Fairies in the Scottish Witch Trials: Bessie Dunlop, Alison Pearson and Andro Man

This story uses three labels. established means the point rests on primary records or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but scholars disagree on detail or meaning. traditional means a claim is widely repeated but cannot be traced to a primary or independent source.

The court records are strong evidence that a trial took place, when, and what was written down. They are weaker evidence of what the accused actually believed. Testimony was taken by people who wanted a confession, often after imprisonment, sleep deprivation or torture, and was written down by clerks in their own words. Some cases survive only as a dittay (the indictment), which sets out the prosecution's version. Many records do not say how a trial ended. Most of the trial texts quoted here come from 19th-century printed editions, chiefly Robert Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833), as quoted by Henderson and Cowan.

Evidence from a cruel archive

shared Much of what is known about popular fairy belief in early modern Scotland survives only because people were put on trial for their lives. Henderson and Cowan say plainly that this is an unhappy fact: some of the best evidence for fairy belief comes from testimony taken from "savagely tortured women and men". The accused were mostly ordinary people, several of them local healers. They were caught by a law that, from 1563, made healing with charms and consulting a healer into crimes.

established Henderson and Cowan list 38 cases between 1572 and 1716 in which fairies appear. Most are witchcraft trials; a few are lesser cases of charming or slander. The list runs from Edinburgh and Ayrshire to Aberdeen, Perth, Bute, Orkney and Shetland, and across all five peaks of the Scottish witch-hunt: 1590–91, 1597, 1629–30, 1649 and 1661–62.

Jonet Boyman at Arthur's Seat, 1572

established Jonet Boyman of the Canongate in Edinburgh was accused in 1572 of witchcraft and "diabolic incantation". Henderson and Cowan describe hers as the first Scottish trial for which a detailed indictment has so far been found, and one of the richest early records of fairy belief. She was a healer. At an "elrich well" (an eerie or uncanny well) on the south side of Arthur's Seat, she called on spirits to tell her whether a sick man, Allan Anderson, would recover. She first raised "ane grit blast" like a whirlwind. Then the shape of a man appeared on the far side of the well. She charged it, in the name of the Father, the Son, King Arthur and Queen Elspeth, to cure her patient.

established She sent instructions for washing Anderson's shirt. When his wife did not follow them exactly, the house shook that night with wind, horses and hammering, and the next night with the din of a great company of women. Three years later Anderson fell ill again. Jonet said she could do nothing, because it was past Halloween, the day on which she had most acquaintance with the good neighbours. When his wife's baby would not feed, Jonet said it would not live. It had been given "ane blast of evill wind" by the "sillyie wychs", the seely wights or blessed beings, because its mother had not blessed it properly before leaving the house.

established One of the fairy company, she said, was well dressed and bearded, but from behind he looked as thin as a stick. She had seen the evil blast twenty times. She was condemned as "ane wyss woman that culd mend diverss seikness and bairnis that are tane away with the faryie men and wemin", and burned. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, as reported on Wikipedia's page on her, dates her execution to 29 December 1572. Henderson and Cowan read the case as one about the fair folk rather than the Devil. The Devil is barely present.

Bessie Dunlop and Thomas Reid, 1576

established Bessie Dunlop was the wife of Andro Jak in Lyne, near Dalry in Ayrshire. She was tried in 1576 for "using of sorcerie, witchcraft, and incantatioune, with invocatioun of spretis of the devill". Henderson and Cowan stress that the record does not accuse her of harming anyone. She was a healer and finder of lost goods whose clients included the chamberlain of Kilwinning, Lady Blair and several other ladies of standing. She told her questioners that "sche hirself had na kynd of art nor science". Everything she knew, she said, came from Thomas Reid.

