'd been

00:41:08.440 accused of something elsewhere and were either fleeing it or it had been banished so their life

00:41:14.580 was not going to be in any way positive wherever they went and in terms of execution i want we're

00:41:21.800 going to do some myth busting right now you talk in your book and i'm so glad you do because this

00:41:26.140 phrase drives me bananas like we are the daughters of the witches that you didn't burn one of my

00:41:32.220 neighbors puts out a sign that says that every year at halloween and i'm just like oh no what

00:41:36.600 What is that saying?

00:41:37.640 Is that saying that my distant grandmother

00:41:41.260 was too tough to get killed as a witch? 0.74

00:41:44.460 Like, so they didn't, she wasn't able to get burned.

00:41:47.000 Is it sort of victim blaming in some way

00:41:48.960 that some of the people that got burned are tough enough?

00:41:51.740 It's just not thought through, it's illogical.

00:41:54.940 Yeah, I think it's trying to,

00:41:57.920 and I think it's totally understandable.

00:41:59.680 I think it's trying to reclaim power

00:42:02.740 to say we come from a long line of strong women and we're still strong i think it's really poorly

00:42:09.660 thought out though and i think that it's a silly phrase it does it does it's made available to so

00:42:15.320 many women though yeah you know like that like there's posters of it and there's all sorts of

00:42:19.660 t-shirts and there's something yeah i think people like my neighbor i haven't talked to her about it

00:42:25.080 but i presume it's something i think it's somehow empowering but to me when you think it through

00:42:29.920 like and we'll talk about this in a second they weren't actually burnt that's not the method of

00:42:33.580 execution for most people but also if you're saying like so you're saying that your ancestors

00:42:37.740 were a witch that were so cunning and so clever that they were never caught yeah and they were

00:42:43.780 witches it's just people who were executed weren't like i don't i don't understand because it's sort

00:42:50.540 of it's saying that there were other women that they could burn and you're kind of like okay so 0.85

00:42:55.940 there was like there were people that weren't strong enough to escape being executed but your

00:43:01.020 ancestors somehow managed to be a witch and not get into trouble for it i just think it's bananas

00:43:07.080 so we we much prefer the strapline that we've used since the beginning for our campaign which

00:43:12.720 is women not witches you know because they were just ordinary people how were witches executed 0.98

00:43:18.200 please explain okay so in in modern sort of popular culture we have this idea that witches

00:43:26.160 were all burned at the stake but they weren't we're not saying that people weren't burned at

00:43:30.260 the stake because they were for particular things but not as sort of a witch so you were burned at

00:43:35.120 the stake if you were found guilty of treason so trying to kill the king or of what's called

00:43:40.980 petite treason which is trying to kill your husband so in those two lovely instances you

00:43:46.520 could be burned at the stake but generally in terms of witchcraft the execution method was

00:43:51.880 hanging or it's called strangled in old sort of language in scotland and scots but really what

00:43:58.980 that means is generally being hanged there there's a case to be made that sometimes they were

00:44:03.760 garroted but we when we first started it we were saying strangled like if you had multiple people

00:44:09.320 that you were executing is the is the is the executioner moving down the line and sort of

00:44:14.620 hand strangling every person obviously that i don't i don't see how that could work so they

00:44:19.620 were hanged is the best possible sort of definition for it and we know from lots of cases that there's

00:44:24.940 evidence of how much rope was used because of how much the rope cost and sort of invoices basically

00:44:30.760 that were put in so what they did was they they hang them and then they did burn their bodies but

00:44:36.660 only after they were already dead and the reason they burned their bodies and the reason why this

00:44:40.760 kind of become all kind of intermingled in popular culture is because there was an idea that if you

00:44:46.040 didn't destroy the body that the devil could still reanimate the body because once you'd signed your

00:44:52.480 soul over to the devil you'd stop being who you were originally and you'd become a puppet of the

00:44:57.760 devil so and I think that's one of the kind of psychological ways that people in a community

00:45:02.460 were able to dehumanize the accused because if you think about it say you lived in a little village

00:45:07.880 at the village I live in and there was a woman John it who everybody had always known um and then

00:45:14.060 one day she's accused of being a witch and then everybody just kind of accepts that she's taken

00:45:18.120 away and questioned and then she's found guilty and then people have to go and watch her being

