Witch Persecution and Folk Belief in Lowland Scotland: The Devil’s Decade

Abstract

The Witchcraft Act of 1563, in citing the ‘abominabill superstitioun’ employed by certain of lieges of the realm through using witchcraft, sorcery and necromancy, and the ‘credence gevin thairto in tymes bygane aganis the Law of God’, effectively identified diablerie and folk belief with the medieval Church.¹ The Reformers, however, operated within a well-established ecclesiastical tradition, for the authorities’ suspicion of folk belief and popular culture was of very long standing. The Kirk had been concerned about witches since at least the thirteenth century. The formulaic sentence of excommunication from that period, to be pronounced four times a year, included ‘witches and all who countenance and protect and support them in their evil doings as well as those who are parties with them in their misdeeds’. The sixteenth-century version mentioned ‘al wichis and trowaris [i.e. believers] in thaim’. The Statutes of the Scottish Church prescribed excommunication for all fortune tellers, witches male and female, incendiaries, violators of churches, and other such offenders. The fourteenth-century St Andrews statutes had a similarly wide remit including ‘all sorcerers and those believing in them’.² After 1560, since there was widespread opinion, not to mention fear, that superstition sustained the Catholic faith, all such superstition had to be eradicated.