established She said she had known Reid for four years. She described him in detail: "ane honest wele elderlie man, gray bairdit, and had ane gray coitt with Lumbart slevis of the auld fassoun", grey breeches, white stockings gartered above the knee, a black bonnet, and "ane quhyte wand in his hand". He said he had been killed at the Battle of Pinkie, fought on 10 September 1547, nearly thirty years before. If she doubted him, she could ask his son, also Thom Reid, who was now an officer to the Laird of Blair in his father's place. She once saw him in the kirkyard at Dalry, among the people, and once in the High Street of Edinburgh.

established The fairy connection came from an earlier meeting. When Bessie was "new rissine out of gissane", just risen from childbed, a stout woman came to her house and asked for a drink. Bessie gave her one. The woman told her the baby would die but her husband would recover. Reid later told her that this visitor was the Queen of Elfame, his mistress, who had ordered him to wait on Bessie and do her good. Childbed was a time of special fairy danger in Scottish belief.

established Reid took her once, at noon, to meet twelve of his companions, eight women and four men. They were, he said, "gude wychtis that wynnit in the Court of Elfame". In this phrase, Henderson and Cowan point out, a wight is a supernatural being, not a witch. Bessie was told not to speak to them. On another occasion, when she and her husband had ridden to Leith to sell meal, she saw a company of riders gallop into Restalrig Loch with a noise "as heavin and erd had gane togidder". Reid told her they were the good wights riding in Middle Earth, the world of the living.

established Reid wanted her to come with him to Elfame. He asked her to deny her Christianity and "the faith sche tuke at the funt-stane", her baptism. She refused. She told him "that sche duelt with hir awin husband and bairnis" and could not leave them. He grew angry and warned that she would get little good of him. Her account also places her among the fairy dead: she saw the Laird of Auchenskeith, who had died nine years earlier, riding with them.

established Her interrogators asked what she thought of the "new law", the reformed religion established in 1560. Bessie said she had asked Reid. He, who greeted her with "Sancta Marie", told her the new law was not good, and that the old faith would come home again, though not as it was before. Henderson and Cowan read this as a sign of Bessie looking back fondly to a time before the Reformation, when speaking of such things was less dangerous.

established Bessie's world can still be traced on the map. Henderson and Cowan follow it from Lynn Glen on the Caaf Water at the edge of Dalry, past Monkcastle and the Blair estate to Auchenskeith, whose name they derive from the Gaelic for hawthorn, and Kilwinning. She met Reid once at the "Thorne of Damwstarnok", a hawthorn. She was convicted on 8 November 1576 and sentenced to be strangled and burned.

Alison Pearson and the Archbishop, 1588

established Alison Pearson (Alesoun Peirson in Pitcairn's text) of Byrehill in Fife was tried in May 1588 for "hanting and repairing with the gude nychtbouris and Quene of Elfame". Like Bessie Dunlop, she had a go-between who had once been an ordinary man. He was her uncle, William Simpson, said to have been carried off as a young man by "ane mann of Egypt", a gypsy, and later taken by the fairies "out of middil-eird". Simpson taught her about every sickness and which herbs would heal it. She said she had travelled to St Andrews to treat people for sixteen years. She also had friends at the fairy court "quhilk wes of hir awin blude".

established Her most famous patient was Patrick Adamson, Archbishop of St Andrews. In 1588 he was suffering from a foul illness, described in her dittay as "ripples, trembling, fever and flux". The physicians could make little of it. Alison treated him with a posset and a salve rubbed on his body, and she said the fairies had told her how to cure him. Henderson and Cowan quote Robert Pitcairn, her 19th-century editor, finding it "strange indeed" that so great a churchman should take advice from a poor healer. They read Pitcairn's remark as evidence of his own snobbery.

established Her contact with the fairies was not gentle. She said that for breaking their rule of secrecy, one of them gave her a "sair straik" (a sore stroke) that "tuke all the poistie of hir car syde fra hir", the power of her left side, leaving a blue, ugly mark. When she spoke of them again they threatened her, and she lay ill for twenty weeks. They came and sat by her bed, promising she would never want if she would be faithful and keep her promises. Simpson also warned her to bless herself so that she would not be taken away with them, "for the teynd of thame gais ewerie yeir to hell": a tenth of the fairy company was paid to Hell every year. The same belief drives the ballad of Tam Lin.