00:45:22.320 executed if she's somebody from your community how do you how do you cope with that unless you've

00:45:27.800 dehumanized her to a point where like well she's no longer John as soon as she got taken over by

00:45:32.420 the devil she was just the devil's play thing essentially and the reason they got rid of their

00:45:37.200 body was so that he couldn't keep them going beyond the moment of their human body's death

00:45:41.700 so they destroyed the body but it also meant that they couldn't get a christian burial

00:45:45.980 and they weren't able to go to heaven in the way that the construct was at the time was particularly

00:45:51.440 cruel well that's the thing like you were saying before like people believed in magic

00:45:56.580 um and people also like their religion did believe that your body needed to be intact to go to heaven

00:46:02.640 so this is for the people left behind i'm just thinking if that was your loved one

00:46:08.080 to think like well yeah because in a very christian country you think like the end of this

00:46:13.780 for all of us is we're going to go to heaven and we'll be together again but well as we all know

00:46:18.340 there's no there's no hate like christian love so i think when when things like that get done

00:46:23.100 they get done in a very complete sort of way and we think now in a modern in a modern way of looking

00:46:28.180 at psychology and about trauma and stuff like that if you had a family member who was accused

00:46:32.800 of being a witch and they were found guilty like you would you would imagine that like the greater

00:46:37.640 family would also be tainted by that you know there'd be a suspicion that you know your you

00:46:42.800 know aunt or whatever had been found as being a witch and that must have then echoed through

00:46:47.680 communities as time went on I think that's quite interesting sort of from a psychological viewpoint

00:46:52.840 of what Scotland is like well and then you talk in your book as well there's like you talk about

00:46:58.020 the salem witch trials sort of contrasting how that happened and then stopped and then there was

00:47:03.560 sort of a retro um compensation like there was there was a reckoning right after and that's kind

00:47:11.100 of why it's well known because it sort of wrapped up and then it was guilt was admitted and that's

00:47:16.260 kind of why we know what happened but in scotland you said there's kind of like the two peaks of

00:47:21.440 of which and then it's kind of then it just kind of stopped and it's like let's just not talk about

00:47:25.720 this anymore. Like how and why did it stop? Exactly. Well, there are a number of factors

00:47:31.580 that came together. Some of the reasons that it got so bad were James was in charge and put out

00:47:37.980 the book of demonology. The church had a vice-like grip on society. Magic was a real thing and was

00:47:44.880 believed. People had really good access to courts in the central belt of Scotland, at least.

00:47:51.820 so those are factors that made the witchcraft accusations in Scotland particularly bad

00:47:56.960 as time went on the power of the church waned somewhat in everybody's life so there was

00:48:04.940 less control as a social force of the church it was still there people still went to church

00:48:11.140 but it wasn't all consuming in all parts of your day people started to believe different things

00:48:18.660 including in science, and particularly the Enlightenment that happened in Scotland,

00:48:24.460 where we started looking at the world in a more scientific way, and more and more doubt was put

00:48:31.440 on it. So it didn't just stop in one day. Over the course of those two centuries, it tapered out.

00:48:38.120 And by 1736, when the Witchcraft Act changed, and the crime of witchcraft moved to a crime of

00:48:45.660 pretended witchcraft so implicit in the crime was that you couldn't do an act of witchcraft

00:48:52.140 because witchcraft didn't exist but what you could do is pretended witchcraft so you could

00:48:56.260 pretend to speak to the devil you could pretend to have charms but that wasn't real and the crime

00:49:02.260 went for a capital offence of murder down to getting a fine for it but the the period of time

00:49:09.240 that it stayed in people's minds was much, much longer.

00:49:14.680 For example, on the podcast, we speak to people,

00:49:18.060 we spoke to an expert on Robert Burns,

00:49:21.340 and Burns wrote the poem maybe about 30 years later,

00:49:25.760 40 years later, about Tam O'Shanter.

00:49:28.600 That's a famous Scottish poem Robert Burns wrote.

00:49:32.100 And that was about a man going home drunk from a night out

00:49:36.820 and going past old Alloway Kirk.

