In August 2023, we spoke with playwright Laurie Flanigan-Hegge about Prick, her play about the Scottish witch trials. It had just premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Two years later, the play has traveled to New Orleans, Wellington (New Zealand), and opens November 6-16, 2025 at the Den Theater in Chicago.
We reunite with Laurie and puppet artist Madeline Helling and meet two directors: Jeff Mills of Chicago’s Proboscis Theater Company and Amy Chaffee from Tulane University.
The conversation covers what it’s like staging historical violence, why the single puppet design works so powerfully, and how a play about 17th-century Scotland keeps finding new relevance.
About the Play
Prick examines the Scottish witch trials through three women: an Unknown Woman lost to history, Marioun Twedy of Peebles, and Isobel Gowdie. The title refers to “pricking”โsearching accused women’s bodies for the “devil’s mark” with sharp instruments.
The play moves between past and present, uses dark humor and Scottish folk music, and centers on a single haunting puppet created by Madeline Helling.
What They Discuss
The rehearsal process: Both directors talk about the challenge of staging the pricking scenes, even with a puppet. Jeff’s Chicago cast continues working through how to show violence respectfully. Amy’s New Orleans students couldn’t bring the instrument near the puppetโthey performed the gesture from twelve feet away.
The puppet’s power: Madeline designed one puppet to represent all the accused women. It’s specific enough to feel real, neutral enough that audiences project onto it. The puppet travels between productions and comes back to her for repairs.
Contemporary connections: The play addresses ongoing witch hunts in countries where witchcraft remains a state crime. Amy teaches in Louisiana and discusses working in a politically charged environment. Jeff talks about theater as “rehumanization” in response to current dehumanization.
The music: Both productions use songs by Heal and Harrow, a folk duo who created an album for the Witches of Scotland Campaign. Jeff adds Scottish guitar with electronics. Amy’s students performed acapella arrangements.
Cultural complications: Amy reflects on taking the play to Wellington, New Zealandโa colonial capitalโat a conference focused on integrating Mฤori culture with acting and voice techniques. The play deals with Scotland as both colonized and colonizer, which created complex responses from audiences of different backgrounds.
“Remembrance Is Resistance”
This Witches of Scotland Campaign motto runs through the conversation. The campaign seeks pardons and memorials for nearly 5,000 documented accused. They created a tartan anyone can wear to show support.
At Tulane, one student built a monument inscribed with every name from the database and installed it in the lobby.
Chicago Production
November 6-16, 2025 The Den Theater, Milwaukee Avenue Tickets: thedentheatre.com (search “Prick”)
Two weekends only. Proboscis Theater Company’s production features new jackdaw puppets and is reaching out to both theater audiences and Chicago’s pagan communities.
Guest Bios
Laurie Flanigan-Hegge is a playwright whose work focuses on historical events. She created Prick in collaboration with the Witches of Scotland Campaign for Justice. The play premiered at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has since been produced in the US and New Zealand. She has been collaborating with Jeff Mills and Amy Chaffee for 35 years.
Madeline Helling is a puppet artist based in Minneapolis. She designed and built the central puppet for Prick, representing the accused women of the Scottish witch trials. The puppet has traveled with the production to all its venues and returns to her for repairs between shows.
Jeff Mills is Co-Artistic Director of Proboscis Theater Company in Chicago. He is directing the Chicago production of Prick (November 6-16, 2025 at the Den Theater). A former member of an Irish-Scottish music band, he is also composing the sound design for the production. He has been friends and collaborators with Laurie and Amy for 35 years.
Amy Chaffee is Associate Professor of Voice and Acting at Tulane University in New Orleans. She directed the North American premiere of Prick at Tulane with nine undergraduate students, then took the production to Wellington, New Zealand for the Oceania premiere at an international theater festival. She primarily works as a voice coach and dialect coach in film and television.
Why Listen
Four theater artists who’ve been friends for 35 years discuss the ethics and challenges of bringing historical trauma to the stage. They’re honest about what works, what’s difficult, and why this particular play keeps finding new audiences.
If you’re interested in historical witch trials, feminist theater, puppetry, or how the past connects to the present, this conversation offers substance without sensationalism.
Related Episode: Episode 47 (August 2023) – Original discussion before Edinburgh premiere
Resources:
Witches of Scotland Campaign
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database
Heal and Harrow (musicians)
thedentheatre.com
Keywords: Scottish witch trials, Prick play, Witches of Scotland, Chicago theater, Den Theater, puppet theater, witch trial history, Laurie Flanigan-Hegge, Jeff Mills, Amy Chaffee, Madeline Helling
The Thing About Witch Hunts explores historical persecution and its continuing echoes. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
What happens when a society finally confronts one of its darkest chapters? In Scotland, a growing movement is demanding recognition for the thousands of women killed during the country’s brutal witch huntsโa campaign that reveals how historical injustices continue to shape us today. Dr. Margaret Malloch from the University of Stirling joins us to discuss her project “Memorializing Injustice,” examining different campaigns of remembrance and exploring why remembering these forgotten victims matters now more than ever, and what Scotland’s reckoning can teach us about confronting uncomfortable truths. A thought-provoking conversation about memory, how we understand justice, and the stories society chooses to tell.
Join Josh and Sarah as they explore one of Scotland’s most notorious witch trials – the Paisley Witch Trials of 1697 (also known as the Bargarran or Renfrewshire Witch Trials). This case represents a major witch hunt and mass execution in late 17th century Europe, where seven people lost their lives in Paisley after being accused by eleven-year-old Christian Shaw.
What You’ll Learn: โข How eleven-year-old Christian Shaw’s accusations against 35 people spiraled into Scotland’s last major witch hunt โข The story behind the seven executions that took place in Paisley on June 10, 1697 โข How fear and superstition transformed a Scottish community into a site of tragedy โข The connection between the Paisley trials and other witch hunts across Europe and America โข Insights from someone who has walked the very streets where these events unfolded
The Seven Executed on June 10, 1697: โข Margaret Lang โข John Lindsay โข James Lindsay โข John Lindsay of Barloch โข Katherine Campbell โข Margaret Fulton โข Agnes Naismith
Our guest, Gayle Pollock, brings a unique perspective to this dark history. Gayle doesn’t just study these events – she lives and breathes them. Walking the same streets where the accusations were made and lives were lost has given her an intimate understanding of how this tragedy actually unfolded. Her immersion in the landscape and the story provides insights you simply can’t get from books alone.
As we remember the accused in Paisley in 1697 and honor Bridget Bishop, who was hanged in Salem on June 10, 1692, we’re reminded of the importance of questioning fear and superstition wherever it may lead.
Don’t forget to check out this week’s episode of The Thing About Salem podcast, and join us next time as we continue to examine the dark corners of history.
Between 1542 and 1735, British courts convicted over 3,000 people under witchcraft legislation. Now, author Charlotte Meredith is leading a campaign to secure their pardons. We first met Charlotte at this fall’s Witchcraft and Human Rights Conference in Lancaster, where advocates gathered to address both historical and modern witch hunts. Her work is so compelling that we knew we needed to bring this conversation to our listeners. Her “Justice for Witches” campaign gathered over 13,000 signatures, pushing for official recognition of one of Britain’s most profound miscarriages of justice. Charlotte details the stark regional differences in witch persecution, explaining why Scotland’s execution count was five times that of England, and illuminates how these historical injustices echo in modern witch hunts around the world. Through her careful research and advocacy, Charlotte makes a compelling case for why these historical pardons matter in contemporary society, revealing how patterns of persecution persist from past to present. Join us for a conversation that bridges centuries and shows how historical recognition can help address ongoing human rights violations.
Join us for an exciting collaboration as Witch Hunt meets Witches of Scotland in this special crossover episode. Hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack sit down with Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell to explore the parallel paths of witch trial justice advocacy across the Atlantic. From Connecticut to Scotland, discover how these podcasters are working to right historical wrongs while preventing modern-day witch hunts. Key topics include contrasts between American and Scottish witch trial histories, the unique challenges of tracing witch trial ancestry in different cultures, Dorothy Good’s heartbreaking story: imprisoned at age 4 in Salem, current advocacy efforts for exoneration and remembrance, and modern witch hunt phenomena and their global impact. The discussion also features Connecticut’s witch trial history and recent exoneration efforts, Scotland’s unique legal framework for addressing historical injustices, the challenges of creating memorials in both countries, modern-day witch hunts and their global prevalence, and the role of gender in historical and contemporary witch accusations.
Writer Laurie Flanigan-Hegge, director Meggie Greivell, and puppet artist Madeline Helling speak about their new play production Prick. Prick is inspired by the Witches of Scotland campaign and tells the story of folk who were victims of the terrible miscarriage of justice of the witch trials in Scotland. The story of Prick traverses magic and memory, fact and fiction, past and present. This special conversation is a reflection of the evocative, poetic, and satirical way artistic work can deliver a relevant and critical message about our history and human experience.
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Hello, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: Today we're here with the makers of the play Prick, which is now showing at Edinburgh Fringe. We are talking to writer Laurie Flanigan Hegge, director Meggie Greivell, and puppet artist Madeline Helling.
[00:00:46] Sarah Jack: Prick is a satirical play about Scottish witch trials.
[00:00:50] Josh Hutchinson: Features stories of three witch trial victims, including an unknown woman, Marioun Twedy, and Isobel [00:01:00] Gowdie.
[00:01:00] Sarah Jack: There's difficult topics dealt with in the story, like pricking and shaving and watching of the alleged witches, and it's really an important part of understanding what thousands of women went through a few centuries ago.
[00:01:19] Josh Hutchinson: Puppetry is employed throughout. The art of the puppets is masterful, and how they're used in the scenes really brings life to the settings, and the puppets help make uncomfortable topics more comfortable. It's a quite enjoyable play. There's dark comedic elements to it, and it's got the devil himself.
[00:01:48] Sarah Jack: Laurie, Meggie, and Madeline have a great conversation with us about how this play came together, the significance.
[00:01:59] Josh Hutchinson: A [00:02:00] lot of the themes of the play are very relevant today, including the ever present element of misogyny in the witch trials and in women's lives these days, also. And so you learn about the double meaning of the name Prick, why they chose that name.
[00:02:25] Sarah Jack: In this conversation, they share some things that you're not gonna get from just attending the play, so this is a really great opportunity to understand the layers. Here is a special conversation about Prick, which was written by Laurie, directed by Meggie, with puppets created by Madeline.
[00:02:48] Josh Hutchinson: What brought your creation team and performance team together?
[00:02:53] Meggie Greivell: So I reached out to Laurie last summer with [00:03:00] the hopes of writing a play about the Scottish Witch Trials, because it had piqued my interest since I moved to Scotland in 2021. I found out about the North Berwick Witch Trials, and I was very shocked and angered. And I'm graduating with my master's in directing soon. And this project is my directing thesis. I needed a play that was a new work, and I reached out to Laurie, because I'd worked with her before at the History Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I really loved her writing. And she said yes, she was interested in writing this play, and that's how we began. And Laurie, do you wanna take it from there?
[00:03:43] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It was interesting, because when Meggie asked me to do it, it was at a point where I had been, is the word fallow? When you don't have, you haven't been writing or like it, it had been a very fallow time for me, and I was just so happy to have a project to explore, but [00:04:00] I didn't know how to get into this project at first. The subject was so huge, and once I started researching, I felt pretty daunted by kind of the scope of it and a little bit nervous about the fact that I'm an American playwright who has, at that point I hadn't been to Scotland and I didn't really understand the history.
[00:04:21] And then as things clicked along in my research, things started coming together in my brain. My introduction to this piece was through listening to modern media, which is podcasts. I was listening to your podcast and Witches of Scotland podcast and getting to know all of the amazing writers and historians and researchers through their own words.
[00:04:49] And as time went on, I got more and more immersed in the understanding of the witch trials and how things connected. And I'm still right now [00:05:00] working on understanding what's happening in the modern world, which I was just saying, Sarah, that I had listened recently to your episode about Papua New Guinea, and it was, came for me at a very timely moment in my own understanding of just how our modern world is expressing this same horror that the women in this play lived through. But you'll notice in the play that media and the, kicking off with news of Scotland and my little kind of twisted take on that it is directly related to my relationship to media and the subject of the witch trials and the spread of witchcraft through the modern world.
[00:05:40] Sarah Jack: And did you guys plan on incorporating puppetry?
[00:05:45] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I would say right out of the gate I knew that I had the title Prick before I had anything else. When I heard about witch prickers I was, I said, "Meggie, I'd like to call it Prick." And she said, "yes, please do." And I knew that I wanted pricking [00:06:00] and the pricker to be a theme of the play but that I did not want to ask any actor or audience member to be subjected to seeing any kind of torture or harm inflicted on a body on stage.
[00:06:17] And so from the gate, I said, I'd like to incorporate puppets. And by the way, my neighbor across the street is a puppet artist that I've been dying to work with. That's Madeline Helling. She's with us today. And I told Meggie I wanted to use puppets. She gave me a wholehearted endorsement and Madeline was immediately part of the process. Madeline, do you wanna say anything about that?
[00:06:41] Madeline: Oh yeah, just Laurie said, "I have this project, it's about the witch trials." And I, yeah, it was an easy yes, easy thing to say yes to. The theme and working with Laurie and then doing this in Scotland was very exciting. Yeah, and Minneapolis is a really vibrant puppet community, so [00:07:00] I've had a lot of amazing experience working with a lot of amazing people here. That helped me gain some skills to do that.
[00:07:09] Josh Hutchinson: That's interesting. I didn't know that about Minneapolis.
[00:07:13] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, it's a hotbed actually. There's a large puppet community and the, so the vocabulary of using puppets is something that I'm really familiar with as a theater artist, and I think, because of that vocabulary, and Meggie has lived in the Twin Cities too. We know, we all understand like what a puppet can mean in terms of emotion and how evocative a puppet can be. It's like a musical element. Does that jive with what you would say, Madeline, that there's a lyricism to using puppets?
[00:07:41] Madeline: Yeah, I think it's just a language understood the world over and it's a street language that like, it's just, it's a cheap art form that is, there's roots in it all over the world. And in that way it has this sort of universality to it. And there's this way that [00:08:00] puppets, like everything they do has to be articulated. And in that way it can draw a little more focus and attention on certain elements, physical elements like breath is an action in a purposeful way, which is, I feel like for this play, for Prick it makes so much sense to have puppets in it.