shared Her case became a public joke. The poet Robert Sempill, an enemy of Adamson, wrote a satire usually known as "The Legend of the Bischop of St Androis Lyfe". It accuses the archbishop of almost every kind of magic and introduces Alison as "Ane carling of the Quene of Phareis", who had ridden through Breadalbane "On horsback, on Hallow ewin" with the "sillie wychtis". The poem also says she was held in the archbishop's castle, and implies he let witches escape. Wikipedia's account, citing the St Andrews kirk session register, says she had already been investigated in 1583. Henderson and Cowan call Sempill's poem very funny but point out that the humour was deadly. Adamson went on with his career. Alison Pearson was burned.

Andro Man and the Queen of Elphen, 1597–98

established Andro Man was an elderly healer from the Aberdeen area. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft gives his residence as Tarbruith, estimates his age at about seventy, and notes he may have been itinerant. The Survey's notes say he claimed the "Quene of Elphen" first came to him as a boy, about sixty years earlier. Henderson and Cowan describe a relationship with her lasting some thirty years. He summoned her by saying "Benedicite", fathered several children with her, and said she could be old or young as she pleased.

established Before she gave him his gifts, she caused one of his cattle to die on a hill called the Elphillok, promising to do him good afterwards. She then gave him the power to "knaw all thingis, and suld help and cuir all sort of seikness". He said the elves looked and dressed like people. They would make him think he was in a fine chamber with candles and swords, and in the morning he would find himself in a moss, the lights and swords turned to dead grass and straws. Among the fairy company he recognised "sindrie deid men", including King James IV, killed at Flodden in 1513, and Thomas the Rhymer.

established Andro also spoke of an angel called Christsonday. "The Quene of Elphen hes a grip of all the craft," he said, "bot Christsonday is the gudeman, and hes all power under God." His questioners told him that Christsonday was "the Devill, thy maister". Christsonday could change shape and once appeared as a stag. On Halloween, Andro said, the company met at the Binhill and the Binlocht, where they danced and feasted, and everyone who met with them kissed both Christsonday and the queen on the backside.

shared It is hard to tell how much of this is Andro's and how much his judges'. Henderson and Cowan reject the reading that the queen has been made subordinate to the Devil. The kiss, they point out, is given to both. They also note that Christian language runs right through his account, as it does through Bessie Dunlop's, and argue that fairy belief and Christianity were not felt to be incompatible. The Survey records that he was found guilty at the Tolbooth of Aberdeen on 20 January 1598. Henderson and Cowan do not record his fate, and the Survey records no sentence.

Other voices in the record

established Isobel Haldane, tried at Perth in 1623, said she had been taken from her bed one night "quhidder be God or the Devill scho knawis nocht" and carried to a hillside, where "the hill oppynit, and scho enterit in". She stayed three days. A grey-bearded man from the fairies later told her of deaths to come. One case against her concerned a sick child she called a "scharge", a changeling, which died after she gave it a herbal drink. Janet Trall, tried with her, said a "bonny white man" had taught her to heal by washing, charms and passing the sick through hanks of yarn.

established In the Northern Isles, Katherine Jonesdochter was accused in Shetland in 1616 of keeping company with "the devill quhom she callit the bowman of Hildiswick and Eschenes". She said she had first met him about forty years before, in her mother's house, and had seen him every year since, on Halloween and Holy Cross Day. She saw trows rise out of the kirkyards of Hillswick and Eshaness. In Orkney the same year, Elspeth Reoch, born in Caithness, said she had first met two fairy men by a loch in Lochaber. One of them, the record says, was "the devell, quhilk she callis the farie man". He claimed to be a dead kinsman, John Stewart, killed at sunset, and said he was neither dead nor alive but held between heaven and earth.