00:49:39.240 and seeing witches having a party and so the witch in popular culture at that time was still

00:49:48.020 really really strong so just because the legislation doesn't like legislation stops at

00:49:53.020 one point doesn't mean that everyone believed in magic of witchcraft one day and didn't in the

00:49:57.780 other it took a lot of time to sort of it's a bit like in in america sort of the south particularly

00:50:04.040 when slavery had happened for a long time and then slavery was outlawed and there was still

00:50:08.500 sort of like lingering from certain groups lingering belief in that and sort of ill treatment

00:50:13.820 towards towards people that had formerly been enslaved it just takes a takes a while and i'm

00:50:19.180 saying that now fully aware of two things and one which is that racism is absolutely on the rise and

00:50:24.680 is becoming more and more acceptable and that the idea of women being witches seems to be back on

00:50:31.280 in the popular imagination and i don't mean like you know in a good way i mean like you know with

00:50:36.060 certain sort of fundamentalist christian politicians and speakers saying that there is a

00:50:40.960 danger of witchcraft being abroad so i think that people's prejudices are held on to by certain

00:50:47.880 groups whether or not there's law that's around it you know i mean like these ideas kind of linger

00:50:52.820 and that when we're under any kind of social anxiety so like at the moment i mean i'm personally

00:50:59.980 quite worried about climate change because this level of heat in scotland is extremely bizarre

00:51:04.120 and you know we're hearing from experts that that's going to get worse or there's war or the

00:51:08.980 threat of war or people are struggling in a very personal domestic way with the cost of bills or

00:51:14.120 whatever then we tend to look just as they did during the witch trials for vulnerable groups to 0.55

00:51:19.360 say right well if we deal with that group if we get rid of that group if we punish that group 0.94

00:51:24.060 then we'll be able to get back to you know the good old days where we all had jobs for life and

00:51:29.460 you know petrol costs you know whatever petrol used to cost and I think that that's a kind of

00:51:35.260 a natural unpleasant aspect of humanity and it's something that I would hope that we would

00:51:41.140 in the modern day in 2026 have more of an understanding about how we get those kind of

00:51:45.920 thoughts and those kind of you know ways of approaching life but I saw somebody today

00:51:50.180 talking on Instagram and he was saying he was talking about racism but he was saying

00:51:54.820 we had to get through yesterday to get to today and what he meant by that was we had to experience

00:52:00.820 the history in order to land where we are today and everything that happens today is because of 0.92

00:52:04.900 stuff that's happened in the past and it's stupid to not recognize history's long shadow and I think 0.63

00:52:11.180 that we're at a point now where we're seeing people specifically talking about women using 0.91

00:52:16.940 witchcraft like we saw Kamala Harris being accused of of using witchcraft during her campaign we're

00:52:23.880 seeing people like you know turning point and stuff like that talking about women women being

00:52:28.640 witches which when claire and i started this campaign we sort of talked about it in kind of

00:52:33.200 abstract terms not expecting that sort of five years later that people would actually be going

00:52:39.020 on stage with a microphone and saying there are witches amongst us i mean that is an incredibly

00:52:43.840 short amount of time to regress so hugely or or that guy at the turning point event who debated

00:52:50.540 a child and explained to the child that the problem with the Salem witch trials was that

00:52:55.180 they weren't organized well enough it's laughable but it's really serious because it's so bananas

00:53:03.580 yeah there's something so um I don't know just the way that witches have sort of permeated

00:53:09.960 culture um where these were real trials that happened but then it's it's a Halloween costume

00:53:16.140 humor it's just it's a fun thing so it's kind of like the myth is still kind of there and it's

00:53:20.480 always connected to women and it's always kind of like unpleasant quote-unquote yeah over women

00:53:27.140 when we talk about witches and then men get mentioned online people call them wizards and

00:53:33.980 we have to say to people no that's not like witches are women and wizards are men these

00:53:38.100 are totally different vibes right so witches could be men or women largely women but it's

00:53:43.460 definitely definitely gendered and it's definitely ageist so we're not we're generally talking about

00:53:49.000 older women and it's like they're no longer you know again quote-unquote useful to society 0.98

00:53:54.360 so then for therefore they become kind of dangerous because you know these women have 0.99

00:53:58.720 got nothing to lose they could cast spells on us and I think a lot of it is about the fear that men

00:54:04.860 have towards women and a lot of it's sexual and a lot of it is is to do with wanting to control

00:54:10.440 women one of my favorite stories about one of the accused witches was that in her community stole 0.99

00:54:17.080 the penises of all like the men the ministers the baileys the men that are in charge and put them 0.84

