Witches of Scotland - SARA SHERIDAN - WHERE ARE THE WOMEN？

00:00:00.160 Hi, I'm Clare Mitchell QC. Welcome to the Witches of Scotland podcast.

00:00:05.220 I'm a lawyer who specialises in miscarriage of justice cases and we're bringing you this podcast

00:00:10.120 because we want to tell you about the women who were accused, prosecuted, convicted

00:00:15.240 and ultimately executed as witches in Scotland.

00:00:18.780 I'm Zoe Vendetotsi and I'm a writer who's always had an interest in the witches

00:00:22.780 and I feel that this dark mark against Scotland needs a reckoning.

00:00:26.500 The campaign Witches of Scotland wants three things.

00:00:29.600 Firstly, a pardon for all those convicted of witchcraft.

00:00:33.120 Secondly, an apology for all those who were accused as witches.

00:00:37.420 And finally, a national monument in recognition of all those who were affected by this terrible miscarriage of justice.

00:00:44.420 Over 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.

00:00:51.440 hello and welcome to episode two of witches of scotland podcast this week claire and i were

00:01:02.080 delighted to speak to sarah sheridan sarah is a renowned author activist and public campaigner

00:01:07.540 her 2019 book where are the women takes an unflinching look at scotland's heritage

00:01:12.780 reimagining the historic sites of scotland so that women have their rightful place

00:01:17.360 sorry about the sound quality in this episode with coronavirus restrictions preventing us

00:01:22.380 from meeting in person we're conducting our interviews online at one point you'll even

00:01:26.900 hear a brief contribution from my dogs redford and crombie we begin by asking sarah what inspiration

00:01:32.900 for writing where are the women was i had written a short story for a book that tied in with the

00:01:40.580 bloody scotland festival which commissioned by historic environment scotland i think they got

00:01:44.460 I think it was 12 or 15 crime writers because I wrote a crime series set in the 50s and I had

00:01:49.760 written a short story to go in this book which was based in a historic environment Scotland

00:01:54.060 property and I went on a tour with some of the other writers into various properties to do events

00:01:59.540 and I was in these historic environment properties and when I got home I met the

00:02:03.800 the publisher of the book the editor that had commissioned it and I said to him where are the

00:02:08.920 women I was around all these castles all these places yeah and there's no female stories what's

00:02:14.440 going on and we had a coffee and he kind of went off and I thought oh he hates me now for being a

00:02:19.380 bit of a feminist and he'll never speak to me again and then about two weeks later he rang me

00:02:24.320 and he went you know what you're totally right I went and I checked and we don't have enough do

00:02:28.400 you want to do something and we had both seen actually in the New Yorker project by Rebecca

00:02:33.540 Solnit the writer Rebecca Solnit who had renamed a number of stops on the New York subway after

00:02:38.820 women to tell the story of New York and and Jamie just said to me well why don't you know why don't

00:02:44.240 you do that and and and i had this vision in my mind initially of doing the glasgow subway i just

00:02:49.240 wasn't particularly ambitious but jamie was and he said you could just do the whole country

00:02:53.000 and i remember this kind of moment of thinking oh my god how would i do that that's a massive

00:02:58.080 massive job and then just coming out of my mouth just saying yeah yeah no problem i'll do that

00:03:02.960 that's great i'd love to do that you know just fire ahead and commission it and then this panic

00:03:07.980 of like three days when there was virtually no sleep or sort of sitting up figuring out how to

00:03:13.240 how to create this imagined guidebook to the whole country how long sarah did it actually

00:03:18.720 take you to get the whole book together it's pretty quick i mean i don't dilly dally when

00:03:24.740 i'm writing i am quite relatively fast and so i think we had that conversation in february

00:03:29.060 commissioned the book straight away and i think i delivered it in the august but it was a kind of mad

00:03:33.840 research project and there were maps all over my study and piles and piles of biographies of

00:03:40.200 different women and you know he was very sort of um he would have allowed me to do whatever I wanted

00:03:45.200 he basically said look if you want to do the stories of 50 women you fire ahead but the more

00:03:50.440 I looked at it the more I saw one of the misconceptions is that the women are not

00:03:54.700 commemorated because there just aren't enough stories there just aren't that many you achieve

00:03:58.500 things and so very quickly my maxim became no lady left behind I became a mad campaigner I was

00:04:06.980 absolutely raging i kept finding all these stories and and normally as a novelist i work within two

00:04:11.740 different historical periods so i was really excited to find material that you know predated