[00:08:22] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: We also wanted to incorporate aspects of the world, of the other world, the familiars. and. When I said to Madeline, "I'd like a fox, a jackdaw," immediately that was possible and shape-shifting is possible. And it did organically change. My first draft, I think, Meggie, I said that there were puppets attached to bodies on stage, and that was just my first thought about it. And it evolved into the design that Madeline brought to us. But yeah, Meggie, I don't know. What did you think when I said puppets right away? You never seemed to fight that.
[00:08:55] Meggie Greivell: I jumped right in. I was gonna say puppets are also [00:09:00] having, I think, a golden age in theater right now. In the UK they are, I think in the US they are, too. But in the UK, especially, with shows like a Warhorse that was, took over the West End and the Life of Pi right now has just won so many Tony Awards. The puppet artists and the tiger won a Tony Award. It was the first ever puppeteers to win a Tony Award, the seven actors that play the tiger.
[00:09:28] I'd never done it before, and I thought this sounds like a great opportunity to learn and for all of the student actors to learn, as well. And also I knew that it would help tell our story that we wanna tell, especially with The Accused puppet and not wanting to show a woman being tortured on stage. But also The Accused has become this really powerful symbol for women not having control over their own bodies during the witch trials.[00:10:00] And I think puppets bring magic to the theater. Like they belong in the theater and on the street, as you say, Madeline.
[00:10:09] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It's interesting that we discovered the disassociation that people experience when they're experiencing trauma is personified by having the characters in our play talking about what happens. But it's embodied by The Accused, our puppet that we call The Accused. And so that was a very organic discovery that felt totally right. When we observed what that disassociation looked like on stage, it felt, like, oh my gosh, yes. It just felt really central to the whole premise of the piece. And we were working really quickly in conceiving and creating this piece. It was a beautiful discovery that felt completely in alignment with what we were trying to do with the piece.
[00:10:49] Meggie Greivell: And all of the audiences have been responding really strongly to all the puppets, and they understand the symbolism of The Accused immediately. [00:11:00] We've had really, really powerful responses about that and the familiar puppets as well.
[00:11:08] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: So in the piece we have three different women who are called into what we call a liminal space, and when they get there, they are conjured into the space by the ensemble, and they are facing off with the pricker character. And in that space, The Accused appears. And so when the women are conjured and they are representing their own, this kind of core character, The Accused is with them.
[00:11:35] Meggie Greivell: The Accused represents all three of the women, but also each of them individually, as well.
[00:11:42] Josh Hutchinson: Can you talk about what pricking is?
[00:11:46] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: ah, pricking.
[00:11:47] Meggie Greivell: Yes.
[00:11:48] So pricking in Scotland during the Witch Craft Act, there were witch prickers who were employed to prick and torture the women. So there, there [00:12:00] actually were witch prickers. But the play also has a beautiful double entendre. Pricking symbolizes women being pricked with misogyny, as well.
[00:12:12] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: So the witch picker would use an instrument or a tool to search for a spot on the woman's body that wouldn't bleed. Witch prickers weren't part of every single trial, but they came and went in the Scottish Witch Trials, and they were sometimes charlatans, brutal. Women would be shaved, stripped, and searched and pricked with an iron rod, looking for a place on their body that wouldn't bleed. And if it was found or falsely found, it was stated that was where the devil's mark was.
[00:12:47] Meggie Greivell: And they were paid very well to do this, and they're very respected in the community.
[00:12:55] Josh Hutchinson: I would say for our audience, a [00:13:00] similar thing happened when they would have a group of women, a jury of women search a female suspect the body looking for witches' teets. That's what they were looking for at Salem and other American trials, and they didn't use the torture method of pricking along, but if they found an insensitive place, sometimes they would stick a needle through it to see if it drained any fluid. And yeah, they would just check for insensitive locations that stood out as unusual.
[00:13:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: To think that a person would be touched in this way. And I, I think it's interesting that prickers in Scotland and the witch trials had their eras. It wasn't consistent throughout, but prickers would show up.
[00:13:57] One of the characters in our play, Marion Twedy [00:14:00] was pricked and actually that I found her in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database. And it so happens that she had two really interesting, compelling things about her case, one that she was pricked and one that she never confessed. But in her pricking, they did discover the devil's mark. We don't know what that was, but we know that she was pricked and that without a confession, the mark that was found on her was enough to end her life.
[00:14:31] Josh Hutchinson: Terrible. We, Sarah and I have ancestors who were examined that way in the Salem witch trials, not with the pricking but with the close inspection of their secret parts. And teets were found, and they said, "get some more experienced women over here." But for the pricking, it's just extremely invasive and misogynist to have a man doing that to a [00:15:00] woman. That just is so brutal. I can hardly imagine it.
[00:15:04] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The fact that sometimes the pricking instrument was a fake instrument that was enough to condemn a woman was that's not something we addressed in Prick. There was a lot I couldn't address just because the play is a one act play, but it did give a character a line, "you're pricking me now with every word," and to me that is that is the thread that Meggie was talking about earlier about the misogyny piece. Not every woman was pricked, but we all know what it feels like to be pricked in some way. And I'm not suggesting that the kind of pricking that these women underwent was in any way comparable to the pricks I felt in my life, because it's not the same, but that kind of image is resonant for all of us, I think.
[00:15:51] Sarah Jack: Absolutely.
[00:15:52] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I asked Madeline to create different size prickers, too, so that each character is met with an [00:16:00] instrument that gets bigger and bigger as the piece proceeds. So it starts out as a normal size, and then she plays with scale. So by the end, we see that this pricker is like the boogeyman is holding this pricker, and it's a little bit more universal.
[00:16:13] Josh Hutchinson: Such a powerful image.
[00:16:16] Madeline: And you just wonder at one point the person instigating or physically doing the harm disassociate themselves. So when we were like working through that piece in the show, that pricking object, like we just worked with the power that object held a bit, which was an, I dunno, it's just an interesting exercise, those elements and objects of torture.
[00:16:49] Josh Hutchinson: It's amazing to me that anybody made it through without confessing.
[00:16:55] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Zoe and Claire on the Witches of Scotland podcast, they talk about that a lot and [00:17:00] the whole thing about Scotland doesn't torture. It's like there was no torture in Scotland. It's just such a ridiculous thing to suggest that's not torture. I would've confessed for sure I wouldn't have been able to take that pain. That's how I think. Maybe I'm wrong, but.
[00:17:14] Meggie Greivell: And Marion Twedy, did you, I can't remember if you said this earlier, but the character, Marion, our play, she did not confess, and we have that in the play. She's one of the women who did not confess, which is just so unimaginable to think about that.
[00:17:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we have cases where the interrogation itself was intimidating enough to get a confession without the added physical duress, and it's just a marvel to me that anybody got through that process and even lived to be tried.
[00:17:56] Sarah Jack: Does the play open with a strong start [00:18:00] or do you ease the audience into things?
[00:18:02] Meggie Greivell: I would say it opens with a strong start.
[00:18:05] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It opens with it well, some audience members have described it as a chant or an incantation. But it starts with a list of communities around Scotland and one of our actors, she's from the Isle of Skye, and she said, "oh, this sounds like a walking song," and she came up with the song to go along with it. So it comes across as this really beautiful kind of chant, and then it's followed by an incantation welcoming the women into the space.
[00:18:33] Meggie Greivell: It's a very haunting song. And we were using, Laurie wrote a heartbeat into the script and we organically discovered this, I found this very large stick at a store called Pound Savers, which is like the dollar store. And in the rehearsal room we discovered that it made a really great heartbeat sound, and that's in the song [00:19:00] and throughout the play, as well.
[00:19:02] But it's become a symbol as well for a broomstick, as well as other types of domestic things, like a butter churn. And we also learned this was a happy discovery, coincidence, but also works really well with the play that in Scotland, a lot of the ministers and commissioners that were involved in the trials, they used questioning sticks. In the opening song, it sounds almost like a sea shanty or like this haunting folk song. And Laurie's written all these really beautiful words and incorporated in the Scottish cities where the witch trials happened into the song.
[00:19:42] Josh Hutchinson: What stood out to me about the opening song is just how long the list of those cities is, the communities where witch trials happened. It's dozens of places.
[00:19:56] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: And yet it's still not comprehensive, right? That was my fear. What did I leave [00:20:00] out? And even now as I'm talking about things that are happening, as I'm trying to wrap my mind about where things are happening in the world, I feel like, again, not comprehensive to understand where modern witch hunts are happening. Just everywhere yet in between is how I got through that as a writer.
[00:20:19] Meggie Greivell: And that's one of the lyrics in the song as well.
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: You talked about one of the women who's a victim who's in the play. Who are the other main characters whose story's being told?
[00:20:33] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The first is an unknown woman, which was very intentional. I was really struck by the sundry witches and all the people whose names are lost. And so she was really the first woman to be conjured in my mind and also to be conjured into this world of this play. And she doesn't know who she is, which is part of her journey.
[00:20:59] [00:21:00] She arrives in on the scene and is confused. She's come back, because she's looking for her baby, her bairn, and doesn't find her baby there. And she tries to leave, and they pull her back in. And we call her the unknown woman. She's an individual, but she represents many of the sundry witches who have no stone, no memorial, and no way of knowing who they are, erased by time.
[00:21:27] Meggie Greivell: And Laurie writes very beautifully into the unknown woman's language that she has no stone. That's a through line throughout all of her scene.
[00:21:39] Sarah Jack: So many elements of this work are just so incredible. I was so thrilled to see this aspect that you put into the story, because the unnamed, for the reasons that you just mentioned, but there's so many we don't know their name. You think about like with this specific [00:22:00] unnamed woman, she didn't know who she was. It's so striking, because before they're accused and examined, these women felt very confident, possibly some did, from testimonies you read, they're confident they're not a witch, they're confident that they're clear before God. And there's other historical unnamed individuals that are memorialized.
[00:22:26] And then I think of when we were working on our exoneration legislation in Connecticut this past year. There is an unnamed person in some records, but the politicians didn't include it in the final draft that individual who could have represented so many, who could have been a symbol for these women like your unnamed is, she was removed from that legislation, and that was so disappointing to me. I [00:23:00] am so thrilled to see that a part of your message.
[00:23:04] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: That's heartbreaking. The fact that we don't know who she was doesn't change the fact that she existed. I think this is what's so important about memorialization, too, is that marking someone's life acknowledges, it's like how we all wanna feel seen, right? I wanna feel seen. You wanna feel seen. To be unseen and to be invisible is another insult. And then for, I think for these women who were Christian women, to not be given a Christian burial, at least in their own understanding of the world as they know it, they're not seen in the world, in the afterlife, in the way that they wanted to be seen. That's an aspect for her, too, that she's stuck in purgatory or whatever it is, the liminal space.
[00:23:45] Meggie Greivell: And Laurie used the Scottish Witchcraft database to get information for the three accused women in the play. And we learned that there are thousands of unnamed in the [00:24:00] records here. So it's a lot really.
[00:24:04] Josh Hutchinson: I found the line in the play about the and sundry witches were killed so powerful, because it shows how little these women were valued. You don't even deserve to have a name, like you're just erased entirely.
[00:24:26] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I think we included the definition. Our version of this play has three men who play various roles, and then three women who play various roles, plus each having their own individual women. But the chorus of men says sundry witches confessed. And one of the women says, "sundry: definition, various items not important enough to be mentioned individually." And that's what it comes down to. It's you're not important enough for us to know who you were.
[00:24:51] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Our listeners here will be familiar with a lot of the women who are just known as Goodwife or Goody, [00:25:00] because their first name, nobody bothered to record that. They just recorded that they were the wife of so-and-so and the man mattered, but the woman who was the actual target, her name didn't matter. So yeah, it's very moving.
[00:25:20] Sarah Jack: I also think it's a recognition of the modern victims that we're just getting to know. We know of such a small fraction of the individual cases. So here today, there are unnamed victims.
[00:25:36] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, and I think it's hard for people when you don't have a name or a story to attach to something to actually hang their understanding on what happened. If it's oh, this woman, this happened to this woman or these women, versus knowing the names of people who are going through this trauma, that's a completely different thing. It's like a personification in a way. [00:26:00] Sundry objectifies people. It makes them into just another witch, when it's an individual who has a story and a life and a history and a family and a living, breathing identity.
[00:26:11] Madeline: It is incredible the power that language has here in dehumanizing. That's actually like what my college thesis was about, our language and use of the words torture and terrorism around like torture tactics used, created by the US government, used in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. And dehumanization that happens to each of those individuals and the things that are defined as torture and those that are not, and those are, that are defined politically and have ramifications of teeth attached to them. It's really interesting what happens when certain words are attached to things and then a whole people become numb to the realities of what that means, of the people behind those [00:27:00] things, or the victims.
[00:27:00] Josh Hutchinson: And there's more than just the pricking in the play. There's also the watching, which was another form of torture. Can you talk to us a little about the watching?
[00:27:13] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: That's really interesting, because one of the things that we discovered in the writing of the piece was that the cast was really interested in kind of understanding what it meant to be watching, too. And you may have noticed that a character who is just a general farmer becomes a watcher, and he has this really beautiful arc throughout the piece.
[00:27:36] That's, those are his words. He was talking about how he felt about playing this role, that his character had an arc. He went from being an accuser to a watcher to the spouse of a victim and essentially a nonbeliever at the end in God or the devil. But that watching piece, people were paid to [00:28:00] watch women, keep them awake, keep them from falling asleep. Sleep deprivation was a a form of getting a confession, and they, the people who were, the women and their families were paying for the candles that the watchers were using. They were paying the salaries of the watchers. This is another weird aspect of the economics of it, is that it got turned back to the families at the end. You, this is your bill for what your witch costs our community.
[00:28:28] You were just asking about the watchers, but it's a bigger answer. We were really curious about what it was like to be responsible for inflicting this on someone else. Our watcher walks into the room and sees his wife in a witch's bridal, which was a way of keeping a woman awake, keeping her tongue from being able to talk and a terrible torture device. And that's bridal is on our puppet, the accused. And I think people respond to that in a way that's really shocked. [00:29:00] Even though you know it's not on a person. It's very evocative.