00:54:22.860 all in a wooden box and she put the box up into a tree and that she could at will open the box and 0.99

00:54:29.360 make the penises fly around now i'm not sure what women would really want to treat themselves to 0.64

00:54:35.980 that vision to be honest but um but i think that's very telling about the psychology of how men at 0.97

00:54:43.240 that point certainly and i would argue a lot of men today in 2026 view women they're just worried

00:54:48.800 their peens are going to get stolen for some sort of that's that's quite a steal um i wanted to um

00:54:56.820 just sort of give you both a chance to talk about the your campaign and the successes you've had

00:55:02.820 and what, just talk about your campaign and the successes you've had,

00:55:06.980 like the apology and everything that's happened.

00:55:09.840 Sure.

00:55:10.380 Well, when we started, what we wanted was a pardon

00:55:13.700 for all those that were convicted

00:55:15.000 to change their status from convicted people.

00:55:18.800 And when we say about a pardon,

00:55:22.520 sometimes American people get in contact with us

00:55:24.660 and say it's not a pardon, it's an exoneration.

00:55:26.520 And it is an exoneration in America

00:55:29.620 because exoneration makes it clear that you should never have been convicted of the thing,

00:55:37.280 that you are free of guilt.

00:55:39.300 The same is done in Scotland, but the word pardon is used.

00:55:42.760 But when the pardon is given, and it's given by legislation,

00:55:47.460 the legislation, when it's passed, makes clear that the people ought never to have been convicted.

00:55:53.280 so since the Scottish Parliament has been back in the early 2000s it's given two pardons

00:55:59.800 one for same-sex sexual offences where men were convicted of that historically

00:56:05.640 and the other was for when people were convicted for protesting in relation to the minor strikes

00:56:13.760 that occurred in the 80s and both those groups of people were given pardons and it was made clear

00:56:20.100 that they were being pardoned because they ought never to have been accused and convicted.

00:56:25.180 So we wanted the pardon. We wanted an apology because the pardon only deals with people who

00:56:31.760 were convicted. But as we know, two thirds of the people were accused and may have gone through all

00:56:36.800 sorts of horrors. But one third of them, up to one third of them, hopefully, were acquitted.

00:56:42.640 So we wanted them to be recognised as well and for the state to give recognition.

00:56:46.440 and the third thing was a national memorial so two years after our campaign started we did the

00:56:53.160 we did and continued to do the podcast we raised awareness we spoke to people we did talks just

00:56:59.740 trying to let everyone know about it and as a result of the work that we did on that on International

00:57:05.320 Women's Day 2022 we had written and asked the then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon whether or not she

00:57:12.680 would give on International Women's Day an apology to all those that were accused

00:57:22.240 and we're delighted to see that she did and it was the first state recognition

00:57:26.120 ever of the people that had been executed as witches so it was quite an incredible day.

00:57:32.440 The second thing we got was that we've been working on as a pardon and we have done all

00:57:38.840 the legwork in that. We have raised the public awareness, we've had a public consultation that

00:57:43.980 was overwhelmingly positive, we've been to our justice committee, we've got cross-party support

00:57:49.060 but just as we were wanting to get the matter put into Parliament, unfortunately the person

00:57:54.900 who was proposing it, I say unfortunately, fortunately for her, she got promoted and the

00:57:59.980 promoted role that she took meant that she could not take this bill forward. So Parliament has

00:58:06.140 started in Scotland now and we're working towards that but we've we've done the we've done most of

00:58:12.440 the work on that and the third thing was a national memorial when we started off we we wanted some

00:58:19.620 form of statue we spoke to the government the government said we think it's a great idea we'd

00:58:25.020 love to help you but we've got no money and for a long time we were absolutely stumped on what it

00:58:30.420 was that we could do there were lots and lots of problems you know where would it be what would it

00:58:35.860 look like who would design it who would keep keep keep it up and these sorts of problems

00:58:43.240 seemed insurmountable to us and people were getting in contact with us saying well we should

00:58:48.580 have it here because of this we should have it here and we're like we're not the arbiters of

00:58:52.480 where things go or what things do and Zoe turned to me at one point and said are we going to have

00:58:57.820 to build this ourselves in a strange sort of way we we eventually did and the reason is because

00:59:03.980 we moved away from the idea of a national memorial as a statue and came up with another idea