00:04:17.360 like the witches and post-dated uh these these two periods and and fill in the gaps almost it

00:04:23.960 was a very different kind of research but it was kind of a 15 and 16 hour a day job pretty much

00:04:29.500 between february and august brilliant and as you say it covers the whole of scotland i like the old

00:04:34.960 Lady of Hoy. I think a lot of people responded to that kind of thing because it hits you immediately

00:04:40.540 that you have an assumption. So I also made Fife a queendom rather than a kingdom. And a lot of

00:04:45.720 people were like, oh, right. Yeah, of course. Why do we do that? And I think that was really one of

00:04:50.100 the sort of purposes of the book was to make people think, oh, actually, our real world is

00:04:55.660 gendered in an incredible extent towards the other gender, towards the dominant gender, the male

00:05:00.340 gender and actually when you start doing that the other way around it highlights uh it highlights

00:05:06.220 that issue you suddenly think sitting there thinking oh yeah why is it called a kingdom

00:05:09.660 and why do we have an old man of hoy and not an old lady of hoy and why is our national monument

00:05:14.740 in sterling a man and not a woman because you know we we are ignoring systematically

00:05:19.780 and not commemorating a really amazing part of our cultural legacy and it's the female part

00:05:26.320 there's a real parallel between your book and what you're talking about um and about this idea that

00:05:32.040 women are sort of invisible and that it's it's men that we think about all the time with the story of

00:05:37.060 the witches because although I grew up in Scotland and I was aware that there were witches in

00:05:42.120 Scotland it's not something that's really in our history and not in a real sort of tangible that

00:05:47.220 these are individuals sort of manner what do you think about that I think that's absolutely

00:05:52.340 pervasive and I think you know we do have stories of women we do have women who are high in public

00:05:57.360 profile and had women who are consistently famous actually but it's the way that we

00:06:04.780 process the memory of that and and almost knit it into our history and that's a huge process I mean

00:06:11.900 it's about how artifacts collections are collated it's about material in libraries for example it's

00:06:18.040 about lots of things. And it's also about a kind of cultural bias that we have towards honoring

00:06:22.820 what men have done. And just assuming that, you know, we can sort of forget the women and it goes

00:06:28.080 on today. I remember on the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, listening to a number of

00:06:33.800 radio programs, and it was BBC programming, I think it was going on all day. And it was two

00:06:38.380 o'clock in the afternoon before anybody mentioned Mo Mullen. And she was the architect of the Good

00:06:43.800 Friday Agreement. And all the big players have been on Gordon Brown have been on and Tony Blair

00:06:47.560 had been on. They'd all been talking about, you know, what a fantastic agreement this was.

00:06:52.220 And then I think it was Mo Molum's son-in-law rang in and basically said, what about Mo Molum?

00:06:56.520 And everyone went, oh, yeah, right. Oh, yeah, she was a myth, you know. And it's just something

00:07:00.980 we do within our culture. We have this tendency to forget women and not only the achievement,

00:07:06.780 but also the tremendous suffering. And for me, what Claire has come up with, the idea of this

00:07:12.260 National Monument, you know, the male monuments that we have to male victimhood are war memorials.

00:07:19.080 Yeah.

00:07:19.900 They are the victims of the state, in a sense, the men who died in the war. And women are not

00:07:25.340 notated routinely on war memorials or haven't been until very recently. So certainly World War I

00:07:31.320 war memorials, for example, don't tend to include any of the female names. And that is the case,

00:07:37.120 you know, in Scotland, we had the Scottish Women's Hospitals, and we had many, many women who

00:07:41.640 volunteered and went off to to to to run the hospitals in serbia in france you know all over

00:07:48.020 belgium uh as well and and um some of these women died and they're not included on the on the war

00:07:54.140 memorials where their brothers are i didn't realize that i didn't want to admit that in public

00:08:01.720 but i didn't realize that women did die during the first world war in conflict it was absolutely

00:08:07.120 massive. So we just had Elsie Ingalls, who's a Scottish doctor from Edinburgh, marched up to 0.86

00:08:12.140 Edinburgh Castle, got on hold of the colonel in charge and said to him, I want to go and set up

00:08:16.840 some hospitals to help in this war. And he said, dear lady, go home and sit still. Elsie went home,

00:08:23.480 rallied a whole load of her female doctor friends, went to the French government. The French 0.82

00:08:27.160 government gave them a grant and they set up a number of these hospitals. And the headquarters

