The Devil -- they say -- is in the detail

(Be advised. Some readers may find some historical details here distressing.)

For the last few months, I’ve been working on what I hope will become my first published collection of short stories. Three are written to complete first-draft stage. 22,000 words (so far). Technically — for the highly-skilled professionals among us — they seem to be at the competence level known as “not actually terrible.”

One lives in hope. And revises constantly.

My fourth tale seems to be turning into a ghost story (of sorts) centred around a real-life person: Agnes Sampson of Nether Keith, a tiny hamlet (now just a ruined church) not far from Edinburgh. Agnes was a poor, widowed, older woman, steeped in the folk traditions of Pre-Reformation Scotland. She had, “a long-established career as a cunning woman and healer, diviner, and, particularly, midwife,” according to an excellent book I read. *

Cunning implies wise, by the way. Not Baldrick and one of his daft plans.

“Shameful Kiss,” Woodcut from Newes from Scotland (1591). Probably written by Rev. James Carmichael as propaganda for King James VI of Scotland. Published in London: Printed for William Wright, 1591

Agnes was denounced as a witch in 1590 by Taliban-style, Presbyterian zealots of their day and the King of Scotland who personally interrogated her. This 'wyse wyffe of Keith' confessed to impossible Satanic and supernatural crimes after months of sexualised torture, brutality and examination (physical and inquisitorial) in Tolbooth jails in Haddington and Edinburgh.

She was convicted on 53 counts of witchcraft (out of 102 indictments) at a one-day ‘Court’ hearing at which women were not permitted to speak. The next day -- at a recorded cost to the Burgh of £6 13s 4d (Scottish legal tender) – Agnes was strangulated with a rope until dead then her body was burned at a stake on Castle Hill: 28th January 1591.

My old office was literally a stone’s throw from the execution site. And I lived in one of the city’s first, ‘barrier-free’ apartments for wheelchair users: in the old Grassmarket, under the shadow of the castle (in more ways than one) and largely oblivious of its murderous past.

Agnes was condemned as a witch, an associate of the Devil, and ringleader of a Satanic Convention's failed conspiracy to assassinate King James VI. The alleged plan (entirely imagined by Agnes's male accusers) was to drown the king and his ship in the Firth of Forth by casting spells over a dead cat, tied to human bones, then throwing the cat into the water from a sieve in which the witch was crossing the stormy sea.

A sieve. I kid you not.

While I'm here, consider this little-known factoid.

You may be aware that there has been, from time to time, a history of minor rivalry between the Scots and the English: invasions, wars, murder plots, double dealing ... that sort of thing. In the modern era the antagonisms have more usually taken the form of sporting rivalries.

It seems that 16th Century witches were just as susceptible to England v Scotland as I was, at Wembley Football Stadium in 1975. (NB: not the infamous goalposts game).

England gubbed us 5 - 1 by the way. But I digress.

In a book on Elizabethan Demonology (1880) Thomas Alfred Spalding helpfully observed:

"It is worth a note that this art of going to sea in sieves, which Shakespeare has referred to in [Macbeth], seems to have been peculiar to this set of [Scotch] witches. English witches had the reputation of being able to go upon the water in egg-shells and cockle-shells, but seem never to have detected any peculiar advantages in the sieve."

Unambiguously ... Scottish witches: in sieves, not cockle shells

Anyway, when it comes to the prosecution of Agnes Sampson and other alleged witches James VI, was desperate to bolster his Protestant credentials at home and strengthen his claim to be crowned King of England too — which happened in 1603. Burnt witches helped his cause.

There were thousands of judicially murdered witches and sorcerers in Scotland's murky past. Almost all of them were women. They became scapegoats and targets of misogynist religious bigots: invariably self-righteous, insecure, petty wee men. Fanatical busybodies. If you’ve lived in Scotland, you’ll ken their ilk.

They're still around. But no one takes them seriously anymore.

I have no idea where my story idea sprang from. But that doesn’t really matter.

I thought I was writing a story about a twenty-first Century actor struggling to learn her lines to inhabit the character of Lady Macbeth (from the play the Bard wrote in 1606 to please his new king).

In a rehearsal room, somewhere not far from the Royal Mile, my actor recites,

"Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full –"

And into the room walks Agnes. My ghost who, until that moment, I had no idea was part of my story. And now I want to understand all that there is to know.

We do know some things about Agnes because her heartless tormentors and torturers told us. For example, the Reverend Carmichael tells us unashamedly in Newes From Scotland (1591):

 "… by special commandments [of King James personally] this Agnes Sampson had all her hair shaven off [with a 16th Century 'sharp razor'] in each part of her body, and her head thrawn [bound around and twisted] with a rope … which continued almost an hour, during which time she would not confess anything, until the devil's mark was found upon her [shaved] privvies [the recommended place to search for the devil's mark was near the sexual or excretory organs]."

This Minister of the Church of Scotland at the time goes on to add, "then she immediately confessed whatsoever was demanded of her".

Demanded of her? Confession?

By the time of Agnes's 'confession' (5th December 1590) she had been imprisoned, interviewed, interrogated and tortured since at least August of that year: four months of King's James's justice by 'special commandment'.

I know this to be true because the whereabouts of Agnes were noted in the Minute Book of Reverend Carmichael's Haddington Presbytery. At their meeting held on 18 August 1590, someone wrote:

The xviij day of August 1590

Convenit the bretherin in Haddington, efter dew invocation of the name of God.

It was rememberit that Agnes Sampsoune, sometime dwelland in Seton, now apprehendit and convict of the cryme of witchcraft, was in former time suspectit for the use of ane prayer or charme in the curing of seikness.

Those pious men had been investigating the 'wyse wyffe of Keith' for over a year. They didn't like the words in her prayer for sick people. Words that were too Roman Catholic: too papist as well as too damned Satanic (as the highlighted text in this modern transcription clearly reveals --- obviously?)

All kinds of illnesses that ever may be,

In Christ’s name I conjure thee.

I conjure thee—both great and small—

By all the virtues of the Mass I call.

And by the nails so sharp and sore

That pierced Christ’s body to its core,

And by the blood that flowed so free

When He hung upon the shameful tree,

Out of His flesh and from His bone,

Into the earth and into stone—

I conjure thee, in God’s own name.

I know this next fact too because I asked AI to 'read' and transcribe the 400-year-old pages of the Church Minute book held in the national archive of Scotland and available online. This is part of a page from April 1589 when Agnes was investigated by a theological thought-police force of hysterical men about a "complaint of the superstitioun of Agnes Sampsoune."

Part of the record book of Haddington Presbytery’s meeting of 30 April 1589.

You can see why I needed the help of AI.

I don't know if I can write a story that does justice to the tortured history of this traditional healer from Scotland's troubled past. Burned as a witch, like thousands of other Scots women (and many fewer) Scots men.

But I'll try.

Reginald Shepherd, the American poet who died in 2008, once wrote: "For me, there is no point in writing if not to attempt what one has not done and perhaps cannot do."

Makes sense to me.

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* Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI's DEMONOLOGY and the North Berwick Witches. Lawrence Normand & Gareth Roberts (Editors). University of Exeter Press, 2011.

On 8th March 2022 the Scottish Government issued a formal apology to those people, mostly women, convicted under the 16th Century Witchcraft Act. An estimated 3,837 people – 84 per cent of whom were women – were tried as witches under the Act. About 2,500 of those accused were executed and burned.

• Watch: Nicola Sturgeon apologises to women accused of witchcraft on International Women's Day | Metro Video