00:59:08.940 which which was um we went to there's a are you familiar with there's a museum in london called

00:59:15.900 the victoria and albert that's known as the v and a it's a big design museum and really old and

00:59:21.820 there's one of them in dundee which is near where i live a beautiful modern structure that's all

00:59:27.400 about design and they had a show opening called tartan and it was just all about unsurprisingly

00:59:32.840 tartan and we went along to the opening party for that and there was loads of people dressed

00:59:37.540 in tartan there and they were there's like a real buzz about it and people were talking about the

00:59:41.600 origins of it not just being in scotland but in different cultures but also about the colors and

00:59:46.780 what that symbolizes and about the link to families and the link to clans and stuff like that

00:59:51.180 and um and claire just kind of went oh this is interesting maybe we should look at getting a

00:59:57.200 tartan commissioned and designing a tartan as a memorial and my well our good friend Leonie Bell

01:00:04.560 who runs the V&A said I know the very person to put you in touch with so it's a woman called

01:00:09.000 Claire Campbell that runs a small um women women owned women run mill in the highlands of Scotland

01:00:15.860 and it turns out that it's the only mill in the highlands that makes tartan which we were

01:00:20.580 like mind boggled by we thought there would still be an industry going on there but in fact for a

01:00:25.140 number of years there'd been no mill and claire had been an accountant and she'd retrained to

01:00:30.020 become a weaver because she was determined that tartan would be made in the region that she's

01:00:34.060 from which is the highlands so she started up this mill prickly thistle which is all environmentally

01:00:39.220 friendly and it's got really great ethos behind everything and we spoke to her and we worked with

01:00:44.980 her and we designed a tartan that's incredibly symbolic of the witch trials so the colors mean

01:00:51.720 different things i'll not go into everything but the black symbolizes the dark times the gray

01:00:57.240 symbolizes the ashes that these women were reduced to the reddy pink that runs through it symbolizes

01:01:03.080 the legal tapes that that bind up legal papers in scotland and they're used less now but they

01:01:08.620 certainly were used a lot then so these different colors things like the thread count you know like

01:01:13.740 the the size of different bits of the design all symbolize different things and we created it and

01:01:20.520 the first thing you have to do is you have to have it registered online now we didn't realize

01:01:25.480 that there are people in america that sit online and watch the tartan registry and then tell

01:01:30.960 everybody about it when a new tartan appears because this was completely whole new world to

01:01:34.480 us so i was at the gym one day i was on the treadmill just walking fast don't get excited

01:01:39.920 and i got a text and um it was from a friend jemma who said is this you two and lo and behold

01:01:45.920 there's this thing on facebook that was starting to kind of go global saying a new um witch trials

01:01:51.480 museum a new witch trials memorial tartan is being created and all these people started going wild

01:01:56.360 for it and at this point it didn't exist really it was just a computer image you know was that

01:02:01.900 hadn't been woven so we spoke to claire at the mill and we decided we'd do a kickstarter to see

01:02:06.880 if there was an interest in it and long story short there was a huge interest in it and it

01:02:11.260 still didn't exist and people were pre-ordering the idea of it but then we went into production

01:02:15.620 and since then it's the fastest growing tartan in scotland and it's amazing because it means that

01:02:21.320 people have it all around the world and when they wear their tartan it's primarily a scarf that they

01:02:26.140 get people say to them what's what's your scarf mean what does your tartan mean and then they

01:02:30.300 can tell them the story of it and it means that our big educational aim of the campaign is being

01:02:35.420 done by all these amazing people mostly women that are out in the world that want to know about it

01:02:40.960 and want to tell people about it and it's just amazing the wings it's taken yeah so and i believe

01:02:47.220 i didn't your paperback of your book is just coming up but i believe the paperback incorporates

01:02:52.100 the tartan in the inside covers or something like that the hardback did in america okay that's what

01:02:58.840 i'm thinking of yeah we've not actually received uh the paperbacks yet so we're not we're not

01:03:03.540 entirely sure what it looks like so actually claire i don't think we've seen an image of it

01:03:08.160 yet have we no no no no i don't i don't think so i think on the if you take off the dust sheet in

01:03:14.960 the hardback then the tartan is there and that's still available in beauty and we're not sure

01:03:21.480 long story we don't know what the paperback looks like no the um the book in the us for anybody