[00:29:04] Josh Hutchinson: So the watching we're talking about, you would sit a woman in the middle of a room and have somebody keep them awake for days on end, and they're looking to see if a familiar or imp comes to feed while they're watching, so the witnesses can confirm that the suspect has had a contract with the devil.
[00:29:33] And they did that also in England. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, is known for doing that. And there's at least one case in New England that's documented of Margaret Jones of Charlestown. She was watched in this way.
[00:29:49] But in your play, I know the characters are awake for untold hours and days, [00:30:00] and at that point, you're just delirious, and who knows what you're seeing even to get a confession out of you at that point, doesn't seem like it might be the most accurate confession that you're gonna get, but it's what they wanted to hear is what the person would say.
[00:30:18] Madeline: Important to note that in Scotland at the time, torture was illegal and known to produce inaccurate information. So there was that piece of recognition there, on the books in Scotland as the official way of the land. And then the reality of the witch trial.
[00:30:38] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: And what do they say? It takes 48 hours before you start hallucinating when you're sleep deprived. Or I hope I'm getting that when I was just in Edinburgh last week, somebody was talking about that, that you are not a reliable witness after being awake for 48 hours. And there is records of a lot of these people being kept awake for days at a time, like you said.
[00:30:59] [00:31:00] I took the perspective that a person who was kept awake like this would do anything to make it stop. That is part of this piece, as you mentioned, but it's a thread that goes through every single trial that we read about the sleep deprivation.
[00:31:13] Meggie Greivell: And it was often the accused family members or friends or neighbors who were doing the watching, which I find like just so incredibly harrowing. That's with all of the witch trials. I know that was something that happened where neighbors had to be complacent, and that's the something that just really disturbs me so much, and I think Laurie wrote that so beautifully.
[00:31:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: These really small communities, everybody knows each other, right? They're accusing people they know, they're watching people they know, and they're executing people they know.
[00:31:49] Meggie Greivell: Yeah.
[00:31:51] Josh Hutchinson: And you do see that with the modern day witchcraft persecutions, as well. The [00:32:00] accusation often comes from within the family, and it's just so extra tragic that it's somebody that you know and you trust turns against you.
[00:32:12] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The third woman that's conjured into our space is probably the most famous of all the Scottish witches, Isobel Gowdie. And she was the last character to come to me. What we love about Isobel Gowdie is how much agency she has in her confessions, or seems to have in her confessions and what she means to people now, that she represents somebody with power.
[00:32:37] And as we were creating this piece, Meggie asked for a powerful character to come into the, this realm. And she was the obvious choice. I wanted to be really careful about how I present her, because I know she has so much meaning to so many people, right? And there's a lot that's unknown about her, [00:33:00] but her confessions are long and interesting and curious and awesome in a way.
[00:33:07] They're just such interesting documents, but we really don't know how she got to those confessions. We don't know if she was pricked or not. There was a pricker in the area, and yet there's no record of the pricker being part of her trial. There's nothing sure about whether she was watched or kept awake. We don't have that information, but we know what she said and it's so interesting. So she was fun to write, and she's, I think Lisa McIntyre, who plays her in this production, really enjoys the power and the fact that she's a bit of a baddy. She gets to speak truth to power and own her own story in a way that the other characters don't, Isobel.
[00:33:49] Meggie Greivell: Laurie and I talked about how we made the choice to give her power back because Laurie was saying, we don't, [00:34:00] nobody knows why she said all things that she said, or if it was really just the ministers and the investigators putting words into her mouth or making these things up or if it was from sleep deprivation.
[00:34:12] But we've made the decision to have her kind of take her power back and say, "no, I did do these things. I did turn into a jackdaw and attacked the pricker."
[00:34:24] Josh Hutchinson: What are some of the other things that she confessed to?
[00:34:28] Meggie Greivell: Part of it though, is she did turn into a lot of different animals.
[00:34:33] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: She did say she did a lot of shape shifting. So Isobel Gowdie, her confessions are pretty remarkable. She says things across a huge gamut, like she's confessed to mixing the body of an unchristian child with nail trimmings, grain, and colewort. I'm reading this right now from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, but she said she chopped it all up and used it to take away the fruit of a man's corn. Just think about that, [00:35:00] chopping up unchristian child with nail clippings.
[00:35:02] It's ah this flying in a straw broom was a thread that we see the witch on a straw broom. That was a, an Isobel Gowdie kind of a one of her biggies. She talked about elf shot. She would fly around and use elf shot, flick it with her thumb, and kill people to send a soul to heaven, but the body remained on Earth, according to her confessions. Talked about meeting the queen of the fairies, taking away milk, doing things in the devil's name. She said she um, destroyed, let's see, she made an image of the laird of Park to destroy his children, and she went into great detail about how she did this. She confessed a lot to shape changing jackdaws, cat, hare, and we really play with that shape changing aspect in our show. I could go on and on, but she's got a lot of really specific things. And she had four, I think four sets of interviews or [00:36:00] interrogations, and she got more and more specific with each one.
[00:36:02] Sarah Jack: I was thinking about some of the New England witch trials, and there's actually some of the afflicted girls either in Connecticut or in Massachusetts had very detailed accusations. I don't know if there's anything quite that detail coming out of New England in the record from an accused.
[00:36:24] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, incredibly detailed. She talked about her specific ritual acts, shape changing, using magic, things she did at the Kirk of Auldearn, communal sex with the devil. That was one. He had sex with her whole coven. And meeting and dancing with her coven. She talked about the fairies. She hit the greatest hits of everything. And she gave them all the information that they wanted to have.
[00:36:53] She explicitly said that the devil rebaptized her as Janet, that she had sex with him, [00:37:00] and that his member was great and long, and that younger women had greater pleasure in sex with the devil than with their own husbands. The idea of sex with the devil was really important to the Scottish witch trial confession logs that they would put together. And we also play with that a little bit in our show, that whole thing of this obsession with sex, which is fascinating to me, but also just strange.
[00:37:27] Sarah Jack: We learned of some of that this fall when we talked to Mary Craig, that was really where I was introduced to what a big part of that history it is.
[00:37:43] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Your interview with Mary Craig was one of my favorite interviews. She was a great resource.
[00:37:47] Sarah Jack: You had a couple lines that the devil said that I loved, and the first is, "I get the credit and I don't have to do any of the work." And [00:38:00] I also, I thought it sounded just like him to say, "I've been here a while. You were nay paying me mind."
[00:38:06] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It was fun to write for the devil. It was fun to write that character. And I have to be reminded that for in this world, that the devil was absolutely real. The fact that I personally don't believe that the devil exists doesn't matter. These characters believed that the devil existed, and it was a great and real threat. And that's the first thing that when I'm talking to modern people about this play, that they're like, "oh, really?" But the devil was a threat.
[00:38:36] Josh Hutchinson: They didn't just believe in the devil. They believed that he was roaming around physically as a person and luring people over to his side to sign contracts with them, which I found interesting in the symbolism in Scotland of someone [00:39:00] becoming the devil's with the touching of the head and the foot. I found that to be very interesting also.
[00:39:08] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: And claiming everything in between.
[00:39:10] Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
[00:39:11] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I believe that was in Isobel's confession, as well, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:39:18] Josh Hutchinson: I think that I read that in that scene. Where she says she's be been baptized as Janet. Yeah. Which I love the Janet and Janet show, because those names, I've listened to all of Witches of Scotland, and Janet and Jonet just come up again and again in the Scottish witch trials.
[00:39:40] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, that's where I got that.
[00:39:43] And it was also a happy accident that our actor who plays Janet in the Janet and Janet scene plays Isobel Gowdie and says, "no, I am Janet. You'll call me Janet." And so that was just another kind of discovery of another added layer of something cool.
[00:39:58] Josh Hutchinson: Another [00:40:00] theme in there is the labeling of women as quarrelsome dames. And you took that from the reality.
[00:40:11] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: There was a lot to mine. And I think that as a woman of my time, I relate to that a lot. And as I get older and feel like, yeah, I'm gonna take up as much space as I want in this world, I see how some people respond to that. We take the quarrelsome dame mantle pretty proudly. Would you say Meggie?
[00:40:37] Meggie Greivell: Definitely, we are quarrelsome dames.
[00:40:41] Josh Hutchinson: Yay.
[00:40:42] Meggie Greivell: embrace it.
[00:40:43] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'm so happy to hear that.
[00:40:46] Meggie Greivell: I think, yeah, as women, we've all experienced times where we've been told that we're too loud, too rude, too bossy, too something. That's an aspect right there that we still have [00:41:00] so far to come with in terms of misogyny. The accused women were called quarrelsome dames then, and now we're just called something else.
[00:41:09] Josh Hutchinson: Now we see a lot with women politicians still getting labeled as witch.
[00:41:16] Meggie Greivell: Yes, definitely like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and here in Scotland no, Nicole Sturgeon, the former Prime Minister of Scotland. She has been called a witch several times.
[00:41:33] Josh Hutchinson: I've seen some of that, and it's just very inappropriate. It feels like men feel threatened when a woman comes into her power and can't just share responsibilities with women. You gotta feel threatened. They're taking over your job or something, but they're not, so [00:42:00] chill out dudes.
[00:42:01] Meggie Greivell: Exactly. As a female director, I've encountered that over my career, as well, with being in a position of power in what is still male-dominated industry. Some pushback definitely.
[00:42:17] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It is interesting to write a piece that's like blatantly naming what most women agree is an experience of being responded to or being pricked by misogyny. It's interesting to encounter what that's like for an audience member who doesn't feel comfortable with that. I think that I'm comfortable with someone being uncomfortable with this piece.
[00:42:46] And part of the reason why I infuse comedy or dark comedy into a subject like this is because that's one way that I can acknowledge that this is a I, [00:43:00] we all know what we're seeing here, right? We know what we're seeing. We're getting what we're seeing here. And it's just a way of acknowledging something that but just putting it into a vessel of communicating that is not a victimized place. That's a more of a an owning the power of what it means to be having this conversation at all.
[00:43:25] Madeline: I think the way you wrote it, Laurie, with the kind of time shifts to the modern platform with like comedic elements allows us to take in the gravity of the reality of the situation. And I feel like in many ways, like comedy, is it the element of that is necessary in this piece. It's not like we're just diving into some disaster tourism situation, like we're getting into something that's relevant and related to now, and you give like those little plant the seeds so people are [00:44:00] making connections. So like why does addressing this thing that happened a long time ago matter now, and how is it still happening, and what are the ways that even in the same place, even in, how is that still showing up?
[00:44:14] Because all of those pieces are still very much alive. And then there are other places in the world where like the reality perhaps even looks similar. But there's also that piece where like this history is a part of our history. And yeah, I feel like it makes it more accessible in a way to have the juxtaposition of that, of the conversation going on, like within the piece.
[00:44:40] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Madeline, something you just said about the disaster aspect. Like I didn't, that's another thing I didn't want, I didn't want it to be torture porn. That's a terrible word, but I didn't want everybody, everyone to come and see a piece that lives in a place where women are being harmed for an hour or more.[00:45:00] That color and that kind of gut punch, that's not interesting, and it's abusive. It's an abusive thing to do. I wanted people to be able to come in and out of this space and our characters and their cast to be able to come in and out of this space, have a conversation that needs to be had, raise a voice that needs to be raised, and by the grace of something, let them exit that space and move, shift into something else.
[00:45:24] And that, again, was a discovery along the way. But I felt it was important to lean into that as it was unveiling itself to us in the process. And our cast is doing a great job of navigating the kind of different colors of this piece. It's hard to describe, though. It's hard to explain, a piece about witch trials that has comedy in it. It seems a little hard to explain, but.
[00:45:50] Meggie Greivell: The piece really does lift up all of the women and gives them their voice back. And I think that is the most powerful [00:46:00] part of this. And the last word in the play that Laurie wrote is, "and the rage." So we have that whole aspect of it. It's giving the voices back to these women.
[00:46:11] Madeline: Also wanna add that in the process, like the week that we were over there, Laurie and I were over there working with actors. She was like, "I want you guys to tap into this and then I want you to tap out, like physically, do hands up. Okay, I'm getting into this role. I'm putting this on for a moment. But we're not like doing this to each other. This is we're agreeing right now." There was just this like little element of consent exercise that happened, like for the actors. It was like this facilitated thing that was, it was just nice to come in and out like that as a cohort.
[00:46:44] Sarah Jack: I just think undertaking this topic as a visual and audible presentation. It is such a layered undertaking, just like the history is, and you used the word [00:47:00] unveiling. It's an opportunity to unveil what we can't get everybody to acknowledge. I just keep thinking about the complexity of the reality, but then also, when I was reading through the script, there's just, all, Meggie said the double entendres, and then the iconic symbolisms, and you even got an apple in there with the devil, and the catchphrases, but then the puppetry and everything about it was just, I think it's such a remarkable piece of art. And thanks for putting it out there. It's important. It's so important.
[00:47:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I really appreciate that. I was really nervous about kind of the tone shifts right out of the gate, and so I really appreciate that feedback. And if something didn't work, I would wanna know that too, right? Because I feel like this subject and these people and just the larger conversation needs to be right, [00:48:00] like the history needs to be correct. The level of respect needs to be correct, and I'm serving a bigger thing, which is why I'm so pleased to be working on this project.
[00:48:12] Sarah Jack: I was gonna add, too, that whole comedy element, it's in the history. There's so many times where we're looking at these dispositions or different things we can read that were happening or people were saying, and you just are like, this can't even be real. It's sadly hysterical, and so I think that's a really great thread to be able to weave in to the storytelling, too, like you did.
[00:48:37] Meggie Greivell: It was all so much about fake news being spread around, which Laurie has written that in so well into the play, as that's so relevant today.
[00:48:47] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Honestly it was my, weirdly my way into this piece, 'cause I would say, I don't know how I'm gonna get into this piece, I don't know what my way in, I don't know what my way in is. And then it was, fake news. I was like, that to me, that was the [00:49:00] hook that got me started writing in the first place.
[00:49:03] I typically write musical theater pieces, and so when it came to the monologues that the women were doing, I didn't really know what to do. So I said, okay, I'm gonna treat this like it's a lyric. And if I were writing a lyric, I would just be brain draining all of my ideas about things that could be in a lyric. And then I would take that kind of dump of writing and find kernels inside of it to craft into a lyric.
