00:00:00.200Hi, I'm Clare Mitchell, QC. Welcome to the Witches of Scotland podcast.
00:00:05.220I'm a lawyer who specialises in miscarriage of justice cases,
00:00:08.740and we're bringing you this podcast because we want to tell you0.61
00:00:11.580about the women who were accused, prosecuted, convicted,
00:00:15.800and ultimately executed as witches in Scotland.
00:00:18.780I'm Zoe Vendetotsi, and I'm a writer who's always had an interest in the witches,
00:00:23.040and I feel that this dark mark against Scotland needs a reckoning.
00:00:26.500The campaign Witches of Scotland wants three things.
00:00:29.600Firstly, a pardon for all those convicted of witchcraft.
00:00:33.240Secondly, an apology for all those who were accused as witches.
00:00:37.460And finally, a national monument in recognition of all those who were affected by this terrible miscarriage of justice.
00:00:44.420Over the forthcoming weeks, we'll be talking to a whole host of experts about the history and the modern day connections to the witches of Scotland.
00:00:53.780Welcome to episode four, especially to all our new listeners.
00:00:57.560Please do keep sharing the podcast so we can reach as many people as possible.
00:01:01.800We'd especially like to say hello to all our listeners in America and Australia, of which we have quite a few.
00:01:08.480So please do spread the word because the more people that know about the campaign, the higher likelihood we have of success.
00:01:14.740If this is your first time listening to the podcast, please do go back and check out the other episodes that are all available.
00:01:21.460Today, we're going to talk to Professor Julian Goodyear.
00:01:24.920He's Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, and what he doesn't know about witches isn't worth knowing.
00:01:32.280He's edited or co-edited a number of books, including Scottish Witches and Witch Hunters, Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, and the Scottish Witch Hunt in Context.
00:01:42.940He's also written a book, The European Witch Hunt, which he refers to in our discussions.
00:01:48.840He is director of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, along with his co-director, Louise Yeoman.
00:01:54.680And I know a number of you have had a good look at that, because it really is the most interesting and up-to-date survey that we have about all the women that were killed as witches in Scotland.
00:02:04.180We started off asking Julian about alewives and spaywives.
00:02:09.120I occasionally come across the word spaywife, which you will very occasionally see in the documents that I look at.
00:02:17.420It became more common in discourse about witches in, I think, the 19th and 20th century.
00:02:22.340And it's linked to the idea that witches were somehow practitioners of something.
00:02:28.380And spay wife means prophetic woman, because it's a sort of vernacular Scottish word.1.00
00:02:35.340Do you think it's got something to do with the word seer?
00:02:38.240Seer, that's another of the kind of thing that people today are thinking that early modern witches were.
00:02:44.420Particularly the modern magical practitioners, Wiccans, neo-pagan community like the idea that there were people like them in the past and they like the idea that the people like them in the past were persecuted as witches.
00:03:01.020And there used to be an idea that the witches of the past were in fact practicing pagans. And this is an idea that has muddied the waters of scholarship for many decades in the 20th century.
00:03:14.420And, you know, it's almost entirely wrong.
00:03:17.160When we first started this, my feeling was very much received wisdom.1.00
00:03:33.520You know, a pagan is somebody who worships pagan gods, in contrast with a Christian who worships the Christian god.
00:03:39.920It's one of the doctrines of Christianity is that there only is one God, though we can then start talking about a trinity.
00:03:45.900But most pagan religions have worshipped a pantheon of a number of gods.
00:03:51.580And in a European context, we tend to be talking either about Celtic paganism or Roman paganism or Germanic paganism.
00:04:01.040And, you know, those are three groups of religions which existed before Christianity.
00:04:05.780The idea in the mid-20th century was mainly launched by a book published in 1921 called The Witch Cult of Western Europe by Margaret Murray.
00:04:14.880She contended that there had been a surviving pagan cult which had continued since pre-Christian times.
00:04:22.540You know, the Christians in the early centuries AD had never really got down to the level of the common people.
00:04:30.080And, you know, it was just a religion of the elite. The common people remained pagan.0.95
00:04:34.260And in early modern times, there were still a few actually practising pagans who did, as I put it, get up in the morning and think I'm a pagan.
