4
Lauren Martin
Isobel Young had land, wealth and power. Most of her life looks successful by early modern standards. In her prime from 1590 to 1622, Young wielded influence over many people in her community. She was a competent, perhaps skilled, household manager. Her husband, George Smith, was the proprietor (holding a feu, a heritable lease) of a productive piece of land in East Barns in the parish of Dunbar, a fertile area of Scotland. She had four sons who brought wives into the household; she may also have had daughters. As well as controlling the labour of at least twelve servants, she also held sway over tenants and households to whom she lent money and leased land. In 1622, her eldest son John combined Smith’s holding with his own – doubling the family’s holding at a time when other comparable East Barns families either stayed the same or declined.
Yet, in 1629 Isobel Young was executed for witchcraft. Forty-five of her neighbours and relatives, including her husband, testified against her, telling a story that unfolded over four decades. Witnesses alleged that Young engaged in a wide range of witch-like activities, including causing magical harm following quarrels, shape-shifting into animals and carrying out healing rituals for humans and cattle. Strange portents accompanied her words and actions. She was widely regarded as ill-tempered, power-hungry and vengeful.
Quarrelsome and difficult women were not uncommon in early modern Scotland and across Europe.1 Young’s case, while outstanding in the amount and quality of its documentation, resonates with the primary themes in Scottish witchcraft. Like most witchcraft cases in Scotland, the case against Young had two main components, ‘malefice’ (magical harm) and her relationship with the Devil. The second of these was the centrepiece of her trial. But twenty out of the twenty-four formal accusations against her stemmed from long-term neighbourhood quarrels. Young was accused of using threatening language or curses, punctuated by unusual and magical occurrences, to enact magical harm. We know, in general, that many witches were quarrelsome and unpopular with their neighbours. What more can be learned about this subject, then, by examining Young’s case? How and why did the community of East Barns, including many members of her own household, decide that Isobel Young was a witch?
I
Young’s case illustrates some of the broader cultural formations, practices and power struggles at work in witchcraft belief, practice and accusation. Specifically, I believe that Young’s case reveals links between witchcraft accusation and the domestic formations that shaped everyday forms of social organisation and practice of early modern communities.
The wide range of trial documents from 1628 and 1629, combined with witness statements from as early as 1613, contain a remarkable level of detail about Young’s daily life over forty years. Of course, most witchcraft studies use trial documents. What the present study has been able to do is to supplement these with a variety of other sources. Documents on landholding and financial transactions survive for Dunbar parish, including testaments, conveyancing documents (charters and instruments of sasine), maps and baron court records. It is possible to reconstruct formal landholding and financial relationships between many of the key community players in Young’s trial. Events around land, heritability, work and social structure as described in witchcraft documents are remarkably consistent with these other documents.
The valuable combination of surviving documents pertaining to Isobel Young and East Barns provides rare flashes of ethnographic sensibility into the everyday life of an accused witch – allowing for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the connections between the structures of everyday practices and witchcraft belief. These flashes reveal the ways that witchcraft was experienced in and through Young’s daily interactions with the people in her life, and how her community and those closest to her slowly turned against her.
The timeline of Young’s life and slowly unfolding witchcraft reputation reveals distinct household patterns to how the specific content of the witchcraft accusations alleged against Young match up with her physical and verbal work as the wife of a head of household in East Barns. Reconstruction of the life of a witch suggests that witchcraft was, in part, a language and practice through which people articulated and influenced their daily domestic arrangements, particularly women’s roles in managing competition and co-operation within and between households in the context of a tenant farming community.
II
I want to start with a word (or two) about my use of anthropological theory in this analysis. Anthropological theory has provided a fertile ground for the historiography of witchcraft and historical methodologies in general to explore matters of culture and belief in the past.2 Alan Macfarlane used functionalist anthropology developed in the study of small-scale societies in the non-western world to help him understand how witchcraft beliefs might function within small villages in England.3 Whether we agree or disagree with conclusions drawn from this cross-disciplinary pollination, the use of anthropology in historical inquiry has fuelled debate and opened new avenues of exploration.
Likewise, many anthropologists have sought inspiration from an understanding of historical trajectories, seeing culture as part of an arc through time rather than as a static, fully formed and closed system in the present. Historicity allows us to break apart the seemingly coherent culture-present which masks the processes over time through which meaning is created, often through struggle, contestation and loss.4 Here I am not seeking a cross-cultural definition of witches or witchcraft. Rather, the goal is to apply a particular strand of cultural theory, developed in anthropology, to the study of witchcraft.