[00:49:27] But I approached it in that way and I realized, oh no, this is the same approach, like they are having this moment of expression that is simply for their a mining of their emotional life at this moment of time when they're being when they're being interrogated. And it It felt the same to me as a song moment where it was, we call it sometimes in, in crafting musicals, theater, in crafting songs, a vertical expression instead of a long horizontal line. It's what is your thought? We're gonna go deeply into [00:50:00] this thought. And for me, it had a lyrical element in working it. And I think that's what I love about working with the puppets, too, is that the puppets to me have a lyrical element, too, because their movement is so expressive, and it's like the actors are singing the puppets alive.
[00:50:18] Madeline: I'm curious now. I haven't seen the script in a long time and probably haven't seen the things until it was like puppet does something here. And then Laurie would come to me and be like, "so what can I do?" So it was fun, I was building even as we got to Scotland and was building the week that we had with the actors.
[00:50:38] I'm curious what it says now when you're reading it, Sarah, because I'm like, oh, that, like we developed those things together and like we didn't really know what it was capable of until we're like figuring out what it's capable of doing. Yeah, just a funny curiosity thinking like, how does that look on paper now?
[00:50:59] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I don't think I [00:51:00] changed it in the script. I think the script just says, "the fox comes through" or that, yeah. But to Madeline's point about working collaboratively, I knew who the cast was before I had written a word of the play. So I was setting this piece onto this cast, and I was writing for the actors that I had, which is a really a luxury when you're a playwright to be able to write for actors that you know who they are. It's the best case scenario, I think.
[00:51:25] Madeline built The Accused, this woman puppet, which is gorgeous. And she built a fox, a cat, a jackdaw, and then a flock of jackdaws, a flock of 13 jackdaws. And the script, it just says that they sweep through, and some actors use them throughout the entire play, and they're just beautiful.
[00:51:50] Sarah Jack: I wanted to give you guys the opportunity to read something from the script.
[00:51:55] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I'd love to. Would you like to hear the Unknown Woman or from [00:52:00] Marion Twedy?
[00:52:01] Josh Hutchinson: I vote for Unknown.
[00:52:04] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: This is an excerpt from the Unknown Woman. So in this monologue, by the time we get to this place, she's realized that there's no stone. No one knows who she is. She's been wiped off the face of the earth, for all practical purposes. She explains that she understands why she was accused, that she doesn't blame her accuser, but that she didn't do what she had been accused of.
[00:52:30] And she's completely vulnerable at this point. So we hear the crescendo of a heartbeat, and she's alone.
[00:52:40] "Let me die, I think. I will tell them whatever it is they want to hear. If only I can get some rest. Only, but there is no rest for the wicked, they say. Am I wicked? I was baptized. I'm a Christian. My bairn was baptized, had a Christian burial. [00:53:00] How did it come to this? I'll tell them whatever it is they want to hear, I'll tell them, yes, no, whatever I'm supposed to say to make this nightmare end so I can sleep, so I can hold my bairn again. But there is no rest for the wicked. Let me die, I think. I want to die. I think. I think I'm dead, for here I am here in this purgatory. Is this purgatory or is this someplace worse? Some kind of purgatory with no hope of escape? Is this hell? There's no rest here, no bairn, no breath. I do not lay in consecrated ground. I have no stone. Ah, that explains it. That explains why nobody visits me. Nobody comes to weep or laugh or make a pencil rub or write a poem or mark a holiday.[00:54:00] Will I my soul, will my soul ever be allowed to be at peace? Will I ever hold my bairn again? You damned me to an eternity of what, what you damned yourself, they said. How? How? I made a charm the way my mother taught me, the way her mother taught her, the way her mother taught her. They said I danced with the devil. If I did dance, that's all I did, dance. I don't know what I did. I don't know anything anymore."
[00:54:33] I didn't use Scottish dialect. I'm not gonna pretend to be Carys Turner, the beautiful performer who does that in our play.
[00:54:42] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much.
[00:54:44] Sarah Jack: Thank you so much.
[00:54:46] Josh Hutchinson: Wonderful. I just want to talk for a moment about how people can see the play. Can you tell us about how it's playing right now and any future plans that you have?
[00:54:58] Meggie Greivell: Yes, so [00:55:00] it's right now we are on until the 25th at the Space on the Mile at 11:15 AM on odd days. We are hoping, really hoping, that it gets picked up for a tour in the UK and Scotland. We've had a few producers, so fingers crossed on that. And it will be filmed professionally on the 21st, so we will have it archived, and so we will have a film version of it, and we hope to bring it to the US, as well. Laurie hopes to bring it to the US, as well. So we just are right now, our fingers are just crossed that we can get it on a tour.
[00:55:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: If anybody's interested in reading the play to produce a version of it, feel free to reach out to me, and I'd be happy to send a copy of the script.
[00:55:50] Josh Hutchinson: It's such a powerful story that needs to be told. So I wish you all the best of luck getting it picked up for tours.[00:56:00] It's so good to give voices to the voiceless. So that's something that we want to do with the podcast, as well, is tell the stories of these people, even the unknown person that Sarah was talking about earlier, they need their story told. So I think you, I think that theater is an excellent way to introduce the story to audiences.
[00:56:29] Sarah Jack: Is there anything else you wanted to be able to express today?
[00:56:34] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The people who were prickers were individuals, and in our world they're represented by this kind of boogeyman character who's a pricker, not a specific individual.
[00:56:47] Meggie Greivell: And he represents all of the men of the time who are abusing their power.
[00:56:52] Madeline: I maybe wanna add that there was a lot of deliberation that kind of went into landing on doing one woman puppet, [00:57:00] and we talked about making specific puppets for each of the actresses, of their like particular faces, sculpting off of their pictures. And yeah, it was just a vibrant conversation and we landed on this, but in a way also just thinking about honoring the larger experience, I think landing on one woman.
[00:57:21] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I would say that people respond to seeing that one puppet as a very universal creation and see themselves in it. I the feedback that we've gotten from people is that was the right thing and that it really is very resonant. I also wanna say that this piece is still alive, right? So it was created super collaboratively and quickly and generously by all of the collaborators that were involved. Meggie brought the idea, Madeline was part of it from the very beginning, and the students gave us a lot of feedback in the process of writing. First time that they saw a script, it was just [00:58:00] the first 30 pages. That was the first time we said, "okay, how do we feel about these tone shifts? How do we feel about the fact that it moves through time and space?"
[00:58:09] And we were all in agreement. As I went forward writing pages for them about what that would look like, they would come back to me and say, "we wish that the devil would come back."
[00:58:21] "Okay, what does that look like?"
[00:58:23] "We wanna see King James again."
[00:58:25] "What does that look like?"
[00:58:26] "What if the watcher in the next scene is the farmer watching his wife?"
[00:58:30] "Oh, that's a great idea. Let me see what that looks like."
[00:58:32] So those, and it's still a new work and I suspect that the next production will have edits, like a new play does when it goes into another iteration. So I'm really excited to see how this play continues to grow. And I would say that if anybody does wanna do this piece, that they should hunt down Madeline Helling to work on the puppets with them.
[00:58:52] Madeline: Well, and I'll say too on that note, like there was a lot of changes. She'd be like, "oh, I met with the cast. So this whole part has changed." Like every [00:59:00] time there was like a Zoom, there was like both of you could attest that there were many changes that were made. So on my end I kept being like, "okay, you're not ready for that part, so I'm just gonna hold off or build this thing and then change it." And just given our time constraint and like what I needed to craft, it was like, okay, I'm just, I was just like crafting at a pace that went with the ebb and flow.
[00:59:22] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I'm just grateful to Meggie for having this idea and bringing it, she, she actually, when she first in invited me to this piece, she said, "I just got back from having dinner at The Witchery." There's this restaurant called The Witchery in Edinburgh. It's a fancy, beautiful restaurant, but she said it's a restaurant called The Witchery on the grounds, essentially of where the witches were burned. And that felt off to you, would you say, Meggie? That felt.
[00:59:50] Meggie Greivell: Yeah, that's how this all started. The first time I went to North Berwick too, when I'd never been there before, and I learned about the North Berwick witch [01:00:00] trials, and I was completely floored and disgusted. There was just a tiny little plaque in this old church by the sea about it, but nothing else.
[01:00:10] And then from there I kept getting even more enraged. Like Laurie said, I went to The Witchery and my family, and it's this beautiful restaurant with exquisite dining options. But yeah it's where the witches, the women were burned. Not the witches. The women, or the women were burned.
[01:00:29] And I also went on a tour, a ghost tour about a few months before I approached Laurie, and they pulled out thumbscrews that they, I replicated thumbscrews. I don't think they were real. And they took, were asking for volunteers to put them on, and I think they put them on me, and everyone was laughing and I was just disgusted this isn't funny but that's a problem with Edinburgh. It's very exploitative of the witch [01:01:00] trials and I know it's like that in Salem, as well. I just thought this is a story that needs to be told, and theater is what I do, so that is going to be the medium for it. And I reached out to Laurie on a whim, and I got lucky.
[01:01:18] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[01:01:22]
[01:01:29] Mary Bingham: Recently I suffered a situation which resulted in my feeling anxious, heartbroken, and most sadly not wanted. Luckily, I have a wonderful community of family, friends, and social services in which I can tap into if needed until I get back on my feet. I am grateful.
[01:01:49] This is not the situation for those women of Ghana accused of witchcraft. They are accused for causing sickness to their neighbors, weather [01:02:00] conditions to cause crop failures, among other things. Those women who are not beaten and burned alive for this crime they did not commit, were sent to one of six witch camps where their living situations were abhorrent at best.
[01:02:15] I cannot begin even to fathom their feelings of total abandonment and betrayal at the hands of their neighbors and family members. Yes, family members. I shouldn't complain. I will survive. Some of these women will not, but there is hope. In 2005, ActionAid started to infiltrate these camps with basic life necessities. The advocates also educated these women and children, informing the women of their rights. In 2011, the women were thus able to stop the Ghana government from closing the camps the following year. Quick closure could result in homelessness [01:03:00] and possibly death by those wanting these innocent human beings dead. They spoke loud and strong using every media and social service at their disposal, increasing benefits for themselves to survive.
[01:03:15] For me, I look forward to the day when my living situation improves. However, I look more towards these women who survive circumstances I will never understand. They are the heroes along with the advocates who risk their lives to save the many for whom they advocate. Thank you.
[01:03:34]
[01:03:42] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:03:43] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:03:47]
[01:03:53] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update. We must continue to educate [01:04:00] against witch-hunt behavior and provide communities with the resources to feel safe together and to work together. If you are in the position to positively impact the communities that experience witch-hunt behaviors, stand in the gap with active advocates now.
[01:04:14] Today, the victims of sorcery accusation related violence must not be nameless and disregarded. We may not know the names of men and women who were attacked today, but we know what is happening. We can speak about their stories and their innocence. We can continue to educate the world about which hunting today. We can acknowledge the crisis. Know that the victims have names, that they have lives, that they have plans, that they want their beautiful tomorrow. If you are in the position to positively impact the communities that experience witch-hunt behaviors in which attacks, stand in the gap with active advocates now.
[01:04:46] I am descended from two well-known accused witches, one whose name was used in the iconic play of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Rebecca Nurse is a name that is familiar with everyone who knows even a little about the Salem witchcraft trials. She said on the record, the [01:05:00] world will know my innocence. We do know her innocence, and we can name her as innocent by name. Rebecca Nurse
[01:05:06] was not a witch. Some of the trials on record have accused identified only by their husband's surname as Goodwife or Goody. Goody Knapp, Goodwife Bassett. We do not know the given name of these women, but we do know that they were innocent of causing supernatural harm. Goody Knapp and Goodwife Bassett were not witches.
[01:05:24] In the American colonies, we have primary sources indicating that at least one unknown person was accused of witchcraft crimes in Connecticut. Unknown was not a witch. Unknown was innocent. Although some names are recorded, the names of thousands of other imprisoned and executed alleged witch across Scotland are unknown. They were innocent. They were not witches.
[01:05:45] When we hear the name of Rebecca Nurse, Marion Twedy, and Isobel Gowdie or other named, executed witch trial victims, may we always see their unnamed sisters, the unknown victims standing there with them in history, unforgotten. Today, 70 years after The Crucible, [01:06:00] the play Prick is memorializing the thousands of women who suffered and died as unnamed alleged witches. This play recognizes them. It is a memorial to the unknown. We must remember them. Thank you, Prick, for honoring their memory in a significant and beautiful way, and for educating the world about witch trials through creative art.
[01:06:18] You are part of Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. Your listening and support is part of the work that keeps the critical conversation on ending witch hunts alive and expanding. When you share episodes with your friends, you are making an effort against violence. Having conversations about what is going on is an easy way that you can jump in to end witch hunts. Advocates worldwide are using their particular abilities, influence, and social network. And when you also listen and share, you are part of strengthening that network. It takes every mind, every voice, every small effort. You are a part of the world network that succeeds because of collaboration and collective efforts. When you speak up about sorcery accusation related violence, you will get questions [01:07:00] about the issue. Questions regarding violence against alleged witches can be scary, but we have your back. Not only have you garnered the answers by listening to the conversations on Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast, you can direct anyone to the program for more information. You can reach out to us with your questions and comments anytime. We are on all social media platforms and have a contact form on our website. Let us know how the conversation is going for you in your sphere of influence. We want to know. Reach out.
[01:07:26] Visiting our websites and the advocate websites listed in our show notes often is another way to stay up to date and support the work. To support us, make a tax deductible donation at endwitchhunts.org. Your support funds are witch trial history and advocacy education projects. You can purchase most of the books discussed on Thou Shalt Not Suffer episodes in our online bookshop, or you can buy it directly from the guest. We sell End Witch Hunts, Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast t-shirts and coffee mugs online in our zazzle.com shop. Make a purchase to support us.
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[01:08:13]
[01:08:19] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:08:21] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:08:22] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:08:28] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for another important episode.
