The Kirk and the Witch Hunts, 1563–1736

• Witchcraft became a capital crime in 1563. The Scottish Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act three years after the Reformation, and it stood until the British Parliament repealed it in 1736.
• The scale was large for a small country. The University of Edinburgh's Survey of Scottish Witchcraft names 3,837 accused people. Estimates of executions range up to about 2,500.
• Most of the accused were women, about 84%, often older, poor or living on the margins.
• The hunts came in waves. There were major panics in 1590–91, 1597, 1628–30, 1649–50 and 1661–62, rather than a steady stream of cases.
• The Kirk was central, not the only actor. Kirk sessions gathered accusations and confessions, but trials needed authority from the Privy Council or Parliament, and local lairds and ministers drove many cases.
• There has been an apology, but no pardon in law. Nicola Sturgeon apologised on 8 March 2022. A proposed bill to pardon those convicted had not become law at the time of writing.

The Reformation Parliament of 1560 abolished papal authority and the Mass. Three years later, Parliament made witchcraft and consulting witches capital crimes. The new Kirk sought a godly society, and its kirk sessions disciplined sin at parish level, which put ministers and elders at the front line of accusations.

The first great panic came in 1590–91. James VI believed witches had raised storms against his ship as he brought his bride home from Denmark. Dozens of people in East Lothian were accused of gathering at North Berwick kirk with the Devil. The king took part in interrogations, and in 1597 he published Daemonologie, a treatise on witchcraft. Torture, though legally restricted, was used. The most common method was sleep deprivation, known as "waking" or "watching".

An accusation often began with a quarrel, a curse, or a misfortune such as sick cattle or a dead child. Neighbours reported the suspect, the kirk session gathered evidence and sought a confession, and a search might be made for the "Devil's mark". A trial required a commission from the Privy Council or Parliament. During the great panics, commissions were issued in batches, and local courts of lairds and burgh officials tried and executed the accused.

Historians point to several factors:

• religious zeal after the Reformation;
• the belief that witches made a pact with the Devil, which turned folk magic into heresy;
• a legal system that let local elites run trials;
• periods of famine, plague and political crisis.

Scotland executed far more people for witchcraft per head of population than England.

The last determined witch-hunt came in 1697 in Renfrewshire, after Christian Shaw, the young daughter of the laird of Bargarran, accused local people of bewitching her. Several of those convicted in the Paisley trials were executed. In the same year, the Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy, an execution the historian Jenny Wormald calls brutal and "probably illegal". She reads the two events together. In the 1690s, she argues, the Kirk was losing confidence. Edinburgh students were reading Hobbes, Spinoza and the deists, and the Kirk was lashing out to regain control. To outsiders, the result confirmed an image of the "horrendous godliness" of the Scottish Kirk. Stewart J. Brown notes that Aikenhead's was the last execution of its kind in Scotland, and that the growing language of toleration, influenced by John Locke, helped end both blasphemy and witchcraft prosecutions over the next generation.

Modern study of the Scottish witch-hunt began with Christina Larner's Enemies of God (1981). She showed how often kirk sessions took the initiative in seeking out suspects, who could include local healers skilled in herbal remedies. Julian Goodare has since stressed that the hunt was directed overwhelmingly against women. In his reading, the godly commonwealth was making an intrusive effort to control women and their sexuality. Historians of the family, such as Lauren Martin, now also use witchcraft depositions as rare evidence of quarrels and tensions within and between ordinary households.

From the late seventeenth century, judges grew sceptical of confessions and of "spectral" evidence, and prosecutions declined. In 1736 the British Parliament replaced the old laws with an Act that treated pretending to have magical powers as fraud. That Act was itself repealed only in 1951.

shared Repeal ended prosecutions, not belief, and emigrants took ideas about witches across the Atlantic. The historian David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed (1989), traces folk magic in the American backcountry, which was settled in the eighteenth century largely from Ulster, the Scottish Lowlands and the north of England. Samuel Kercheval, writing of the Valley of Virginia in 1833, remembered "witch-masters" who "made a public profession of curing these diseases, inflicted by the influence of witches", as quoted by Fischer. Fischer also notes that no one is known to have been executed for witchcraft anywhere in the southern highlands. The belief crossed the ocean; the machinery of kirk session, commission and assize did not.

shared Two cautions apply. Fischer himself says this folklore came from Ireland, Scotland and the north of England, and was constantly added to from Native American, African and German sources, so no single charm can be called Scottish without separate evidence. And most of his examples were collected by folklorists in North Carolina and the Ozarks in the twentieth century. They show that witch belief lasted among the descendants of British emigrants; they say little about what any Scottish parish believed in 1700.

The Witches of Scotland campaign, launched in 2020 by the lawyer Claire Mitchell and the writer Zoe Venditozzi, called for an apology, a pardon and a national memorial. On International Women's Day 2022, Nicola Sturgeon apologised in the Scottish Parliament for "an injustice of epic proportions". Some historians argued that an apology for events centuries old was a political rather than historical act. Others welcomed it.

• James VI personally questioned suspects in the North Berwick trials.
• The 1736 replacement Act made it a crime to claim magical powers. It was used against spiritualist mediums into the twentieth century and was repealed in 1951.
• The University of Edinburgh's Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database is free to search online.
• In the eighteenth-century American backcountry, where many Scottish and Ulster emigrants settled, people still paid "witch-masters" to cure bewitchment, yet no one there is known to have been executed for witchcraft.

• Execution numbers are estimates, because many trial outcomes are unrecorded. Published figures vary widely: Stewart J. Brown's survey chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History gives "some fifteen hundred women" executed, well below the higher estimates of up to 2,500.
• Repeal date: the repealing statute is the Witchcraft Act 1735 and took effect in 1736, so both dates appear in the literature.
• The last execution's date and details rest on limited evidence.
• Responsibility was shared: the relative roles of the Kirk, the Crown and local elites are still debated.
• Emigrant folklore: do not present the witch charms collected in Appalachia and the Ozarks as Scottish. Fischer says they came from Ireland, Scotland and northern England and were mixed with other traditions, and most were recorded in the twentieth century. His wider "borderland" thesis about the backcountry is influential but contested.

• The North Berwick Witches
• Isobel Gowdie's Confession
• The Kirk Session
• Reformed Worship in Scotland