I think it is worth stepping out of early modern Scotland and witchcraft, for a moment, to highlight a few components of the theoretical lens used in this study. My approach to witchcraft documents is derived from two anthropological tenets: a focus on small groups as the object of study and recent understandings of ‘culture’ as a struggle over meaning rather than a finished product. Both of these insights are linked to the historical formation of the discipline of anthropology as rooted within European colonialism and subsequent disciplinary critiques, as well as a deliberate use of theory related to political economy and culture.
A focus on small groups stems from the discipline’s birth in its study of so-called ‘primitive’ or small-scale societies. This early anthropology suggested that the boundaries of ‘culture’ – seen as a static system of symbols, meanings, rituals, beliefs and life-ways – adhered to the boundaries of whatever group, or ‘people’, was being studied.5 Most modern anthropologists, however, would reject an easy linkage between a group of people and ‘their’ culture, as a product of past colonial encounters that saw so-called primitive people as having simple cultures in contrast to the perceived complexity of European nation-states.6
The study of small groups of people, referred to in modern parlance as ‘communities’ or ‘the local’, remains one of the hallmarks of anthropology. But now, communities are studied with respect to the larger structures in which the local context forms and is shaped. As the anthropologically-minded historian David Sabean has written: ‘The local is interesting precisely because it offers a locus for observing relations.’7 The places that people live, in this view, present vantage points from which to view the concrete workings of larger processes.8 However, a balance needs to be struck: ‘too one-sided a concentration on the larger structures and their lived reality tends to disappear; too exclusive a focus on particular lives and we lose the connections with the larger realities in which those lives are embedded’.9
Finally, my approach is attentive to connections between language, power and the construction of meaning through and within the practices of daily life. Culture and language are seen as a practical activity in which meaning is shifting and contingent depending on contexts, rather than a static system of signs and referents with fixed meanings.10 The anthropologist William Roseberry suggests that ‘interpretation cannot be separated from what people say, what they do, what is done to them, because culture cannot be so separated’.11 This anthropological perspective sees power, domination, hierarchy and social systems of inequality as part of the context that shapes meaning.12
I am not the first anthropologist or historian to notice the connections between witchcraft, neighbours and community contexts; nor am I the first to look at witchcraft related to gender and ideology.13 Anthropology is a varied discipline that offers many different theories and approaches. Here I seek to offer a fresh approach, zeroing in on several key relations that are highlighted through a particular anthropological reading of the documents. It is my hope that through a rich understanding of Isobel Young and her community of East Barns we can see something new in neighbourhood disputes and quarrelsome witches. Young’s case highlights how the meanings of witchcraft, and its connections to how early modern people lived their lives within their communities and households, both challenged and reaffirmed the structures of everyday work and social life.
III
We begin with a sketch of Young as a witch. This is, after all, first and foremost what the documents in her case sought to present. A large dossier of documents, created over the course of fifteen years, survives in Young’s case, including pre-trial witness statements, interrogatories from interrogations, depositions from Young’s defence, a dittay (indictment), trial transcripts, jury deliberation notes and independent verification of her execution in Edinburgh.14
Most of the surviving witchcraft documents date the beginnings of Young’s reputation for witchcraft to the 1590s, with accusations of magical harm (‘malefice’) stemming from her long-term quarrels. These quarrels constituted twenty out of the twenty-four accusations in Young’s dittay. Neighbours who testified against Young reported that magical harm occurred after a quarrel with Young where she uttered curses or other threatening language and removed her ‘courch’ (kerchief), sometimes while walking ‘withershins’ (counter-clockwise).15 The process of diagnosing Young’s harmful magic as the cause of illnesses and other harms in East Barns was helped by several magical healers when they suggested to sick people that Young was the cause of their illnesses.16 According to witchcraft trial documents, around 1600, Young won a slander case at an unnamed local kirk session against George Sandie, a miller, for publicly calling her a witch. The miller was forced to do public penance. Some time after that, probably before 1613, Young and her sons had a run-in with the kirk session. They were forced to do public penance for engaging in a ritual healing of Young’s cattle.