[01:08:31] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:08:34] Sarah Jack: I hope you're visiting us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:08:38] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:08:42] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:08:48] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:08:51] [01:09:00]
Take a look with us into Scottish witch trial history, as well as a close look at one particular Scottish witch trial. We discuss important historic details with historian and informative author Mary W. Craig. We are so pleased to get to learn about her new book release โAgnes Finnie the Witch of Potterrow Portโ available for pre-order now. Mary fills the conversation with meaningful dialog around our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?, while also sharing valuable insight into the current witch trial pardon efforts in Scotland.
[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Mary W. Craig about Borders Witch Hunt, Scottish Witch Hunts, and her upcoming book, Agnes Finnie: the Witch of Potterow Port.
Sarah Jack: I do think people should read the Borders book before they read the Finnie book. That's what I think.
Josh Hutchinson: I think that's a good idea to get you some good background on Scottish Witch Hunts to read Borders Witch Hunt and learn about the 17th century [00:01:00] witch-hunt in Scotland, why it happened, what happened, why it was so different from English witch-hunts, what they did differently, which was so much. They were brutal. It was not fun and games in Scotland. It was serious, deadly business involving a lot of violence. It was legal to torture in Scotland.
Sarah Jack: You realized it's really incredible that the accused made it to the execution, and I know we saw accused in Salem perish in the prison, but nobody endured the amount of brutal examination that the victims of Scotland endured.[00:02:00]
Josh Hutchinson: In Scotland, they could torture you, in some cases, even if you were eight years old.
Sarah Jack: And the people that were fulfilling the different steps of the trial were getting paid well to do it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. We'll learn about brodders today, a. k. a. witch prickers, and what their role was in examining the suspects. We don't get into too much detail about what they did, but you can read all about it in the book, Borders Witch Hunt. She makes the medicine go down, and her approach to the book overall, it's very readable. It's informative. You learn a lot, but you enjoy the reading process of it.
Sarah Jack: We've been realizing the different nuances [00:03:00] of witch hunt management, mechanics, and behavior across the globe. And this was another one of those realizations, cuz we just aren't used to seeing the victims experience what they did here.
Josh Hutchinson: We like to remind people that in England and New England, they almost always hanged people. In Scotland, they did burn the bodies of the victims.
Sarah Jack: Her research was extensive, and her writing on it just perfectly descriptive and informative. And very visual. I felt like I could see it.
Josh Hutchinson: It is very visceral. She really takes you to Scotland, to these small borders communities in Borders Witch Hunt. And then in Agnes Finnie, she's gonna take us to the city of Edinburgh. We're going to learn about a not so great neighborhood called [00:04:00] Potterrow Port, where everyone is unfortunate and has a low income, and we'll learn how little the king cares about these people.
Sarah Jack: So after reading Borders Witch Hunt, we're getting to pull back another layer of the onion into the Scottish experience of witch hunting.
Josh Hutchinson: Her writing about Agnes Finnie, it's an intimate portrait of an individual. You get to see witch hunts through the eyes of one person. You get details on individual lives and individual case. It's not a global survey of witch hunts. It's not one page for each case. It's a whole book for one person's witchcraft trial.
Watch our [00:05:00] social media. We will be posting about this book, because our discussion coming up with Mary Craig is so enlightening, so eye-opening. It's such a pleasure to talk to her. She's one of those people, you feel like you could just talk to her all day about this topic.
Sarah Jack: We definitely could. The time flew by, but the information in the history that we gleaned from the conversation was incredible.
Josh Hutchinson: You'll want to listen to this episode more than once, I guarantee.
Sarah Jack: Borders Witch Hunt. I learned a ton about that. Like the Scotland, the England thing. I really did. I think that will be helpful to listeners. I am so happy to introduce our guest, author Mary W. Craig. We'll be talking about her book Borders Witch Hunt: 17th Century Witchcraft Trials in the Scottish Borders and her [00:06:00] upcoming project, Agnes Finnie: the Witch of Potterrow Port.
Mary W Craig: We've just recently unveiled a memorial to those who were executed in one particular trial in Peebles. We had 24 people executed in one day and then 3 individuals who were found not proven, cuz we have a not proven verdict in Scotland. They were then executed a week later. They were all part of the one trial, so we've just unveiled that memorial, which was really nice. We managed to get a minister to come along and give a little bit of a blessing, as well. So there's been lots of work. We've had an apology from the Church of Scotland over here, and we're working in the Scottish Parliament to have a pardon for all of those convicted under the witchcraft act. Things are going well over here.
Josh Hutchinson: We were gonna start by talking to you about the Peebles Witch Memorial. We saw that on your Twitter that you were there. Did you speak at that event?
Mary W Craig: I did, yes. We had a piper and then Elisa and Simon, who live in Peebles, unveiled memorial. Then I spoke for maybe [00:07:00] about five minutes, and then we had the minister, Tony, came along. He gave a blessing, and then as he read out 27 names, we had some fiddlers playing. And then we went back up to the youth center who very kindly gave us our premises for nothing. And I gave a sort of impromptu lecture about what happened during the trial. And that was really good because we had quite a few youngsters come along. We had two or three under the age of 12, but we had quite a sort of sprinkling of teenagers, which was really good to have the young people there interested. And it's, we're trying to get youngsters interested in history, can sometimes be a bit an, so it was good that they were there. .
Sarah Jack: There's been a little bit of movement with exoneration and talking about that over here in the states, Massachusetts just did an exoneration on their last witch, and that had a lot of teenagers involved, and that was a very important part. And I saw on Twitter that you had tweeted about some younger generation that was taking care of the history and could, could go forward with the history. And I thought, yeah, that's very important.
Mary W Craig: Especially as a lot of [00:08:00] those who were executed as witches were quite young themselves. The stereotype is of the old lady at the end of the village, and no, there were youngsters in the borders. We had people as young as eight and nine being accused of being witches. It mattered. It was young people of the day that were affected as well as everybody else.
Sarah Jack: When you were writing on the witch trials in Peebles, were you anticipating that you would be at a memorial so soon?
Mary W Craig: No. Now I'm gonna have to tell you how old I am. I first wrote about the Peebles Witch Trial back in 2008, and then I wrote again in 2020. So this has been a long haul. We didn't think we'd get an apology from the Church of Scotland. We were very surprised about that. And we were surprised as to how readily the community and people said, "yes, of course there should be a memorial." So it was great that everybody said, "oh, of course we need to talk about that, and we need to address what we've done in the past." So, surprising and very pleasing.
Josh Hutchinson: And why do you think it's [00:09:00] important to have the memorials?
Mary W Craig: I think because Scotland had a very high number of executions. We prosecuted and executed 10 times the number of people that they did in England per head of population. To give you a sort of idea, the numbers, Scotland at that time had a population of just under 1 million, and we executed 4,000 people that we know of. The figure is probably closer to 8,000, but 4,000 are the ones that we can definitively see in the records. Although some of the records say things like some witches, a few witches, we don't know how many that means. But for every individual that's executed, they were somebody's daughter, somebody's son, somebody's mother, somebody's sister.
So it would be the equivalent today of executing 24,000 people in Scotland today. It's a massive thing. It happened for a long time, and even when people weren't being arrested and executed, the Kirk session became almost like a morality police. [00:10:00] Everybody was terrified of witches or of being accused of being a witch or living next door to witch.
The Highlands and Islands were slightly doing better because of their, they had retained the links to Catholicism and the clan system was different up there. But for Lowland Scotland, it was a period of absolute terror, and it's something we have to recognize we got it very wrong, acknowledge what we got wrong, apologize to those who are affected, and learn from it for the future.
So that's why I think the memorials are important to see. We have memorials. Any village in Scotland has a memorial to the Great War. We should never forget the Great War. Unfortunately we did, and we're going into the Second World War. But the idea is to say, to literally put a marker in the ground to say, "we did this, we got it very wrong, we should never do this again. This level of prejudice, this level of othering people and finger pointing and blaming and shaming." And although we don't do that today, if you look at the way again, going back to young people, [00:11:00] the venom that can be on social media that's piling onto somebody and attacking somebody. That sort of mob rule, we have to stop that and we have to use the witch memorials as an example of how bad it can get.
Sarah Jack: That was so true. I'm learning so much about the Scotland trials. I just went through your book this week. And as far as descendants like over here the descendants tend to find each other, talk about it, "is there a memorial, do we need a memorial?" Do the descendants, are they a part of this? Were there descendants at the Peebles memorial? Do you hear from them?
Mary W Craig: No. What tended to happen was, because the terror was so absolute well into the 18th century, anyone who had been the son or the daughter of a witch is never going to admit it. What tended to happen was the second somebody got arrested, the family would absolutely deny any association. You'll get notes in the records of people saying, "oh no, she wasn't really my sister, she was only my half [00:12:00] sister" or, "no, she wasn't my mother, she was my stepmother." So people were so ashamed of what the person had done, because witchcraft was so evil, but obviously terrified that they themselves would get arrested.
Mary W Craig: And so within two or three generations, granny or great granny that was executed as a witch is airbrushed out of the family history. And because, of course, they weren't given Christian burial, because the church did not note their names, there is really not a way for people to go back and decide that was a relative of theirs. It's very difficult for you to trace back. And as I say, we have so many records that just say things like, "a few witches were burned." Partly fear, partly shame, and partly incomplete records. We have very few who can trace a true descent.
Josh Hutchinson: And what was a witch to the Scots in 17th century?
Mary W Craig: Okay, we could be here for some time. In the 16th century, everybody was Christian. There were a [00:13:00] few Jewish people around, but everybody was Christian. Witches were magical practitioners. They were Christians, but they were also able to do magic. So they could talk to the little people. They could talk to the kelpies or the selkies, or they could talk to the man in the black hat, and he would help you find lost property, or you might say a charm when you were trying to help a child become well. So it would be somebody who was a healer who would help you in that way.
They could also lay a spell on you if you were bad to them, but mostly they were thought of as good, and most communities knew of them. When you move into the 17th century after the Reformation and the Church of Scotland is terrified, it's got itself into siege mentality, it's surrounded by Catholics. It's not quite sure what the king's doing down in London, and we've got famine and pestilence and war going on in Scotland, which seems as if the devil is out there, using his handmaiden witches.
Then the [00:14:00] Church of Scotland takes the word "witch" and sticks it very closely, it cleaves it to the devil, because it is unnatural for women to have power. And women who do have power or claim to have power, it can only come from the devil. "Witch" changes, the meaning of the word "witch" changes from meaning being a herbal healer, wise women into this satanic follower of the devil.
We notice in the early part of the century, a lot of people who, when they're first arrested, they'll say, "yes, I'm a witch." Because they don't understand that this has now become a bad thing. By the end of the century, nobody's admitting to being a witch, unless they are kept awake and tortured. So the meaning shifts and changes and moves within that century because the church is obsessed with the devil.
Because we had a form of Calvinism that was so strict, and we had the predestination that God already knew who was damned and who was saved. And if we were God's elect and we were [00:15:00] all saved, then the devil would attack us, and he would attack us using witches. So the meaning changed, just as the meaning has changed now. There are people in Scotland today who call themselves witches today, who have, just as there are half a dozen different definitions of what to be a Christian is, there are half a dozen definitions of what a witch is today, but certainly in the 17th century, it changed from being good and healing to having that diabolical link.
And strangely enough, the people in Scotland were being told this every Sunday you'd go to the kirk on a Sunday and the minister would tell you It's witches. It's witches. It's the devil. It's the devil. And yet communities still use their witches, because what else can you do? You can't afford a doctor. There's not a doctor in your little village. If your child falls ill, or if your hens stop laying, and you think it's old Aggie at the end of the road who's cast a spell, you'll find another witch to take the spell off, because that's the day-to-day life you're living.
Sarah Jack: That's great. What did they believe the [00:16:00] diabolical witches were capable of?
Mary W Craig: Because the Kirk of Scotland were obsessed with the devil, they thought that the devil was going to bring down the new Protestant church. The Reformation happens in Scotland very quickly. In England, it was gradual. They moved from Catholicism to Anglicanism. In Scotland, we were Catholic, and then John Knox arrives and says, "no, we're now all Protestant, and all Catholics are in league with the devil." so the idea was that the devil was going to attack us all and drag us all to hell. And we had to guide against him. We had to guard against him. We had to be constantly on our watch against the devil.
And so witches were people. They were women, predominantly because women were weak and stupid and lascivious and liars and just awful creatures. And our faith was weak because of that. And so we would be easily seduced by the devil. And then we would do his bidding. We would lure men with our sexual wiles. [00:17:00] We would cast spells to make people die. We would make men impotent. It's an awful lot about sex in it with the Church of Scotland. I'm not quite sure what that says about the ministers, but there's a lot to do with sex. We would shrivel men's members, we would make men barren, we would make cattle and horses barren. We would spoil crop. We would just basically bring the whole world to its knees as servants and handmaidens of the devil. And that was why the Kirk was obsessed.
But because of this nonsense about predestination, it meant that even if you were a kirk minister, even if you were a very senior kirk minister in the General Assembly, the Kirk of Scotland, you couldn't know for absolute certainty that you were saved. So you end up in a circular argument, because if I'm the most godly person, then the devil's going to attack me. So if the devil attacks me, that proves I'm the most godly. So if I'm the most godly local [00:18:00] minister and the witches attack me, that proves I'm the most godly. But that means I want there to be witches in my area.
And so it just becomes a circular argument. You end up bringing in the witch prickers and witch brodders that we had here, and they were paid by how many witches they found, so they found lots of witches. And the ministers stood in the pulpit and screamed that this was diabolical and this was the devil and this was awful. But in a way you're saying, " see, it proves I'm a really good minister, because why else would they attack me? Why else would there be witches in my parish?" And once you're in that mindset, it's really difficult to get out of that mindset. Once you're in that circular argument, there's really no way out.
Josh Hutchinson: We read in Borders Witch Hunt about Auld Nick. Who was he?
Mary W Craig: Auld Nick was the devil. Scotland has lots of names for the Devil. He is Auld Nick. He's Auld Horny. He's Auld Jack. He's Black Clootie. [00:19:00] He's Horny Clootie. We have all these different names, and a lot of the names are from way back, from our Pagan ancestors.
There are also lots of places in Scotland named after the Devil. There's the Devil's Beeftub, which is just a very large river valley, but it's a round river valley, so it's the Devil's Beeftub. There's the Devil's Arse, there's the Devil's Bum, there's the Devil's Loo. There's the Devil's Toothpick. Not quite sure about that one.
