Scottish Witch Map

...or the cold is just God's way of telling the Scots to burn more witches   

An interesting resource if you are interested in witchcraft and/or Scottish history https://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/ even if it is quite clunky (esp for a modern website)

I am disturbed however at going through the records of the number of surnames I recognise, of Scottish friends (and a couple of exes...which might explain things).  

It's also worth pointing out that, despite popular myth, it was the Scots who were keen on burning witches, not the English.  Generally, in Scotland witchcraft was seen as an "acceptable" charge to lay against someone in the courts whereas in England a judge was more likely to go "really?" at such a charge...it's what makes Matthew Hopkin's reign of terror more the shocking (though that can be at least in part be attributed to the disruption in the concept of the "circuit judge" caused by the War of Three Kingdoms and its aftermath)

This is an interesting map, though you need to zoom in to get to some of the really interesting detail.

There do seem to be a few oddities like:

1. Eyemouth had the same number of witches burnt as the much larger town of Ayr (30). From what I can establish Ayr has always been much larger. Both towns were ports. Eyemouth is a rather pleasant little place, more a village today than a town, 7 miles from the English border. Makes me wonder if some of the 'witches' were actually English.

2. Compare these numbers to the likes of Perth (18) and Dundee (2) which should have much larger populations and it does seem strange.

3. Inverness had 25, but Aberdeen had 65, which given its larger Catholic population does make me wonder if Catholics were condemned as witches rather than 'heretics' - after all it is rather difficult for protestants to condemn other religious groups as heretics given they themselves are. It would have been rather interesting if the data had recorded the confessed 'religion' of the 'witches'. Of course it may not have been particularly accurate, but it could have revealed one motive of the accusers?

4. The other oddity on the map is that the location marked is not necessarily where they were found. Take Katherine Ross who is marked on the map as being in the highlands - she was actually tracked down in Edinburgh 1577, marked as 'nobility' and a widow. Seems awfully convenient that a property owning widow should be denounced as a witch by her stepson who wanted her lands. Following the case notes (available by drilling down) she appears to have been accused of killing 2 heirs, and wanting to dispose of members of her family by poisoning; she wasn't convicted until 1590 when her 'co-conspirators' confessed. If she really had been a 'witch' then she wasn't a very competent one as in the 13 years she was under investigation they didn't seem to find anything against her.

On the broader point, I would agree that the Scots were much more ready to accuse people of witchcraft whereas in England the enemy was not so much 'witches' as Catholics, so they relied on Recusancy laws and rounding up Catholic missionary priests. Scotland did have plenty of anti-Catholic laws so I'm not quite sure why this should have been the case unless it was simply harder to get the evidence together to charge people with being Catholic in Scotland, possibly because of lower population density and that much of the old nobility still clung to the Catholic faith. So instead the Scots had to terrorise their people with phoney charges and rumours of witchcraft.

Perhaps I shouldn't introduce professional nurses in Scotland just in case they end up being burnt as witches?

Or I could pursue the more enlightened course of sending suspected witches on an expedition to find Nessie. If they find him then they are clearly guilty; if they don't then they must be innocent.