00:04:42.380They might not have used that word for it, but they worshipped the old gods.
00:04:46.660And Murray used the confessions of early modern witches in a highly selective and, in fact, fraudulent way to suggest that they were worshippers of these old gods.
00:04:57.440And she argued that they operated in covens.
00:05:01.200and you know if you think that witches operated in covens then you're hearing a distant echo of
00:05:06.280the works of Margaret Murray. They were in groups of 13 and so they worshipped a horned god and she
00:05:12.880supported this with carefully selected quotations from early modern sources but it really will not
00:05:19.820stand up for anyone who looks at these sources in a scholarly or objective way and it was frequently
00:05:26.060They criticised for many decades and really terminally exploded in 1965 in a chapter of a book called Europe's and the Demons by Norman Koenig.
00:05:35.060It then sort of survived among the neo-pagan community because the neo-pagan community grew up initially in England in the middle years of the 20th century, which was very much when Murray was writing.
00:05:49.420And the earliest Wiccans, as they tend to call themselves, were actually in touch with Murray and her ideas, and they reconstructed in their mind this surviving pre-Christian pagan religion.
00:06:04.100And some of the practitioners convinced themselves that they were inheritors of this tradition.
00:06:10.580Now, just how exactly Gerald Gardner, who was the leading person who's always mentioned, convinced himself that he was a member of a coven of witches that had survived since pre-Christian times.
00:06:22.080This has been written about at some length by my friend Ronald Hutton in his book, The Triumph of the Moon, History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.
00:06:29.920He did, in all sincerity, convince himself of this. It did require a certain amount of imagination and reconstruction. But he published a book called Ritchcock Today in 1954, in which he announced that he was a member of a covenant that had survived since pre-Christian times.
00:06:46.540And Margaret Murray, the scholar who had launched the idea, contributed a foreword to the book.
00:06:51.060So the idea caught on among these early pagans that they were the inheritors of tradition and that they had been persecuted in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Christians.
00:07:02.680This idea, as I say, has been largely debunked by historians.
00:07:06.960And, you know, I don't really want to tread on anyone's religious faith.
00:07:10.120If a pagan today tells me that they find it meaningful to regard themselves as inheritors of an ancient tradition and that their forebears were burnt as witches,
00:07:20.300I will merely say carefully that as a professional historian, I can say only that the documentary historical evidence does not support that view.
00:07:30.880But of course, people have many other sources of ideas and evidence.
00:07:34.960Was she deliberately playing fast and loose with facts or is there any evidence about what her sort of agenda was?
00:07:43.760She was certainly pushing a particular line much further than an impartial scholar would support.
00:07:51.360I have not read her third and last book, The Divine King in England, but I sort of leafed through it.
00:07:56.420And, you know, my understanding is that its idea is that there was a pagan cult at the top levels of English history.
00:08:03.720You know, the king and his supporters were not Christians.
00:08:07.880They pretended to be, but they actually had an idea about divine kingship, which Murray had picked up from Sir James Fraser, the 19th century anthropologist.
00:08:17.640The idea that the king needed to be sacrificed for fertility.
00:08:21.440And so she rewrote English history and explained that whenever an English king died prematurely, this pagan cult sacrificing the king for fertility and putting out a story that there was some political reason for the death of William Rufus or Edward II or whatever.
00:08:40.820I think even Charles I, the execution of Charles I, was attributed to this pagan cult and pretending to have his head cut off, but really it was actually this pagan cult.
00:08:51.900I can't quite get into the mind of someone who produces stuff like this, so I don't really want to impute motives.
00:08:58.600I'm really shocked our modern idea of witches is a construct from the 20s.
00:09:03.200It's only part of it. The cauldron, the pointy hat, the broomstick and the cat all come from other sources.
00:09:09.300Is there any general source from which we define a witch in the way that we sort of do in the modern day?
00:09:18.500If you were to say, I'm going to dress up as a witch for Halloween, and you imagine the look, the cat, the cauldron, the hat, the wearing black, where did that come from?
00:09:28.860Well, the dress mostly comes from hostile or mocking depictions of witches in the 18th century England.