So there's lots of, so the Devil in a way, the Devil that the church had in mind, who was Satan, who ruled over hell and fire and damnation. He wasn't quite the devil that, in Pagan times, we had believed in, he was a man that you could have a sort of, you can make a deal with the devil. You played the fiddle, you can play dice with the devil, you can play cards with the devil. There was a familiarity there that sort of lingered in folk superstition, even after the Christian Church was established. So again, when the [00:20:00] Church is railing about the Devil, and locally you say, "ah, it's just Auld Nick," that mismatch could mean the difference between life and death.
Sarah Jack: I'm very curious and I found the overlapping of the old and new beliefs quite a big deal.
Mary W Craig: Yeah, because like in all things, what people believe, ordinary people believe and what society deems as acceptable, there's always a lag of several years. I have a friend who's an elder in the Kirk of Scotland, and he still won't walk under a ladder, and he laughs at himself for that superstition. Even though he is a practicing Christian, he still has that superstitious belief, and he knows it's ridiculous, but that's what he grew up with. So these folk beliefs linger on, and I the original meaning the original Pagan meaning has been lost in time.
But you keep all, you'll say, "knock on wood," or you'll touch wood for good luck, or you won't cross a black cat's path or breaking a mirror. All of these superstitions, we've lost the original meaning, but [00:21:00] they're still there. We still all do it.
We still go out at Halloween, we go out guising, you guys go out trick-or-treating, and that's going way back. That's pre-Christian, that's a pre-Christian festival that we all still now. I mean, it's fun, and the kids get sweeties and candy. These superstitious beliefs hang on in there, and while now we smile at them and they're fine, because the Reformation was so recent for the Kirk of Scotland and because they had developed this siege mentality, they couldn't make any allowances for these old beliefs.
So it didn't make sense. So that 50 years previously your grandmother might have said a Catholic prayer as she was soothing an ill child. That was acceptable. Now, Catholicism had been tarred with the brush of being diabolical. It's very difficult to tell somebody they can't do something they've been doing for 50 years with no apparent harm.
Sarah Jack: The people's beliefs were in a transition, but what was acceptable was like a switch.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. If you think about the modern day [00:22:00] laws on things like homosexuality, society had moved on from homosexuality whilst lawmakers had not. Their thinking was about 30 years behind. And social change, same-sex marriages, things like that, the lawmakers are always behind what is the societal movement of what isn't acceptable within a society.
And what we had kept onto our old pagan traditions in Scotland. We still do it today. You still throw coins in a fountain or down a wishing well. That again, it's an old pagan belief. You take metal, which is precious, you put it into water, and water is a gateway into the world of the gods. Pre-Christian, we all do it when we're on holiday. That's part of the fun. We still, you get some people who will still leave out, my grandmother would still leave out cheese and milk for the fairies that were in the wood at the back of her house, and this would be in about 1930. She was still doing that. Admittedly, most of her neighbors thought she was a bit odd, but that belief was was still with her.
Josh Hutchinson: What were [00:23:00] some factors in the high rate of witch trials and executions in Scotland?
Mary W Craig: One of the highest problems was the king. When Elizabeth I dies in 1601, and James VI of Scotland, goes down to England to become James I of Great Britain, he goes to London, cuz that's where the money's to be made, and he takes most of his court away with him. So the senior nobility all go down to London, and it leaves a power vacuum in Scotland. And that's where the Kirk of Scotland just steps into that power vacuum.
The problem was that James VI wanted a uniform faith across the whole of Britain, and he wanted to have the Episcopal faith, or the Anglican Episcopacy faith, simply because England's 10 times bigger than Scotland. It was easier to go with the majority faith. He was in London. He was in an, gonna go with the majority faith. The problem is that had a hierarchy, which included bishops, and the Church of Scotland took one look at that and [00:24:00] said, "that's Catholicism being shoved back." And so instantly they were at loggerheads.
Now, initially, James VI wasn't too stupid, so he just thought, I'll just leave the Scotch alone. His son, Charles I, comes along, wants to do the same thing, but he didn't have the same political nous as his father. So instead of leaving well alone, he decides he wants to impose this Episcopal faith onto Scotland.
At the same time, Charles has fallen out with his English parliamentarians over taxation, and he's causing bother over in Ireland. So basically you end up with the English Civil War or the War of the Three Kingdoms. So you basically got civil war going on. So because you've got a war going on, the Kirk of Scotland turned around and says, "well see, it's the Devil, it must be, because we are all good Calvinist Scots. Why would God inflict a war on us? It must be the Devil. Why is God inflicting famine on us? He wouldn't. It must be the [00:25:00] Devil." So all the external factors are pushing it to being the devil, because that's, that's your only get outta jail free card.
There is no other explanation. It's like in the 1930s in Germany, everything was a fault of the Jews. It didn't matter what, it was the fault of the Jews, because that's what people were being constantly told. It was the same thing up here, because of course, if you start to admit for one second that it might not be the devil, then maybe you have to take responsibility for yourself.
There's also the fact that in Scotland, we do have rotten weather up here. Let's be honest, it is absolutely pelting rain with me. I can see is it today, and it's supposed to be nice today. So we do have rotten weather. So if you have harvest failure and bad weather and war and famine and death, and then the 30 years religious war kicks off in the continent, and there are Catholics across in Ireland, who are coming across into Scotland and going up and causing bother with the Irish clans. The whole world is in chaos. And halfway through the century we [00:26:00] chop the king's head off. Now that's pretty serious. Your king might be mad, and your king might be bad, and your king might be mad and bad, but you don't chop his head off.
And then Scotland, we ended up, Oliver Cromwell comes up and imposed a republic on Scotland. So there were English soldiers based in Scotland. So the Scottish Covenanters say, "our only king is Jesus Christ." So they end up doing a Holy War. So in all of this chaos and confusion that you cannot control as a church, the only thing you can say for certainty is all of this is caused by the devil. And you have to believe that because if you don't, then there's nothing the church can do about the king, there's nothing the church can do about all Oliver Cromwell, they can't control the weather, they can't control the pestilence, they can't control the war in Europe, they can't control the Irish Catholics coming over. Only thing they can do is stick to their certainty, so they develop that siege mentality, and it lasts for a long time. They keep to this belief in the [00:27:00] devil and witches and witchcraft for well over 150 years because to admit anything else, then their house starts to crumble. So that's why they have fixated on that.
Sarah Jack: That was wonderful. Thanks for that very detailed explanation for that.
Mary W Craig: The 17th century was a bad century across Europe because we had the reformation in the previous century, and what you end up with in the 17th century is the counter-reformation, and you end up with the 30 years religious wars. You've got the German states fighting with each other, you've got France and Spain fighting, so there's wars all over the place.
People are jockeying for position in Europe, which is utterly terrifying. So you've got religious uncertainty and war and soldiers and famine and plague and bad weather. And you as an individual have no control. And then you go to the one person who's going to tell you what's what, and it's the minister, and they're telling you what to do.
And as I say, we had Charles I we chop [00:28:00] his head off, we ended up the protectorate. Then Oliver Cromwell dies. His son comes along, we didn't like him, we got rid of him. Charles II comes back, but oh dear, he's married to a Catholic, so we're not quite sure about him. They don't have any children. And then James VII of Scotland, or James II of Britain. We had a lot of Jameses. He comes back. Oh dear, he's a Catholic, so we don't like him, so we bump him. So we end up with Mary and William of Orange coming over from the Netherlands. So for that entire century, there is very little stable government at the time giving us anything, because it's the government that's causing half the bother. Cuz the government, whichever government, is always arguing with the church. So the only stable thing you have in Scotland is the Kirk of Scotland. Everything else is in flux all the time. And as I say, it lasts for that full century.
Josh Hutchinson: Why were women believed more likely to be witches?
Mary W Craig: Oh, there were two or three books. There was one known as the Malleus Maleficarum, [00:29:00] which was written by a chap who may have been under the name Kramer or may have been under the name Institoris. He may or may not have been a Dominican, and he was kicked about the German states in the 16th century.
There was a Witch trial in Speyer in one of the German states, and he had an argument with the bishop Speyer as to how they should conduct this trial. The bishop said, "no, it's my town. We're doing it my way." And the women there were acquitted of witchcraft. And Kramer then said, "you're an idiot. You're wrong. If you'd have done it my way, would've had them executed."
And he wrote this book called Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer of the Witches, in which he basically outlined what a witch is and what you should do about it. So women are weak, lascivious, lying, deceitful, awful creatures, and therefore, we are ready tools of the devil. A man is steadfast in his faith in the Lord. A man is very seldom going to be tempted, but we are gonna be tempted, because, well, we're [00:30:00] useless and weak and awful.
He writes terrible things, like women's bodies are weak, and you can tell they're weak because they're porous. You think, oh, you're a horrible man. They produce milk, they leak, their bodies leak, therefore their faith will leak. He uses analogies like that, a terrible book. Problem is, it was a bestseller. Everybody thought this book was brilliant. Then you come in to the later 16th century, and you've got John Knox, and John Knox writes his book against the, it's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. And he was actually talking about people like Mary Tudor, who he thought was a disgraceful person and should never have been queen, cuz of course she's female, and she's a queen, and she's Catholic.
So he says that power is unnatural to women, and women who have power are in league with the devil. So you've got Institoris saying that we're weak, and our faith is weak, and we're terrible and awful. And then you've got John Knox saying, and any woman that's [00:31:00] got power is coming from the devil. And these books are read by all of the learned men right the way across Europe.
And then James I, James VI of Scotland, James I of England, just before he leaves Scotland, he comes back from Denmark with his wife-to-be in a boat, and a great storm is raised outside North Berwick. And somebody says, "oh, that storm was raised by witchcraft." So there's a huge witchcraft trial. James is involved, he's the king. And because Scotland was a little country, James wanted to be one of the big princes in Europe. Scotland's so little and so poor, he can't really do it with money, but he can do it by learning. So he writes a book called Demonology, all about Witches.
So if the king's writing about it, and John Knox is writing about it, and Kramer's writing about it, these three books do the rounds. And they just become the accepted norm that women are, by their nature, weak and silly and stupid [00:32:00] and, therefore, susceptible to the wiles of the devil. We'll just give in, because we're so hopeless. And in Scotland, about 85% of those who were persecuted as witches were women, about 15% were men.
Sarah Jack: And how were warlocks viewed differently?
Mary W Craig: Warlocks were slightly different, because there were men who followed the devil and became warlocks, but because they were men, they had to be in charge of the women. So you would maybe get three or four women, and the warlock would be in charge of them. So although he was awful and had renounced Christ and made a pact with the devil, he was in charge of the women. So that made sense, because men are supposed to be in charge of women. The reason the church was very upset about warlocks is that also tended to be men who were learned, so men who were themselves ex-ministers.
One of the famous ones is Major Weir in Edinburgh, who was this bowhead saint. And he would [00:33:00] give great sermons in the open air in Edinburgh at the Westport of Edinburgh. And then he actually turned out to have been a warlock all along. When he was executed, he threw his staff into the fire, and apparently it turned and made grimaces and uttered curses as the wood burned.
But yes, so they were very frightened of warlocks because that was just all worry. Even the devil was so powerful. He was now ensnaring men, where his women were just what can you expect? They're women. They're going to be easily ensnared.
Josh Hutchinson: Were the warlocks treated differently in the witch trials than the witches?
Mary W Craig: Yes. Now women couldn't speak in court. You weren't allowed to speak in court if you were a woman. But then one of the proofs of being a witch was to be deleted or named by another witch. So if I'm accused of being a witch, and I say, "I am and so is my sister," and then they bring my sister into court, I have to be able to say in court, "yes, I am naming my sister as a witch." So they changed the law so that [00:34:00] women could speak, but only to delate, to talk about another woman as a witch. But men as warlocks were allowed to speak in court.
And so women would be asked things like, "did you have sex with the devil?" Yet again, we're obsessed with sex. "What was he like?" And all these sorts of questions. And, "what did you do? And how did you serve him? And who was all there with you?" When men were accused of being a warlock, they would be asked, "why did you renounce your baptism? Why did you turn away from Christ? Why did you make a pact with the devil?"
It's almost as if women are just emotional. We don't really care about what they've been up to. But with the men, it was almost as if they were reasoning with them and saying, "do you not understand what you've done here? Come back to Christ. Do you not understand that this is wicked and awful?"
And there would be, the trials of warlocks could sometimes last for two or three days. The trials for women often lasted barely two or three hours. So it was quite different, yes, and a lot of men who were accused were [00:35:00] allowed to escape, shall we say? Or they would be held under house arrest, and they would often kill themselves, because your family could inherit your money, if you kill yourself. If you're executed as a witch or a warlock, your money is forfeit to the Kirk.
And a lot of men could actually challenge the accusation in the first place. If I accuse you of being a witch or a warlock, you would just turn around and say, "how dare you? I'm a man of good standing in this community. That, that Mary's outrageous. She's accused me of being a witch." And I could often be arrested for slander. So a man could often talk the accusation down at that very early stage. So that's why, there are a few, and there are a few men who went to trial and were acquitted, because they either talked themselves out of it, or they got a couple of good lawyers in there to say, "for goodness sake, this is a chap of good standing, and why we're listening to the gossip of women? Of course he's not a warlock." So the acquittal rate for men was a lot higher than women.
We also have in Scotland the not proven verdict, and we still have it in Scots law. Now, not proven doesn't mean you're innocent, [00:36:00] and it doesn't mean you're guilty. It just means that the crown has not proved its case against you. And so there are a few cases of not proven verdicts in witchcraft trials, and that tended to be for men. Men would get a not proven verdict, and if you're not proven, you're not sent to prison, you cannot be punished, because the case against you has not been proven. There are constant arguments under Scots law, whenever anybody's found not proven these days, as to whether or not we should abolish it.
Josh Hutchinson: What was the penalty for witchcraft in Scotland?
Mary W Craig: To be worriet, strangled to death, and then your dead body burnt. If you were extremely lucky, you might, in the earliest part of the century, and in the 16th century, you might get away with being branded, fined, and exiled. Oh, there are very few guilty verdicts that did not end up in an execution. And for women it was always execution after the guilty verdict, every time. Yep. And as I say, in the case of the people's [00:37:00] trial, that was 24 people executed on one day.
