Footprints of the Clan

"The flame tuik fast upon her cheik
Tuik fast upon her chin;
Tuik fast upon her faire bodye -
She burn'd like hollins green."

Traditional Ballad by Earl Richard

According to Ehrenreich and English, witches' crimes fall roughly into three categories: organization, female sexuality, and healing.

Witches were accused of gathering together to bring about evils and various events. Some women still celebrated the old folk religions with music and rituals outside the Church and met for fellowship. Certainly other news would have been passed along at these gatherings, including news of political interest. These organizations were seen as subversive activities, undermining the sovereignty of the Church. So part of the witches' crime became socially organizing.

A second crime was acknowledging and embracing sexuality. A witch supposedly used her sexuality to do harm to men. Under the old ways, sexuality was a gift. Under the Church's view, sexuality became a sin. Beginning with Eve, women were seen as the root of mans' fall from grace. Husbands were urged by the clergy to beat their wives "for charity to her soul". According to the Malleus Maleficarum, all witchcraft came from women's insatiable carnal lust, expressed by witches' sexual relations with the Devil. They also bewitched men and cast spells that made men's sexual organs disappear.

The third general category of witches' crimes is healing, perhaps the most interesting and unexpected of the charges. How did healing and relieving pain and suffering become a target of these witch hunts? In rural areas where the witch burnings occurred, wisewomen had long been called on to comfort and heal. They used plants and herbs to cure in the tradition of the Earth Goddesses that had been celebrated across many cultures. Williams & Adelman explain that unmarried or widow women who could not support themselves in other ways often claimed powers to cure animals or humans in return for bare sustenance.

Women healers challenged the Church's position that the ability to cure, thus the powers of life and death, lay exclusively in the hands of God and his earthly emissaries (i.e., male priests). Midwives were especially dangerous. They eased the pain of labor, God's punishment to all women for Eve's sin. And they went against God's will in practicing birth control and abortion. Midwives offered newborns to the Devil. In an age when any complications in childbirth could readily lead to death, safe childbirth could be blamed on the witch midwives' supernatural powers. A death could be blamed on her evil work.

These folk remedies were also outside the law and university medical "knowledge" of the period. Women who professed to heal without studying medicine were considered lawbreakers, even though women were not allowed into medical schools and the medical schools had nothing better to offer. The Church and physicians (many from the Catholic elite) were not able to stop the illnesses and deaths brought by Black Death and the epidemics that followed. Much to the disapproval of the ruling elite in church, state, and medicine, people turned to wise women for help since the Church wasn't helping them. The Church also perceived this as a challenge to its' authority. Although university trained physicians had no better knowledge of controlling illness than these laywomen, the testimony of male doctors was used against many accused witches. Physicians could reputedly tell if an illness was from witchcraft or a biological cause. For example, an illness resulting from witchcraft could not be relieved by drugs (conveniently excusing the physician from any accountability for his own inability to bring relief).

-- Kathy S. Stolley

Although literally thousands of people were burned throughout Europe for being convicted of these crimes the situation in Britain was comparatively mild to the Continent, for these beliefs spread slowly and in crossing the Channel they lost much of their potency.

The practise of burning witches was never really adopted in England although direct dissenters with the established religion were treated as heretics and then burned (not much better). Witches were burned in Scotland and, again unlike England, torture was used to gain confessions of guilt from them.

Not only was much of the potency of the witch-hysteria in Europe lost in reaching Britain, but it arrived at a later date and the type of heretic-witch who was constantly pursued by the Inquisition in Europe was virtually unknown in Scotland, until a law was passed against them by Mary Queen of Scots in 1563.

Mary was the wife of the Dauphin of France and inherited the throne of Scotland on the death of her mother (Mary of Guise). She brought many European ideas with her and her Act was based on the assumption that witchcraft equated with heresy, hence burning became the prescribed punishment for a traitor, a heretic or a witch -- but not for a murderer.

At the same time the Scottish Reformation was taking place. The Protestant John Knox lived to see the Catholic Queen Mary lose her power -- she flew to England, Elizabeth I and her death -- but the punishment of witches remained the same under the reformed church and the persecution of witches was carried out with more thoroughness than before. Although witch-hunting in Scotland continued sporadically between about 1500 and 1700, there were three main peak-periods of activity, 1590-97, 1640-44 and 1660-63.