00:09:36.960and this was when political cartoonists would attribute belief in witches to their enemies0.82
00:09:44.380you know these people are so silly as to believe in witches you know witches were um seen as0.80
00:09:49.920old-fashioned you know modern enlightened people in the 18th century no longer believe in witchcraft0.99
00:09:54.280you know it's it's a silly thing it's a thing for all women to believe in and those clothes were0.70
00:09:59.800old-fashioned clothes at that time the pointed hat was an old-fashioned thing and so um so so the
00:10:05.680The pointed hat is an out-of-date item of dress that we today no longer find fashionable.
00:10:10.980Previous to these political cartoons then, that wasn't sort of the cultural mental picture of a witch then.
00:10:17.320So it was only when these cartoons came in in the 18th century that there started to be the connotation was the pointy hat.
00:10:26.220Before that, witches would be depicted wearing ordinary clothes or occasionally no clothes at all.
00:10:31.620It's all a construct from a number of different sources.
00:10:35.140The broomstick is mainly French, I think. And there is actually a 15th century French manuscript from the 1440s, I think, which has a marginal illustration of two witches, one flying on a plain stick and another flying on a broomstick.
00:10:50.540I'm told you can now get this on a T-shirt. That's the oldest depiction of a witch on a broomstick.
00:10:58.380And actually, throughout the centuries of witch hunting, when witches were depicted flying, they were depicted flying in various ways, using various vehicles or occasionally no vehicles at all.
00:11:09.940Sometimes they're flying on demons. Sometimes they're flying on demonic dragons, often on goats, actually.
00:11:15.200another very common thing was a forked cooking stick particularly in germany i think had a long
00:11:20.500stick with a fork on the end to put a pot in and out of the oven or hold a pot over a fire and the
00:11:26.220cooking stick came to be a sort of witch's accessory in germany and there are many images of
00:11:32.380witches flying on forks cooking sticks or simply brandishing this forked cooking stick it's a long
00:11:38.340thing about as long as a broomstick but instead of you know a broom on the end there's simply a
00:11:43.200sort of u-shaped stick why it is that the broomstick survived and not the forked cooking stick
00:11:48.640offhand i don't know but uh you know presumably there's an illustrator's tradition sometime in
00:11:55.880the 18th or 19th century plugged into the broomstick and not the forked cooking stick
00:11:59.560so the broomstick mainly french the cat is mainly english because english witches were sometimes
00:12:04.760said to have demonic familiars which were small animals sometimes cats often they were toads for
00:12:10.920some reason we find it harder to imagine a witch with a pet toad but because modern society
00:12:17.720recognises pet cats as things you know the idea that witches had pet cats has survived and so we
00:12:25.700depict witches with cats. Our idea of a witch could be very very different it could be a lady with
00:12:30.880effectively a fork and a toad. Yeah or it could be an owl I've actually got a fidge magnet that1.00
00:12:36.260someone gave me from Germany showing witches flying on broomsticks carrying owls. So the
00:12:42.520modern image is a composite of many different ideas and witchcraft itself is a composite of
00:12:49.100different ideas. You know, you can't sort of trace witchcraft back to a single thing and then you've
00:12:54.320got the ultimate witchcraft. You know, it's not like that. It's always spreading out in different
00:12:59.700directions, putting things into itself. Can I ask when the witch hunt was at its peak and
00:13:05.780there were so many people being accused and executed. Did people broadly genuinely believe
00:13:12.200that these women and some men were actually doing witchcraft? Because I'm still a bit perplexed by
00:13:18.540this. Oh, yes, this is a very common modern myth. They don't really believe in it. But if you want
00:13:24.440to get rid of someone, you accuse them of witchcraft. But it is perplexing, because if you
00:13:29.040think about it, if nobody believes in witchcraft, you know, you know, how much weight does a
00:13:33.040witchcraft accusation. It only works if people believe in it. So why not just go all the way
00:13:38.960and say, yes, actually, yeah, they did believe in it. You know, the accusers believed in it.
00:13:43.240The accused believed in it. You know, the authorities believed in it. And if you accused
00:13:48.940somebody of witchcraft, it wasn't because you want their land or dislike them for some other reason.