established John Stewart (no relation), a wandering palmist tried at Irvine in 1618, said he had met the king of the fairies at Halloween in Galway, Ireland, and had met the fairies every Halloween since on Lanark Hill or Kilmaurs Hill. All people "taken away by sudden death", he said, went to Elfland. His questioners pricked the spot where the fairy king's wand had touched his forehead, as they would search for the Devil's mark. He died by his own hand before his case was decided.

established By the 1660s the boundary had almost gone. Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn, in 1662, mixed fairy and Devil more thoroughly than anyone else in the record. Her confession is covered on its own card. Jonet Morison of Bute, tried in the same year, said the Devil told her "it was the fayries" who had killed a neighbour's child. In 1670 Jean Weir, sister of Major Thomas Weir, told the court that a visitor had asked her to speak for her to the "queen of ferrie, meaning the devell". Henderson and Cowan call this a completely explicit identification. Her case is covered on the Major Weir card.

James VI and the "cullour of safetie"

established James VI took a personal part in the North Berwick trials of 1590–91 and published Daemonologie, a dialogue on witchcraft, in Edinburgh in 1597. It was reprinted in London in 1603 and cited at Scottish trials through the 17th century. Its fairy chapter is short but direct. James held that fairies, "our good neighboures", were one of the illusions "rifest in the time of Papistrie", and that the Devil "illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures" into thinking they saw and heard such things.

established His sceptic, Philomathes, asks the obvious question. How can it be that people have gone to their deaths confessing that they were carried by the fairies to a hill which opened, where a fair queen gave them a stone of many virtues? His expert, Epistemon, answers that the Devil dulls their senses and shows them hills, courts and trains of followers while their bodies lie senseless, then slips a stone into their hand. James allowed that people troubled by such visions ought to be pitied. But he had no mercy for those who brought fairies into court. He thought they did so "to be a cullour of safetie for them, that ignorant Magistrates may not punish them for it": a colour, or pretext, of safety. Henderson and Cowan suggest that James grasped why people believed in fairies, and that understanding made him no more forgiving.

How fairies became devils

shared Henderson and Cowan argue that the Reformation left no room for beings that were neither angels nor devils. Reformers recast the world as a battle between God and Satan, and the grey area once occupied by fairies, ghosts and wise women was handed over to the Devil. They stress that this did not start with James's return from Denmark in 1590. The link between fairies and the Devil was already stirring in the courts at least twenty years earlier, as Boyman's and Dunlop's cases show.

established The renaming can be watched happening in the records. Reid asks Bessie Dunlop to renounce her baptism, a demand that sounds like the Devil's pact but comes from a fairy go-between. Andro Man's angel becomes "the Devill, thy maister". Agnes Sampson, tried in 1590–91, called the spirit she summoned "Elva", a name that suggests an elf. Elspeth Reoch's fairy man and Katherine Jonesdochter's bowman are both written down as the Devil. Three women tried in 1661 described the Devil, or a mysterious stranger, as a man in green, the traditional fairy colour. Henderson and Cowan note that these descriptions recall the good neighbours rather than Auld Nick.

shared They also stress that many accused people held on to the difference. Walter Scott's Minstrelsy repeats a story, of uncertain origin, of a countryman about 1620 who stubbornly denied that the good King of the Fairies had anything to do with the Devil. Henderson and Cowan treat Scottish confessions as layered: folk belief at the bottom, with what Carlo Ginzburg called a "thin diabolical crust" laid on top by the questioners.

Arguing with Christina Larner

shared Henderson and Cowan call Christina Larner's Enemies of God (1981) the fullest and most accomplished study of the Scottish witch-hunt. They regret only that she had little interest in fairies. When Larner met fairy material in the records, she put it down to "dreams, nightmares, and collective fantasies". Henderson and Cowan call this "an inadequate assessment to say the least". Their own view is that every text has meaning and can be read for the folk belief within it. Larner's estimate of executions, no more than 2,000 and more likely around 1,500 or fewer, was the best available when they wrote.

shared They make the same complaint about older writers: Robert Chambers called Bessie Dunlop's account hallucination, and Walter Scott put Isobel Gowdie's down to lunacy.