00:08:32.420 was in St Andrews Square in Edinburgh

00:08:34.160 and they saved

00:08:36.640 literally thousands upon thousands

00:08:38.740 upon thousands of lives 0.99

00:08:40.200 and it was staffed by women 1.00

00:08:42.140 it was female doctors, it was female 0.74

00:08:44.440 nurses, it was called the Scottish Women's Hospitals

00:08:46.740 and we have no major monument

00:08:48.360 I mean this is your next job Claire

00:08:49.740 No, no, I was thinking Sarah

00:08:51.280 I see a whole new campaign starting

00:08:54.120 ahead of you 1.00

00:08:55.220 And these women are not

00:08:58.280 on war memorials, their brothers are

00:09:00.140 the men who died are

00:09:01.460 they are not and is you know that is an injustice quite as much as witches who are

00:09:06.620 victims of the state victims of religious intolerance victims of social intolerance

00:09:13.240 and in many cases as well we need those kind of monuments as well because it's part of painting

00:09:19.060 our history in the whole and and we're missing you know half the story all the way through it's

00:09:25.160 crazy i think the recent black lives matter events and people pulling down statues that

00:09:30.960 didn't properly represent the past was a really really powerful symbol that people are no longer

00:09:36.980 willing to accept a history that's just given to them without without challenge anymore i thought

00:09:44.500 that was a really powerful thing to have happened recently and i hope it does signify that people

00:09:50.740 are more interested in showing in public spaces the true history the black lives matter protest

00:09:58.780 protested the statue in St. Andrew's Square of Henry Melville.

00:10:03.760 And that statue hasn't come down, but recently they've put up an explanation next to the statue

00:10:08.700 to talk about his role within the slave trade and perpetuating the slave trade, in fact.

00:10:13.080 And he's a very, you know, blackened figure, really.

00:10:16.400 I mean, he's quite, he's very controversial.

00:10:19.180 I don't know how much you know about it and how much we need to go into it on a podcast

00:10:22.640 that's essentially about witchcraft, but I would love to see that statue come down.

00:10:25.960 you know we need really we need to free up some of the spaces in our you know in edinburgh we have

00:10:32.160 just so many spaces that are taken over by male statues of people who for one reason or another

00:10:37.860 just really shouldn't be there and we need to start looking at that with a kind of more honest

00:10:42.660 eye because statutory and street names and things are about honoring honoring the memory they're not

00:10:48.780 just about telling our history and we shouldn't be we shouldn't be honoring those memories for me

00:10:53.820 it's really interesting with the witches is to open up that whole sort of public concept of who

00:10:59.740 the witches were that they weren't just this kind of mass of old women with warts and pointy hats

00:11:06.080 you know that they were actually lots and lots of women and some men too obviously who were

00:11:11.460 caught in the trap of this sort of really hideous kind of social movement we saw you of course down

00:11:18.060 at Curis for the commemoration event for Lilius and I was wondering if you could maybe tell us

00:11:24.920 a bit more about the Lilius story that we briefly touched on last episode. I love Lilius I mean

00:11:30.320 some of the witches stories stand out there were over 3,000 women died in Scotland and we don't

00:11:35.960 know all of their stories but there are a few that you know really stand out and what I love

00:11:39.980 about Lilius she's an older woman and she died in 1704 she was taken to the Kirk Sessions the church

00:11:46.260 and she was questioned she was tortured for probably around a month and they questioned

00:11:51.460 her and questioned her and questioned her and and she admitted all kinds of things including

00:11:56.340 having sex with the devil and the devil coming to visit and all kinds of stuff but they were

00:12:00.940 constantly pressing her to give up the names of other witches in her coven and she wouldn't do 0.98

00:12:06.520 that she gave them the names of women that they already had but she wouldn't give them anyone new

00:12:11.920 And that probably extended her torture, but it meant that she didn't spread that fear any further.

00:12:18.640 And sadly, Lillias died before she could be convicted.

00:12:24.760 And so she's one of the only, in fact, I think she is the only witch's grave that we have because her body was never burned.

00:12:31.320 They buried her at the shoreline because they were so afraid she would rise from the dead and come to seek revenge.