And of course, everybody had to come out to watch. The minister wanted everybody to see what happened to witches. The devil didn't come down and save them in the end. The devil was a lying master that if you follow the devil, this is what happens to you.
And oftentimes, if it's in some of the smaller towns, there was no public executioner. So it might be somebody like the local blacksmith, because he was a big strong lad, and he might be the one that had to, often they would put a noose around the neck and slip a little bit of wood in, and they would turn the piece of wood to strangle someone. And that's, you're having to do that face to face with somebody. It takes a long time to strangle somebody. And if it's in a small town, the chances are that blacksmith's gonna know the people that he's executing. So it was traumatic, I would think, for them afterwards to think, especially if there had been any doubt, if perhaps somebody just got caught up in it, a name was uttered, or somebody had fallen out with someone, but that was it. [00:38:00] There was no get out. Once that guilty verdict was in, you were executed, usually within a day or two days.
Sarah Jack: In your book, you noted that the people were not just expected to be there. If you weren't there observing, that was really bad for your reputation.
Mary W Craig: Oh yes. The minister would notice. You had to have a very good reason to not be there and have your children there as well. Why aren't you there? Why aren't you seeing? Because executing a witch was God's work. So, "why are you not there to witness it? Why are you hiding in your house? What have you got to hide? Were you a friend of the Witch? Are you a Witch yourself?" Yes, it would be noted if you didn't, if you didn't turn up, you didn't get there. "Why are you not watching what's going on? Why are you not showing your children, your three and four year old children? Why are you not showing them this gruesome scene to say to them, 'this is what happens?'"
Yes, you had to be there, and ministers would take note of it. And these were the sorts of things that could build to a bad reputation. So that, [00:39:00] 10 years down the line, another accusation is made, and your name might be on the list, and the minister thinks, "oh yeah, they didn't turn up that execution the last time. Yeah. They've not been to the kirk a couple of Sundays in a row without a good reason. Yeah, I'm gonna keep an eye on them." So that bad reputation can follow you about. We have situations where there are people caught up in an accusation, don't make it to court, but then 10 years down the line, the fact that they were previously investigated is brought up as part of the evidence against them.
Josh Hutchinson: And why did they burn the bodies?
Mary W Craig: It was so that there was nothing left, absolutely nothing left, because you had denied your faith, and your faith is everything. You denied that. Then you are nothing. And so the body would be burnt, and it takes a long time to burn the body. It's not like today, if you have somebody who's cremated, it's done very clinically and very safely and very respectfully and, you know, in a[00:40:00] proper sort of manner. If you're talking about Scotland this time of the year, it has rained today all day. Body could take three or four days to burn, and it's burning in a public place. It's maybe burning in the marketplace where you go to buy your bread every morning, and there is a body still burning, still burning. And then, eventually, there's nothing left, or if there is anything left, if there are a pile of ashes left, they're usually thrown into water, and the water will take 'em away. Partly because it's cleansing like a baptism, and partly the fact that it physically takes them away.
Sarah Jack: And where did the methods originate of killing and burning the witch?
Mary W Craig: Initially, if you'd done a terrible crime, if you committed a murder, you'd be executed. And usually people were hanged in Scotland. We didn't tend to burn people alive. They did in some of the Catholic countries, but that was because witchcraft to them was mixed in with heresy and burning alive was a particular punishment for heresy. We tended to hang people. Occasionally you got your head [00:41:00] chopped off, but that was slightly different. That tended to happen up in Highlands a little bit more. But anyway, Lowland Scotland tended to hang people. But because you were then gonna burn the body to get rid of the body as well, because you don't want anything of the Witch left, it was a practical thing.
If you have to build a gallows and then hang somebody, and then take a body down and then put it onto a pyre to burn it, that's a lot more work. And so if you just build a pyre and have a stake and tie someone to the stake, strangle them there and then burn them, it was purely a practical method. In some areas, people were burned inside tar barrels to make sure they couldn't escape at the last minute, although the Church of Scotland didn't quite like that, so that was too much like superstition.
But it was a purely practical reason, especially if you're gonna execute 24 people in one day. That's a lot of gallows to have to construct and then take down, because often witches weren't executed in a local place of execution. So you might have a big town, and you would have a place of execution for those who were guilty of [00:42:00] murder or rape or something horrible like that. Witches weren't executed there, because they weren't even supposed to be executed alongside ordinary criminals. Cause ordinary criminals were bad, but they hadn't denied Christ. So they were separate, even in their execution and even in their death, they were separate.
Sarah Jack: And these witches didn't say they denied Christ. They just had, because they were a witch.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. Oh, all of them were Christian. They were absolutely Christian. And you can hear it if you read through, the best thing I always find with the confessions is to actually read them out loud. And you can hear these women, especially the early part of the century, they're genuinely confused as to what it is they're supposed to have done, because they're not doing anything that their mother and their grandmother didn't do before them.
They went out, and they got herbs to, to help heal a child, and they said a little charm. What had this got to do with the devil? They didn't understand, and [00:43:00] occasionally they might say things like, "I met the man in the black hat." They meant a supernatural creature with a black hat. They did not mean the Devil, and they couldn't, you can hear the fact that it's almost as if the ministers and the interrogators are saying one thing, and the woman is saying another. It's like ships that pass in the night, they're just not understanding.
There are some really poignant ones where people say things like, "can I be a witch and not know it?" They were genuinely confused by what was going on. It was only as the trials continued, and by the time you got to about 1649, then a lot of people are absolutely shutting up and they're saying nothing.
They're saying absolutely nothing because they know that it doesn't matter what they say, it's gonna be turned. Now, the interrogators tended to be the minister and tended to be led by the minister. They would ask what today we would say would be leading questions, but what they would say is they wouldn't say to you, "did you meet the devil?" Cuz you're gonna say no to that. What they'll say is, "when you met the devil, who else was there with you?" [00:44:00] You said, "but I didn't meet the devil." "When you met the man in the black hat, was your sister with you? Was your mother with you? Was your daughter with you?" And so they would ask questions in a way to get the women to incriminate themselves, although they didn't really understand, and as I said, but later in this century, people understood and people were saying nothing. And that's when they start to use things like walking and watching and waking. And keeping people awake for days and days on end to get them into that mindset where they're gonna confess to anything.
Josh Hutchinson: You've talked about several methods that they used to test the witches. Were there others?
Mary W Craig: There were the four proofs. The first proof was having a really bad reputation or a reputation of doing bad things. One was to be called a witch by another confessing witch. One was to confess to being a witch, and that was usually done, they would keep you awake for days on end and be badgering you the whole time, "you're a disgrace to your family. You're a disgrace to your friends." And eventually you give in.
They would hold lighted candles to your feet. They would string you up by your thumbs. They would break [00:45:00] your arms, things like that. They would beat you to make you confess.
The other one was the Devil's mark. Cuz it was thought that the devil laid his hands on you and it's a parody of Christ. And because he was unnatural, he would leave a mark on you that was unnatural. And then a witch pricker or a witch brodder would arrive with a pin maybe about five centimeters long, and he would put that into your shoulders or your neck or your head on say, a mole or a freckle. And if you didn't cry out or it didn't bleed, that proved you had the devil's mark. And of course, acupuncture today, there are points in the body you can put a pin in. Often they would just keep on pricking somebody until they found point that didn't bleed.
You could be called a Witch by another Witch. If you had marks on your body, and that goes back to biblical times where you're talking about people being leprous with sin, and so if you were a sinful person, if you'd gone to the devil, there would be marks on you.
But it was mostly by keeping you awake and constantly talking at you the whole time. That was the main method [00:46:00] that was used against you.
Sarah Jack: It just amazes me that they survived everything to even get to the execution. It just seems like it was so harsh.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. I'm surprised at those who didn't confess, I'm genuinely surprised that those that didn't confess at all. And there were some who absolutely to the end said, "no, I'm not gonna confess." There were a lot of people who confessed and then at trial or just before the trial retracted their confession, and they said, "I confessed because of the torture I was put under."
You weren't allowed to be interrogated if you were under the age of 10, but we know that happened. You weren't allowed to be interrogated if you were what was known as addled in your wits, if you're mentally incompetent. But again, we know that happened. There were people who were put on trial who were quite obviously mentally incapable, and yet the local kirk minister said, "no, I want them sent to trial, and if they're mad, it's their own fault. That's what happens if you [00:47:00] hang about the devil, and anyway, they're probably faking it." And it didn't matter if your family said, " granny's been a bit wandered for years" or even if you had a doctor to say, "this person is mentally incompetent." The kirk minister should, by sheer force of personality, just say, "no, I want them brought to trial." And they were brought to trial.
But as I say, some of the confessions are so poignant. They're sort of little things like, "I left out milk for the fairies." That's it, you're witch. Or, "I was taking care of my neighbor's little boy, and I said a little rhyme over him to help him soothe him to, to sleep," which every mother and father has done that. You sing a little nursery rhyme to help your little one, if you've got a fever. That now becomes a diabolical act. It's so poignant when you read what they're actually accused of doing. But underpinning all of that, as far as the kirk was concerned, was this obsession that they had made a pact with the devil.
Josh Hutchinson: What drew you [00:48:00] to write a book about Agnes Finnie?
Mary W Craig: Oh, I wrote the book about Agnes Finnie, because I've been interested in the Witches and witchcraft for ages and ages, and the reason I'm write, I'm writing the book on Agnes Finnie, is because she doesn't fit the stereotype. She's not a nice, cute little old lady living in a cottage. She's not gathering her to take care of her neighbors. She's a nasty so-and-so. She lives in a tenement slum. She's a shopkeeper selling dodgy goods. She's a money-lender.
And it's very easy to be sympathetic to a sweet, gray-haired old granny who's gathering herbs in the countryside and who is persecuted by the church. And we all think that's terrible and awful and shouldn't have happened. It's much more difficult to be sympathetic to somebody who's not a sympathetic character, but Agnes Finnie, for all she was a nasty piece of work and for all she was quite an unpleasant person, was still deserving of justice. The law should not have treated her the way it did.
[00:49:00] And that's why I wrote about her. And also the fact that she was in the city and the book, just what life was like if you were poor. In the city of Edinburgh at that time, Agnes Finnie, is living in a place called Potterrow Port, which is, it's no longer there, but it's one of the high tenements in Edinburgh. So there's no sanitation, there's no running water, it's dark at night, it's freezing cold. Everybody's drinking as if there's no tomorrow, because the lives are so miserable.
At the same time as Agnes is alive, King Charles I has a camel, which he keeps at Corstorphine, which is the west end of Edinburgh. And this camel goes out for a walk every day, except for a Sunday, cuz it's a good Christian camel, it rests on a Sunday. And you can pay sixpence to go and see the camel. Camel has got a groom, and it's got heated stables, and it's got the best of food, and it's being fed, I dunno, sugar lumps and all sorts. And once a month, the keeper of the royal camel writes a report on how the camel's doing and [00:50:00] sends that to Charles I, and he reads this. He's not getting a report on how the poor people are living in the tenement where Agnes is. He doesn't care about them, who are starving and freezing and drinking alcohol that they've made themselves, because there's nothing else they can do to get through the day.
So that's why I wrote about Agnes, partly to say everybody's deserving of justice, nasty or otherwise, but also the fact that the king cares about his camel, but doesn't care about the poor. This is the century in which witches were living or alleged witches were living.
Sarah Jack: And what was like the population, and how many people were living like Agnes?
Mary W Craig: That's difficult to say, because not everybody was registered. You might get a tenement that had eight alleged houses in it, but you might have people who were so poor that when their husband went to work in the morning, they would get a lodger coming in off the night shift to sleep in their husband's bed. You had people sleeping in the back stairs of [00:51:00] tenements, because that was all they had. That was the problem. Nobody quite knew how many people were there.
The conditions were so bad that 50% of all children never made it to their fifth birthday. You go to Edinburgh today and you've got the amazing guides that'll take you down the old town in Edinburgh, and they talk about gardylooing. It's all done as a joke and a laugh, and everybody laughs about it. They were basically throwing excrement out of windows, and that's how people lived. There was no light. There was no heat. There was lice and fleas and cockroaches and rats. This was the life that King Charles I's subjects were living whilst his camel on the west end of the city is being fed sugar lumps.
Josh Hutchinson: So why did you choose to write a book about one particular individual after the borders witches was many trials and many people, so why focus on just one?
Mary W Craig: I wanted to focus in on one person's life to look at the ordinary life of the person in a bit more detail. And I went [00:52:00] through the records with the National Archives and the National Library in Scotland, and I was fortunate enough to find Agnes Finnie's entire trial records. So that allowed me to look at that in some detail, but also the fact that she lived just at the outbreak of the Scottish Civil War and the chaos and what is sort of throughout that because of the rising tension all the time. And we've got the wars going on in Ukraine and Russia at the moment. There's a war over there, but it's far away. We hear about it on the news, but it doesn't affect us on a daily basis.
The war was right there in Edinburgh. Young men were getting called up. You might just be an ordinary person. All of a sudden your son has to go to fight either for the king or against the king. There were roving gangs around the city, armed men in the city. So there's all sorts of things bubbling up, and the fact that I could focus in on this one individual and see what her life was like and how she starts off just as a shopkeeper, maybe doing a little bit of money-lending, all the way up to the time when [00:53:00] she's arrested, where there are 20 accusations of witchcraft being laid against her by her neighbors.
So I was able to look at it in a lot more sort of microscopic detail of one individual and how that came to pass.
Sarah Jack: I was thinking how you probably just saw her coming, like who she was,, coming together before you because of all of your extensive research and your expertise on all of these things you're talking about. And then you find her and all these records. I'm sure she just jumped right out at you.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. And the fact that she wasn't in a little cottage and she wasn't a sweet little old lady, because that would've been a very different book, because from page one, everybody would've gone, "oh, that's a shame. Poor, sweet, little old lady, what's the big bad church gonna do?" Whereas this is, "okay, Agnes, oh I see. You're like that. Are you?" And that's the challenge. The challenge of this is the reality.
I'm not saying that Agnes was a horrible person, because she was horrible. I'm saying that she wasn't a nice person, [00:54:00] but she wasn't living in a nice time. She was trying to cope the best she could. And of course she had all of the, she's a woman on her own, she's a widow, and women are only supposed to do certain things and act in certain ways. So that drew me to her because, she's trying to struggle through and do the best she can, but because she was that slightly more unpleasant character, she was much more fascinating than a sweet, little old lady.