Testimony was taken by the kirk session of Duns from a folk healer named Alexander Fortune in 1619 regarding a small wound that Young had under her left breast. Because he was unable to heal the wound, he surmised that it was a Devil’s mark; this was also apparently the topic of rumours in and around the parish of Dunbar.17 The literature on early modern witchcraft suggests a gulf between so-called popular and elite culture, with the Devil and demonic pacts more prominent in elite beliefs. Documents in Scotland are not clear on how prevalent demonic beliefs were in community and neighbour understanding of witchcraft. This rare document suggests that Young’s community was thinking about the Devil, specifically the demonic pact, in relationship to Young’s status as a witch. Yet they continued daily interactions with her for another ten years.
On 22 and 24 April 1624 Margaret Melrose and Janet Acheson, two confessed witches from a neighbouring settlement in Dunbar, gave depositions against Young to the presbytery of Dunbar. The hearings were staffed by ministers and a bailie and clerk from the burgh of Dunbar – local men, embedded in the local context.18 Melrose and Acheson publicly confronted Young, testifying that she had been present at a Devil’s meeting with them on the Dunehill of Spot. Most of the witnesses later cited at Young’s trial originally provided depositions at these investigations by the presbytery. While most depositions detailed magical harm, many also talked about Young’s associations with Melrose and Acheson, alleging that they transformed into animals for meetings.19
The central authorities became involved in December 1628 with an order from the privy council ordering her second oldest son, James Smith, to bring Young to Edinburgh to be examined by them. The documents do not make clear why the privy council became interested in Young, but it may have been related to the swell of witchcraft trials in the Lothians between 1628 and 1631. On 26 January 1629, Young was interrogated by Adam Bellenden, bishop of Dunblane, and Alexander Colville of Blair, justice depute.20 Both men were involved in many other witchcraft cases.21 Two days later a warrant was issued for Young’s arrest, an assize was selected and a trial was set to take place in the justiciary court in Edinburgh.22 Presumably the council chose to send Young’s case to the central justiciary court, rather than issuing a commission for a local trial, because it had already become interested in her case.
Young went to trial in Edinburgh represented by her sons and two well-known Edinburgh lawyers. They constructed an elaborate and reasoned defence against all of the allegations in the dittay. Many of the people who had provided testimony in 1624 journeyed to Edinburgh to testify at her trial, including her husband. The assize was selected from the same community and class as Young. They deliberated on each indictment, finding her guilty of some and not guilty of others. But, in the end, the assize found that Isobel Young had renounced her baptism, entered into the service of Satan, received a Devil’s mark, cast ‘uncouth and fearful sicknesses on men, women and beasts’, and removed her kerchief while she wielded harmful words. Based on this verdict, she was executed.
IV
The witchcraft accusations and case against Isobel Young unfolded and were embedded in the context of her everyday life, household and community. Malefice, quarrels, curses and even magical happenings played out while Young worked, struggled and interacted with other households and her community. Neighbours who testified against Young marked their allegations with reference to calendar customs, seasonal work patterns (such as the Dunbar herring drove, harvest and market days) and household life cycles. When all the witchcraft documents are aggregated, reviewed for evidence of daily life and supplemented by other documents, the arc over time of Young’s life and household emerges.
Young’s life prior to marrying George Smith and setting up a household in East Barns is murky in the surviving documents. But it is possible to sketch her early years and to speculate about her place of birth, family of origin and household. Following early modern Scottish custom, Isobel retained her own surname. Her father’s surname would have been Young. The first step in finding Young’s possible roots is to locate men with the surname of Young who were tenant farmers with heritable or similar types of lease in or near the parish of Dunbar, where Young spent the vast majority of her adult life. Two such men were found living in Belhaven, both of whom also occupied land in West Barns: James Young (1582) and William Young (1596).23 It is possible that James Young was Isobel’s father and William Young her brother. Isobel Young’s second son was named James, and it was customary to name the second son after the maternal grandfather. Both men were of similar social standing to George Smith, Isobel Young’s husband, and Belhaven and West Barns were very near to East Barns in the parish of Dunbar. No other men with the surname Young were found in or around Dunbar in surviving landholding documents. According to witchcraft documents, Isobel Young also had at least one younger brother named Thomas who worked for the Young and Smith household as a shepherd and odd jobber.