00:12:37.480 and the shoreline where the tide comes in

00:12:40.020 is traditionally an area

00:12:41.760 that it's difficult for spirits to cross

00:12:43.860 and so she was buried on the beach

00:12:45.700 near where she lived at Toryburn

00:12:47.520 I didn't realise that was part of the thinking

00:12:50.060 of where to bury her

00:12:51.600 I mean I realised they took her out to the shore

00:12:53.520 and they put her in a box

00:12:55.120 and they locked the box

00:12:56.440 and then they put the enormous slab

00:12:59.500 of stone over her

00:13:01.360 but I didn't realise that that was a particular reason

00:13:03.780 that they'd put her there in the water

00:13:05.200 yeah it's like a superstition spirits can't cross that that's a sort of in between two worlds place

00:13:11.320 if you like isn't it remarkable it was driven supposedly by christianity but at the same time

00:13:17.680 sort of you know it was the church that were very involved in it obviously but then to have such

00:13:22.320 pagan idea is really remarkable yeah i mean it's groupthink you know the church at this point in

00:13:30.140 history um they believe they're doing a good thing and people often say oh do you really believe in

00:13:35.360 the witches you know did they really believe that they must have just been out to settle scores or

00:13:38.900 whatever but no they did really believe it and they believed it was their duty you know people

00:13:42.380 had that absolute complete burning belief that if they didn't try and execute witches then terrible

00:13:48.880 things would happen god would come and wreak havoc upon them for not sort of looking after society by

00:13:54.100 naming and punishing these people and so you know it's quite easy when you're looking backwards

00:13:59.740 to look backwards through all the things that you know and you learned you see this quite often as a 0.99

00:14:04.540 historical novelist you know people think oh weren't they so stupid in the victorian era not 0.96

00:14:08.480 to have invented penicillin of course they hadn't invented penicillin if you hadn't invented 0.92

00:14:12.380 penicillin also believes that you know weird things like you know if you put um tobacco up

00:14:18.220 your bottom it would help with your cancer whatever all kinds of weird medical sort of

00:14:23.360 medical things and it's the same with this you know we we live in a world where i mean people

00:14:28.580 are still superstitious but superstitions were were i think much more real people were looking

00:14:34.360 for order and desperately in a kind of fairly chaotic world um and we forget how dangerous

00:14:41.380 the world was medieval era that was because king james really legitimized the whole thing though

00:14:46.760 wasn't it that was because um he became obsessed and and then wrote the book in demonology and

00:14:52.460 And everyone from nobility down had, as you described it quite rightly, a burning belief, literally, quite literally in the cases of these poor women, that people who were beholden to the devil were were amongst us.

00:15:05.360 But remember, he was taken away. He was inducted by John Knox himself until the age of about seven or eight.

00:15:14.160 And John Knox, a massive misogynist, absolutely hated Mary Queen of Scots, James's mother, and demonized her to this very young child.

00:15:23.220 And so this idea of, you know, Scottish woman being evil, Scottish woman being out to get things and do evil things.

00:15:29.160 I sort of feel like there's a whole Freudian analysis of James, which is yet to be undertaken almost. 0.78

00:15:36.300 And I wrote an essay, actually, which I haven't done anything with yet, called We Are All Witches, which is about this process of demonizing women so that there is no way out. 0.62

00:15:45.480 And we see this today. We see it often online. We see it in newspapers. We see the way that our media deal with women.

00:15:54.020 And there is a sense in which, you know, that that witchcraft mentality kind of lives on in this country.

00:16:01.140 And of course, it lives on for real in other places in the world, in Africa and in India, where there are still witchcraft trials go on and people are still executed.

00:16:09.160 And that's something we're going to be covering in one of our future episodes.

00:16:11.760 We've got an expert who will be talking to us about the experiences in the country in which he works.

00:16:17.260 But we'll reveal that in time.

00:16:19.400 Oh, how exciting.

00:16:20.860 How would you like to see the witches memorialised?

00:16:23.320 So have you had any thoughts about how that might look?

00:16:26.980 Oh, I mean, I think about memorials for women all the time.

00:16:29.380 In Where Are the Women, I had some individual monuments to witches,

00:16:32.680 but I made a national monument, which was in a burnt out church

00:16:35.880 in the middle of the countryside.

00:16:37.600 The church exists, actually.

00:16:39.320 And it was a trail that you would follow to the church.

00:16:42.240 And then this church would have inside it all kinds of herbs

00:16:46.100 that were put around the walls.