01:03:28.400 looking up is slight titled slightly differently it's called how to kill a witch the patriarchy's

01:03:33.540 guide to silencing women yeah it's slightly different to the UK version so the UK version

01:03:40.380 has got some fiction that's scattered through it as well so that I wrote the fiction which is taking

01:03:46.160 the viewpoint of different people that were involved in the trials so not not the witch

01:03:51.420 per se but like you know John Knox has got something to say and like the minister's wife

01:03:57.020 has got something to say and stuff like that but the American publisher felt that it was better to

01:04:01.340 stick to non-fiction for the states so you have a slightly different version in the states but

01:04:05.580 confusingly the audiobook is that is available to you in the states is the the uk version so

01:04:12.680 sometimes people i didn't realize this was a thing sometimes people like the audiobook and

01:04:16.760 they like to follow it with the actual book in their hands oh but it's not the same yeah

01:04:20.500 what are these extra bits so they're slightly different so just to give people a it's a

01:04:25.180 slightly different thing that they've got in the states than in in britain and so if people want to

01:04:31.260 get their hands on one of these tartan scarves what's the is there do you just have a general

01:04:36.940 website that's just kind of like about your campaign and about the book and about everything

01:04:40.340 yeah easy peasy it's witches of scotland.com perfect so you just go on there and it's got

01:04:47.540 yeah exactly it's got um it's got the stuff about the campaign it's got the history of that it's got

01:04:53.520 links so you can find the podcast it's got the links the tartan and it's got a bit more about

01:04:58.340 about what we've been doing over the last seven years and we should say that because the tartan

01:05:04.980 is bespoke it's handmade it's zero waste it's done in the the on on very old looms the same

01:05:12.800 way as it's been done for hundreds of years that everything's made to order and it can take up to

01:05:18.540 six months in order to go from the order to actually getting your hands but if people want

01:05:24.280 to google online they will see many many people now worldwide that have their beware because we

01:05:30.460 this is not a thing that we have in the uk but in america you have these things they got renaissance

01:05:36.820 fairs where people people dress up and we have had people getting in touch to say oh they're

01:05:42.900 selling your tartan at the renaissance fair it's not our tartan it's a really really inferior

01:05:47.460 wrongly colored only patterned ripoff so just know that it's not actually our tartan ours

01:05:53.020 the only place to get the actual one is from and yeah we don't have a shop we don't have a store

01:06:00.140 front it's only fruit through us and we're doing that really deliberately so that we can

01:06:04.900 maintain the integrity of it and that it's made by women you know we really like the fact that 0.99

01:06:09.820 it's this very small like really special thing that's happening and we're going to keep that 1.00

01:06:14.640 going rather than go to mass production yeah well i was so looking forward to talking with you as i

01:06:20.620 said it was just the the hand of fate just had me reading your book just amazing about this it was

01:06:26.840 yes i'm so happy to talk to you about this and it's so um just lovely to hear about your kit

01:06:32.660 the success thus far of your campaign you know there's so many people who advocate for so many

01:06:37.300 things and you've had success and that's i hope that that inspires other people to to do similar

01:06:42.680 source of work. Definitely. Zoe has said when people ask us or some people criticise us for

01:06:50.240 anything, Zoe says, look, you know, luckily and presently, we live in a democracy where if you

01:06:56.760 want to tell people your views and promote it and find community for it, then we're still able to do

01:07:04.480 that. And it's really, really important that particularly for women and particularly for

01:07:09.620 women worldwide where their rights are on the slide and the UN has written and told us about

01:07:15.960 that it's very very important to form a community and for that community not only necessarily to be

01:07:22.120 your own small community but knowing other people worldwide because in my view it's time for the

01:07:29.060 matriarchy yeah yeah so to that to that view actually we should mention we started our own

01:07:34.820 clan so we've got clan witches of scotland so if anybody listening wants to join our clan it

01:07:41.160 doesn't cost anything you don't have to buy tartan or anything like that you just go to our website

01:07:44.900 witch of scotland.com and sign up for the mailing list we're already 25 000 people or something in

01:07:50.460 the clan it's it's huge and it's just the whole idea is that if we band together as largely women

01:07:56.500 then we're we're better when we're all working together you know and it's really nice to know

01:08:01.080 There's a community of like-minded women all over the world.