00:13:54.400It's because you think they're a witch. That's fascinating. What I want to ask really is how
00:14:01.520many people did this effect in Scotland we know numbers can never be exact because you're looking
00:14:08.780at documents and trying to trace it out but if you can explain to us how you've tried to work
00:14:15.620out what the numbers are and what you think the numbers are okay well the numbers in Scotland are
00:14:21.880higher than the European average and the European average contains you know very wide variations so
00:14:30.140Scotland is not the top of the league. You know, when you compare different countries or regions,
00:14:37.080you are not necessarily comparing like with like. In general, the most intense place for
00:14:42.620witch hunting is Germany, and particularly Western Germany and the Rhineland area.
00:14:47.440You know, it's very hard to draw a line around a particular area. You can draw lines around
00:14:52.720larger areas, and they will have lower numbers. And you can carefully select a very small area.
00:14:59.240you can produce, you know, huge numbers. And Scotland is the size that it is. But, you know,
00:15:05.740even Scotland is a sort of artificial thing. You know, Scotland contains regions with very low
00:15:10.380numbers and regions with much higher numbers. I mean, if you drew a line around East Lothian,
00:15:14.780you know, the numbers per head would be much higher because that's the top counting. You know,
00:15:20.000if I just pursue this average business for a bit longer, the figure that I like to quote
00:15:25.740for Scotland is that Scotland's execution rate per head is about five times the European average
00:15:32.240of executions per head of population. But if you take a much smaller place, you can get much higher
00:15:38.880than five. And my friend Liefel-Lynne Willemsen is a Norwegian scholar, and she worked out the
00:15:44.140figures for Scotland. And so you'd really have to ask her how she did it. I can more or less tell
00:15:48.520you how she came up with the figure of 2,500, which gives me the basis for saying it's five
00:15:54.180times the european average because the european average would predict about 500 executions for
00:15:59.900scotland but um lival and velumson also works on northern norway which is finnmark is norway's
00:16:07.120most northerly county and they had panics in finnmark now the numbers are very small and they
00:16:12.940have only depending on how you count them 88 or 91 executions but in a tiny population if you run
00:16:19.920the numbers per head of population, Finnmark has got 60 times the European average.
00:16:25.680Was that the place, Julian, that has the memorial to the witches?
00:16:30.040Yes. Yes. Those 91 have all got individual plaques telling their little story that Liefel
00:20:53.660And in Scotland, I haven't run those same numbers for Scotland,
00:20:58.740but the period of witch hunting is shorter,0.99
00:21:03.160which maybe that's a good thing, I don't know,
00:21:05.040but the period of witch hunting is shorter and the numbers are higher,
00:21:10.020you know, the proportions of the population.
00:21:12.040So, you know, it would be several times.
00:21:14.100because it's over a shorter period of time it would be much more concentrated um well it's
00:21:20.320mainly that we've already got five times the average so you've got to multiply that by five
00:21:25.680if you then have the time period which you probably would for scotland because i was taking
00:21:30.160the longest time periods for europe as a whole so you then get 10 times during that period and
00:21:36.460you know if you then take the more intense panic periods you know you're probably you know
00:21:43.460multiplying it by at least another 10 if not another 100 another figure that i offered in
00:21:48.360my european book is you know how many people does it take to execute someone in the sense of how
00:21:53.460many people are involved in the trial how many personnel of the court you know how many people
00:21:58.100does it take to actually build a pyre and burn someone at the stake and you know how many witnesses
00:22:03.620and so forth will there be how many people involved in the the criminal justice system
00:22:08.720And I came up with the figure of, you know, maybe about 100 overall. So, you know, 100 people who know that they were involved in some way in the execution of the witch. This is something that very much does touch people's consciousness.
00:22:22.400on those numbers as you say you'd either know someone that was involved in it as a witch or
00:22:29.080know someone that was involved perhaps in the process of judging a witch building the pyre
00:22:36.440the real question is what was it that started the witchcraft panic the four or five periods
00:22:45.900where the witchcraft trials were whipped up what was it about scotland that started that
00:22:51.860so zoe we've ended in a bit of a cliffhanger there when is our next podcast going to drop
00:23:00.360it will be out next sunday as we seem to have gotten into a pattern with this now
00:23:05.000so they come out on sundays which is good because you can have a day of contemplation
00:23:09.520and reflection where you can find out about some terrible things that happened in the past