00:16:48.060 And I worked with a perfume consultant, Alex Musgrave,

00:16:50.660 who gave me ideas for which herbs would work well together in a damp ruined church

00:16:56.500 which smelled of charcoal because it had been burnt out like an amazing monument like a totally

00:17:02.260 sensual monument and I quite often when I look back as far as the witches smell is where I go

00:17:09.000 because it's a sense that hasn't changed it's an aesthetic that hasn't changed we still think

00:17:13.340 that the same stuff smells good or smells stimulating and yeah so that in my imagined

00:17:19.380 monument to the witches was a burnt out church with a lot of herbs in it where you could go and

00:17:24.200 commune with that spirit of these sort of fallen women that sounds absolutely amazing it sounds

00:17:32.300 doesn't it it just it's so clever just drawn to the idea of it but it's it's not your first

00:17:38.940 foray into saints and witches is it um no i i my daughter and i founded together a perfume company

00:17:46.620 in 2016 which we actually only closed earlier this year it's a four-year project to look at

00:17:52.960 commemorating women through scent and we had two scents and that we brought out we almost

00:17:57.460 but we were halted in our tracks by politics and events and things and the first one was called 0.86

00:18:02.980 Damn Rebel Bitches which was in memory of the Jacobite women and the second was Ascent to the

00:18:08.380 Witches and working with a perfumer for the witches we wanted to use scents that would have 0.97

00:18:13.340 really made sense to the women of that era in their lives so we used um hazelnut and we used 0.90

00:18:20.020 blood orange you know these things that these things that were almost like luxuries at the

00:18:24.020 time and hazelnut was a very stable stable food and we wanted to make it smell green we wanted

00:18:29.600 to make it smell of outdoors and of animal so we had a kind of leather scent to it a tobacco

00:18:34.720 um so that it would smell kind of um green and of you know even cities during the medieval era

00:18:41.700 were actually what today we would consider them pretty rural in many ways there were animals about

00:18:46.800 there was you know people growing stuff everywhere so um yeah we wanted to create a scent that sort

00:18:52.840 of commemorated them through smells that they would have they would have recognized as part

00:18:57.140 of their lives and of course malt because so many women were brewers and there is a whole

00:19:02.540 theory of study that the witches were part of the witchcraft sort of mentality was men taking over

00:19:08.740 the brewing industry, victimising women who had these sort of tall hats, which were the uniform,

00:19:14.220 if you like, of the brewer, the tall hat with the broom. You had brewed and you had fresh ale, 0.63

00:19:19.020 you would hang out a broom outside your cottage and people could buy that ale. And so a lot of

00:19:23.460 the iconography around the witches actually ties in with iconography around medieval women who were

00:19:30.280 brewing. We would love to get a medieval historian to come and talk to us more about that. I think

00:19:35.760 you've already did that in your investigations didn't you sarah yeah we did we had a um we had 1.00

00:19:41.420 a blog called uh bitches unite lots of people came on bitches unite and wrote about the beauty 0.94

00:19:46.300 industry and the way that it shows women's bodies and and wrote about the perfume industry and how 0.90

00:19:51.380 wasteful and unsustainable it usually is and wrote about women's history as well so we had a really

00:19:56.800 interesting mix of women who are historians and academics activists and politicians and things

00:20:01.500 who were all kind of involved in giving their view and the writer that wrote that piece I think

00:20:06.440 was doing a PhD actually on it so there's definitely people out there with the smarts

00:20:10.620 to come on and chat to you. Well we definitely are following in your footsteps. It's such an

00:20:16.880 endlessly fascinating subject you know the fact that we're talking about the witches but then

00:20:21.300 we're talking you know more broadly about social history and about the way that people lived in

00:20:25.320 the medieval times and the way the church was. Absolutely I mean I think the problem is with

00:20:30.940 such short periods of time that we have on podcasts we can definitely take any of these

00:20:36.620 conversations and make them into several different podcasts so I do hope Sarah that you will come

00:20:43.700 back and speak to us again as the campaign continues because I definitely think we want

00:20:49.240 to go into some more of the detail about female visibility in public places and about what it

00:20:54.540 means to have a position in the world and how we properly record history going forward so that the

00:21:01.680 women's place is central to it. A big thanks to Sarah Sheridan for joining us this week.

00:21:09.460 I hope you found that discussion as fascinating as we did and we're certainly hoping to have

00:21:13.580 Sarah back on in the future as the project develops. Thanks so much for being here and

00:21:19.720 please tune in next time for episode

00:21:21.600 three. Can you say

00:21:23.780 tuning in? I feel like

00:21:25.800 the old tackiness of that.

00:21:28.780 Do

00:21:29.000 set your radio cassette recorder

00:21:31.940 to record our radio

00:21:33.660 I think we still need to have 0.99

00:21:35.640 If you'd like to learn more about the Witches of 0.98

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Witches of Scotland - October 04, 2020

SARA SHERIDAN - WHERE ARE THE WOMEN？

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