What newer research adds

established The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, directed by Julian Goodare with Louise Yeoman, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller, went online in January 2003. It records 3,837 people accused of witchcraft between 1563 and 1736, with details of trials, verdicts and sentences where they survive. For many of the people in this story, including Isobel Haldane, the Survey records no verdict or sentence. That gap is part of the evidence: many outcomes simply were not written down, or the papers have been lost.

shared Emma Wilby's Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005) takes the fairy go-betweens seriously as a widespread British belief in familiar spirits, and uses Bessie Dunlop and Thomas Reid as a central example. She argues that encounters with familiars may reflect visionary or trance experience with roots in pre-Christian tradition. Reviewers were divided. Ronald Hutton welcomed the book but questioned its more speculative comparisons with shamanism elsewhere, and the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson was not persuaded by Wilby's distinction between fairy familiars and demon familiars. Wilby went on to write a full study of Isobel Gowdie (2010).

shared Julian Goodare, in "The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland" (Folklore, 2012), argues that the "seely wights" of the records were nature spirits related to but distinct from fairies, and that some people, mostly women, believed they travelled with them in visions. The term appears in Jonet Boyman's trial, in Sempill's poem on Alison Pearson, and in William Hay's lectures of 1564, which mention women who claimed dealings with "celly vichtys". Margaret Dudley and Goodare have also suggested that some night-time encounters in the confessions match experiences of sleep paralysis. These are interpretations, not settled findings.

What became of them

established Henderson and Cowan record the fates of only some of the people in this story. Jonet Boyman was burned in 1572. Bessie Dunlop was strangled and burned in 1576. Alison Pearson was burned in 1588. John Stewart died in custody by his own hand in 1618. For Andro Man, Isobel Haldane, Janet Trall, Katherine Jonesdochter and Elspeth Reoch, their book does not record the outcome. These were people with families, neighbours and patients. Most had tried to help the sick. They were prosecuted under a law that made their healing and their beliefs into capital crimes, and they are remembered here as victims of that law.

• Bessie Dunlop's fairy contact, Thomas Reid, claimed to have died at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, and told her to ask his son if she doubted him.
• The Queen of Elfame first came to Bessie Dunlop as a stout woman asking for a drink while Bessie lay in childbed.
• Jonet Boyman called on a spirit in the name of King Arthur at a well on the south side of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh.
• Alison Pearson's most famous patient was Patrick Adamson, Archbishop of St Andrews.
• Andro Man said he saw James IV, killed at Flodden in 1513, and Thomas the Rhymer among the fairy company.
• His questioners told him that his angel Christsonday was really "the Devill, thy maister".
• In Shetland, Katherine Jonesdochter's fairy companion was called "the bowman"; in Norn, the element "bo" carries a sense of bogey or ghost.

• Myth: the accused were members of a secret pagan witch cult. The records show healers, charmers and ordinary people describing fairy contacts in the language of local belief. The organised cult, the pact and the sabbat were largely the interrogators' framework.
• Myth: fairy confessions are simply evidence of madness. Older writers such as Robert Chambers and Walter Scott put these accounts down to hallucination or lunacy. Modern historians read them as evidence of shared popular belief, recorded under pressure.
• Myth: witchcraft trials in Scotland began with North Berwick. Jonet Boyman (1572), Bessie Dunlop (1576) and Alison Pearson (1588) were all tried and executed before 1590, and fairies were central to their cases.
• Disputed: how much of a confession is the accused's own. The words were taken down by questioners who wanted a confession. Henderson and Cowan think the fairy layer can be separated from the diabolical one; others are more cautious.
• Disputed: what the fairy encounters were. Emma Wilby links them to visionary or trance traditions, Julian Goodare to a cult of the seely wights and, with Margaret Dudley, to sleep paralysis. None of these readings is settled.
• Disputed: the fate of Andro Man. He is often said to have been burned in 1598. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft records a guilty verdict but no sentence, and Henderson and Cowan do not record his fate.