Sarah Jack: Why was she chosen to be an accused?
Mary W Craig: She was accused, she was finally accused by her neighbors. Her neighbors went to the minister and complained about her. And then when the minister started to investigate, he ended up with these 20 accusations going back years and years.
So there were neighbors saying things like, "I had an argument with her and she made me go lame" or, "I had an argument with her and she blinded my husband." And all of these accusations then start to come out, and Agnes ends up arrested and sent to trial. So it's a sort of accumulation of different things that had happened, [00:55:00] because at one point, she's known in the neighborhood as a witch.
They know she's a witch. There's a couple called the Buchanans, and they go to her when they're little boy is unwell. And you think, why else are they going to the witch? I mean, Agnes is known to be a bad tempered so-and-so. Why are they going to this woman to try and help the little boy?
Because there was nowhere else for them to go. They're poor. They can't afford a doctor. There's no doctor going down to the tenements. The minister from the Kirk doesn't even go down to the tenements. They're basically a little world on their own in a little squallid corner of Edinburgh. They're in the capital city, and yet they're living a miserable life, and they have nothing else to do but go to Agnes. You think why would anybody borrow money from her if she's so horrible? Where else can they go? They can't go to a bank. They haven't got anywhere else to go.
The only person they can go to is Agnes, because they're all living life on the edge. One bad day, you fall over and break your leg. You can't work, you can't pay your rent, you're [00:56:00] put out your house. You try living on the streets in a Scottish winter, you're gonna die. Witch she might have been, bad tempered so-and-so she might have been, but there was nobody else for these people to go until finally they've had enough of her temper. And also finally, the fear of the witch tips the balance against the usefulness that she has, because of the rising tension of the war. And so all these things come together, and eventually they've had enough, and they go to the minister.
Josh Hutchinson: And what was the evidence used against her?
Mary W Craig: The evidence against her was what you and I would probably just think of as the accusation. So somebody would say, "I had an argument with her in the street. She yelled at me, "I'll send you halting hame." And I developed a limp. And as far as the court, as far as the minister was concerned, that was proof positive. And if the minister says so, then the court just agrees. So it was actually just the accusation.
I [00:57:00] think in Agnes's case, because there were so many of these accusations, it just piled up and piled and piled up. But interestingly, the jury took a long time to find her guilty. It took a long time. You'd expect with 20 odd accusations that they would've said guilty straight away. Now, they took a good few weeks to think about it and think about whether or not Agnes was guilty, but I think it was just accumulation. As I say, in the vast majority of witchcraft trials, there was no proof, because how can you prove something like a spell? It's very difficult to prove a spell.
You can say, "we asked Agnes to take care of our little boy, and then our little boy died." But how do you prove that Agnes killed the child? You could say, "Agnes yelled at my father, and then he had a stroke." But how do you actually prove that? Yeah, the link between cause and effect was very tenuous then, but it was enough because you had power from the devil. Then that gave you the power to lame someone [00:58:00] or blind someone.
Sarah Jack: Was Agnes executed?
Mary W Craig: She was, yes. If you're ever in Edinburgh, going up just before you hit the castle esplanade on the right hand side, you'll see the Witches' Well. And that's where the witches were executed in Edinburgh. So yes, she was executed.
Sarah Jack: Was she executed alongside other witches that day?
Mary W Craig: No. She was executed on her own, and interestingly, her daughter was not. And yet within the accusations, the 20 accusations, her daughter was named as a witch as well. And yet she was not executed, which is a curious point.
When I looked at the sort of aftermath of her trial, what was interesting was that the minister, who had never gone near the Potterrow in his time as a minister, nothing was ever said against him. Nobody said to him, "why did you not know about this witch?" Nothing was said. And he thereafter never went down to Potterrow. The local bailey, who was like the police officer for the beat, they said to him, "why did you [00:59:00] never see any of this happening?" Nobody said anything to him, and he just continued to be the police officer on the beat. They didn't do anything. No doctor went down to Potterrow. It was a case of, "we've found your witch, we've executed your witch. Now go back to your slum, because we don't care about you." And that's what happened. They were just left to continue living in the slum. That was a Potterrow.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you want people to take away from your book?
Mary W Craig: To understand that everybody deserves justice no matter what personality they have. Sometimes we should look at the way people live. We think of Edinburgh as the capital city of Scotland and oh, it's wonderful and oh, it's fantastic. It's got its poor areas well, and everywhere does. And to look at the trial and think about the difference, look at what is cause and effect, what is just an accusation, and look at the way the law is used and can be [01:00:00] abused by some people.
Sarah Jack: Will the story of Agnes help the cause of pardoning and memorializing the witch trial victims in Scotland? Is that something you support?
Mary W Craig: I think it might help towards the pardon. The pardon is being run by Claire Madison Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi. And Claire is a KC, she's a King's Counsel. In the appellate court, she deals with appeals and miscarriages of justice. And that's why she's interested in this. And I think looking at the way the law is used and abused and looking at the fact that you have to have proof, proper proof to convict somebody of any crime, and that's what was lacking in the witchcraft trials.
I understand the religious belief in the Devil. I understand the theological knot that the Kirk of Scotland got itself tied into with this Calvinist predestination, but to then take that theological [01:01:00] argument and get the secular authorities and get the law to use it, that was what was wrong. And that's why we need the pardon today.
We don't do exonerations in Scotland, but we need to pardon these women and men for what happened to them under the law and to use it as an example of us always keeping an eye on the law and making sure that the law and the justice system is kept out of the hands of people like the Kirk of Scotland and kept out of the hands of politicians. It should stand alone that if you are accused of something, you go to trial, you have a fair trial. That's, what's it? It's nobody else's business. It's not politicians, not the religious people, nobody else. Let the law be the law, and let faith be faith. So I think that's something that's really important.
And as I say, we have had an apology from the Kirk of Scotland. I think the pardon would be a good idea, because it would again strengthen that. And then what we're looking for is a national [01:02:00] memorial, as well as lots of people are putting up small local memorials. But I think a national memorial. And I personally would also like this part of Scottish history to be taught in our schools. We quite rightly teach the children in Scotland about her our involvement in slave trade. This, to me, stands alongside that. It's a very dark part of our past. It's not something we should be proud of, but it's something we should teach and learn from.
Josh Hutchinson: I agree a hundred percent with what you've said. We're working on exonerating the accused in Connecticut and hopefully memorializing and getting some more education about that. Even though there were much fewer in number than Scotland, we still feel that they're important.
Mary W Craig: Oh yes. One is one too many. Absolutely, yes. Especially when you look at the ages of some of them. Some of these, it was right across the age range, and as I say, every one of them had a family, [01:03:00] had friends, had communities ripped apart by this constant fear, so yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Jack: We really see the parallels in the history in what's happening in Scotland with the pardoning, what needs to happen in the state of Connecticut. It's all part of a very big message, educational message. And thanks for talking about this stuff with us. I want all of these, Agnes and others, to be known so that what you're saying of the changes that need to happen can happen based on the injustices that we know and that we see now.
Mary W Craig: One of the other reasons why I think we need to talk about apologies and pardons and memorials is the fact that there are still people today who are killed as witches. It's still happening to this day, and that is something. You can believe anything you want, but you can't [01:04:00] use that belief to persecute another individual. And that's a really strong message that I think we still need to get across because there are still women and men today being executed as witches around the world.
Josh Hutchinson: We've recently spoke with an activist from South Africa, and he explained the situation there, and it's really eye-opening. There's so many people that are still tortured and killed.
Mary W Craig: Was that Leo Igwe?
Josh Hutchinson: This was Damon Leff that we spoke with. We're hoping to speak with Leo pretty soon.
Mary W Craig: Leo's excellent. That's the saddest part is the fact that we, we're 400 years on and it's still happening, so human beings can be so nice and so fantastic and so wonderful to each other. And we can produce amazing things like, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the Mona Lisa. And yet we can equally be absolutely awful to one another, and we need to recognize that part of our personality and guard [01:05:00] against it whenever we can.
Josh Hutchinson: Is there anything that we could do to stop hunting witches in the present day?
Mary W Craig: That's a difficult one, because the witch hunts that are happening today have different roots. So a lot of the ones in Africa are rooted in evangelical church, so it's coming from Christian belief. But there are witchcraft trials in places like Nepal and Saudi Arabia, countries like that, where it's not coming from a Christian perspective. So I'm not sure what their concept of witchcraft is.
I think it's a case of talking about it, keeping it in a public domain, getting it recognized as what it is, which is terror. And speaking to people like Leo Igwe, speaking to campaigners who are working in these actual countries and finding out what's going on there. I'm currently researching a book about colonial India and the witchcraft [01:06:00] trials that took place there under British rule and the parallels that are still happening in some of the Indian states today.
So it's difficult to pick apart exactly what's meant by witchcraft and Witches in some of these areas, but it's speaking to local campaigners and making sure it's on the internet, it's on social media, it's in the news. I think that's what those of us here can do about it.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the things that we're starting to do, we're trying to speak with Leo and Damon and those kinds of people who are on the ground in those nations and know what's going on and get their voices on our podcast. And we find every day stories of these atrocities happening in so many countries, and we share those on social media and try to get the word out the best that we can, and so far that's the thing that we're able to [01:07:00] do.
Sarah Jack: It feels like there should be more to say about that, because it's such a huge, the scope is so wide, but I don't know. It's also silencing when you think about it.
Mary W Craig: I think the problem is the fact that most people, certainly in Scotland, think, "oh, we did it then, and it's all over." And then you'll say, "and there are witchcraft trials happening today" or, "there are witch executions happening today." And people say, they don't know, quite know what to say, because we think of it in the past, I almost liken it to modern day slavery, because up until, I would say 10 years ago, I would reckon most people in Britain thought that slavery was over and done with, was over and done with over 150 years ago.
And it's taken a long time for people in Britain to understand about modern slavery and what that means. For a long time people thought, "oh no, but we abolished the slave trade. There isn't any slavery anymore." And then you discover that the young lady in the nail salon that you go to [01:08:00] might be a modern day slave or the lad that's washing your car.
And that took a long time for people to get that understanding. And I think it's the same with modern witch persecutions. I think is gonna take a bit of time for people to accept it. And then once they say, "oh yes, that is still happening. And so we need to put a stop to that, we need to stop that."
In a way it's quite tied together. It's persecution of people who can't stand up for themselves, because of poverty and or ignorance or political unrest in their home countries. And they are then very quickly victimized, and they could be victimized as a witch, or you could end up being a slave doing my nails in the local salon or something. All of these things are quite interlinked now. So raising the profile and making people understand that it is still happening. Yeah, it's a big, it's a big thing to do, but it's something I think we all should be doing.
Sarah Jack: I'm really hopeful that these messages that we're starting to pull together are [01:09:00] going to just keep reaching more ears and those people are gonna talk about it, too. But there's a parallel, too, with the family of the victims. When I asked about descendants in Scotland, and they didn't want to be connected to those who had been executed. I think in some of the nations today that are having witch attacks, they have to also find a way to carry on in the aftermath and not also be attacked because their grandmother was or their cousin was.
Josh Hutchinson: It was a real eye-opening discussion and very important discussion, and you spoke eloquently to the problems that are still going on today and why it's important to memorialize and pardon. And I want to thank you for that. And thank you for being our guest.
Sarah Jack: I'm really looking forward to getting to know Agnes Finnie.
Mary W Craig: It will be available as a [01:10:00] paperback, hardback, and also in a Kindle version on Amazon, or you can get it direct from the publishing house, Luath Press.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with another update on Witch. Hunts happening in modern times.
Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts World Advocacy News.
As you just heard from Mary Craig, Scotland is actively attending to the damage the witch trials brought to their ancestors. Activists are seeking justice for the innocent people accused and convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1563. As you learned, there is much to make amends for, as much as can be done.
Many individuals and groups have collaborated over recent years to build an effective campaign across the country of Scotland. This effort can heal the massive trauma from their alleged witch executions and trials. Today I want to briefly catch you up on their official progress and point you to the sources of information.
The Scottish Parliament established a precedent of pardoning convictions of innocent past [01:11:00] individuals when it passed the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) Act of 2018. Recognizing this precedent, King's Counsel Claire Mitchell submitted a petition to the Scottish Parliament for the pardoning of Scotland Witches. She states, "history still records these people as convicted witches -- justice demands that this is put right. History should properly reflect what these people were -- innocent, vulnerable people, caught up in a time where allegations of witchcraft were widespread and deadly."
This petition has a strong message, and it's being heard. Two official apologies have been declared to Scotland from within its leadership this year. First, on International Women's Day, March 8th, 2022, the Scottish First Minister on behalf of the Scottish Government issued a formal apology stating, "I am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend a formal posthumous apology to all of those accused, convicted, vilified, or executed under [01:12:00] the Witchcraft Act of 1563." The second apology occurred at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, when a unanimous motion was accepted based on a report by its theological forum to apologize for its role in the murders of thousands of people, mostly women, who were accused of witchcraft between the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Following these landmark apology statements by the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland, Member of Scottish Parliament Natalie Don submitted a member's proposal for a bill requesting a formal pardon, stating, "to build the fairer, more equal, and forward thinking Scotland that we all want to see, we must address the historic abuses of our past. Under the Witchcraft Act of 1563, an estimated 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland, with approximately 2,500, executed between 1563 and 1736."
As Claire Mitchell so clearly pointed out in her petition, Scotland's victims were caught up in a [01:13:00] time where allegations of witchcraft were widespread and deadly. The world today must admit that thousands of living alleged witches are caught up now in a time where allegations of witchcraft are widespread and deadly. The deadly time is still here. It's called today. Actions must be taken to intervene for alleged witches in Africa and the Asian Pacific that are being attacked, tortured, and killed in this deadly time.
Can you accept that witch hunt thinking has not ended? It has not disappeared, it has not stopped. These strongly-held fears must be addressed and stopped immediately. While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world. Use your social power to help them support them by acknowledging and sharing their.
Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
End Witch Hunts movement and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast support the [01:14:00] worldwide movement to recognize and address historical wrongs.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for that informative news segment, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcast.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all the people in your life about our show.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.Org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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