01:08:04.340 And it means that connections can be made 1.00

01:08:06.700 and that stuff can change at a grassroots level,

01:08:09.020 which we know is the only way to topple fascism.

01:08:13.420 I love the Scottishness of this.

01:08:16.700 I love that there's a tartan.

01:08:18.100 I love that there's a clam.

01:08:19.400 It's like, there's no question about what country.

01:08:21.920 No.

01:08:22.500 This is all based on it.

01:08:23.900 Also, we should say,

01:08:25.560 because sometimes we get people from North America,

01:08:28.020 particularly getting in touch with us and saying,

01:08:29.720 oh i can't wear a kill you know i can't wear tartan i don't want to do cultural appropriation

01:08:34.820 it's not cultural appropriation in this instance because a we as scottish people really like seeing

01:08:41.420 the kilts and stuff everywhere you know like you could see that with the tartan army at the at the

01:08:45.100 football yeah you know people we're really proud of it and we really like it it's not cultural

01:08:49.280 appropriation and b it's because we are like a dominant power structure so it's not coming in

01:08:55.560 and going oh I'm going to take this and I'm going to make money off your culture. It's something

01:08:59.860 that's absolutely available to anybody and it just means that you get what the campaign is

01:09:04.340 and that you believe in understanding history and you believe in a better present day.

01:09:09.200 That's basically what we're saying with our turn. Exactly and it absolutely echoes the clan system.

01:09:15.740 The clan system in Scotland was about standing behind someone that you believed in and principles

01:09:21.400 that you believed in not where you were from or where you were going necessarily it was about do

01:09:27.120 you stand with us and that's what we're asking people to do stand with us yeah yeah that's

01:09:33.400 fantastic so everybody should go first of all which is of scotland.com to just to learn more

01:09:38.540 about everything that you're up to and everybody should go get your book in paperback or in hard

01:09:43.260 cover or however they or an audiobook however people prefer to read um thank you so much thank

01:09:49.440 you so much for for chatting with me today this is such a fun conversation oh thank you you really

01:09:54.420 appreciate it and my cat Hepburn she's she's she's loved it all as well

01:09:59.560 she has been fully involved in this process and she's been very very active yeah

01:10:07.640 so you can get all the links to find all the ways to keep up with Claire and Zoe and how to support

01:10:15.940 them at their website, witchesofscotland.com, listen to their podcast, get their book, How to

01:10:21.140 Kill a Witch, a guide for the patriarchy now available in paperback everywhere. You can also

01:10:27.240 up there at witchesofscotland.com, you can join clan, the witch's clan. You can find ways to order

01:10:32.900 the witch tartan. I love everything they're doing and it was such a treat to speak with them.

01:10:38.620 And if you want to keep up with me and what I'm doing, I have a Patreon, which is a site where

01:10:43.800 you can join either for free or for a small monthly donation.

01:10:48.940 And you can get bonus tweets when you join my Patreon.

01:10:52.980 So you can get ad-free episodes of this podcast,

01:10:55.320 Vulgar History, for $1 a month.

01:10:58.440 And if you up that to $6 or more a month,

01:11:02.240 and I'm saying U.S. dollars,

01:11:03.660 but whatever country you're in, it converts to...

01:11:06.120 You can do the conversion.

01:11:07.500 Anyway, for the $6 a month or more level,

01:11:09.880 you get bonus episodes as well as access to our Discord,

01:11:13.560 where you can just like hang it with other history nerds you also i'm starting to do every now and

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01:12:16.360 to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever. To join the Patreon, you can go to

01:12:22.400 patreon.com slash annfosterwriter. And if you're like, I don't know if that's for me. I don't know

01:12:26.820 if I like this Patreon life. Get a seven-day free trial. See what's up. See if you like it there.

01:12:31.580 I hope you will. Again, it's patreon.com slash Anne Foster Writer. Why is Anne Foster Writer?

01:12:36.660 Because I'm also a writer. I wrote a book. It's called Rebel of the Regency and it's available

01:12:40.380 now wherever you get your books. Get more information about that at rebeloftheregency.com.

01:12:47.040 And until next week, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out. 1.00

01:12:52.740 Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Anne Foster. Editor is Christina Lumagi. 0.99

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Witch Hunts in Tudor Era Scotland (ft. Witches of Scotland)

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