Young was probably born in the 1560s.24 She married George Smith and moved to East Barns, most likely around 1582 when Smith first appears as a ‘portioner’ there.25 East Barns was an old estate that had been divided into sixteen portions that were held by heritable feu-ferme tenure.26 In 1581, the sixteen portions of East Barns were divided into eleven holdings – five men held two portions and six held only one portion. Landholding was remarkably stable from then until 1622, with a father generally passing their portion to their eldest son.27
While Smith held only one portion of East Barns, Young and her family began the 1590s with promise. The portioners were at the top of the local hierarchy. Through George Smith, the family and household held a heritable title to land, and they had the labour-power of children and servants. With luck and proper management, land was a source of wealth and security. At least one portion of East Barns passed from George Smith through eldest sons for at least four generations.
Young’s witchcraft reputation started in the 1590s and 1600s, when Young’s household was at its peak strength in labour-power. All of Young’s four sons were of working age, possibly married and still living at home. Smith rented two cottars’ houses from a neighbour; these were occupied by married couples and their children who worked for the household. The household also had at least eight unmarried workers: three female servants and three male servants as well as Smith’s nephew and Young’s brother.
Descriptions of their farm and household in witchcraft documents tell us something about how they lived. Neighbours and witnesses described a house with a locked front door. The household buildings also included at least one barn filled with grain, a byre for animals that included dairy cows, horses, oxen, swine and sheep. The household also had some quantity of cloth, milk products and access to a plough and ploughshare.
In addition to their portion of East Barns, Smith and Young also informally occupied land through leases. Property and informal land use often show up in the documents surrounding death, wills and testaments, but none survive for Smith or Young. However, William Meslet, another portioner of East Barns, died on 9 September 1579 leaving a testament.28 Of roughly similar social and economic standing to Smith and Young, his inventory suggests the types of moveable goods that Young’s household might have had. Meslet’s testament listed crops in the barn and the field (wheat, rye, peas, oats and bere), six oxen, one heifer and cow with calf (probably for milking), three horses, eleven ewes, nine hoggs (yearling sheep) and one little hogg, and five varieties of woollen and linen cloth. He also owed servants wages, feu-duty to the king and a tithe to the parson of Pinkerton. Testaments from other households in East Barns from the 1600s show that webs of money-lending, credit and mortgaging of land bound portioner households of East Barns and across the parish of Dunbar to each other in complicated financial arrangements. For example, the testament of Margaret Home in Pinkerton showed that she and her husband owed Young’s husband £100 at her death in 1601.29
In 1613, Young’s eldest son John acquired one portion of East Barns from another portioner. John’s acquisition of land, prior to inheriting his father’s portion, moved the two Smith households up in combined status by occupying two portions of land. When one family rises, another falls. Mobility in landholding, while rare among the portioners of East Barns during this period, tended to be downward. Witnesses testified that Young told those present to call her ‘Lady Home’, because she believed that her son would soon acquire some land held by the household of Thomas Home. The tone and intent of Young’s comment are hard to interpret. Was she being humorous, self-deprecating or threatening? Since it was recounted in trial documents, it seems that either at the time or in hindsight her comment was viewed as threatening. This was a topic of community discussion and gossip.30 Rumour was further fuelled by Young’s use of curses, kerchief removal and walking withershins.
So far, the documents describe Young as a female head of household, managing, overseeing and conducting a range of productive activities. Documents specifically describe her role in dairying, marketing of household goods and products, cloth production and sale, money-lending, animal husbandry, oversight of sub-leased land, and more. These activities are described in witchcraft documents as the subjects or backdrops of quarrels and altercations that led to magical harm. Young’s work also involved what I refer to as ‘verbal work’. This included bartering, making deals, harassing people for repayment of loans, beating a competitor to a lease or purchase, and discrediting an unskilled craftsman for his bad products.31 Other scholarly work on early modern households suggests that she would also have overseen washing, cooking, gathering fuel and child-rearing among other things. Perhaps she helped with planting and harvesting of crops as well.32
Several witnesses described Young’s household as having odd magical characteristics. Two of Young’s servants said that her oxen could speak; one heard one of her oxen cry, ‘oh God, oh God, o God’; another said that Young’s ox had asked him what ailed him.33 Several people witnessed Young controlling the weather, conducting magical healing and shape-shifting. And others saw her creeping around in the dark on other people’s land and conducting strange rituals.
In fact, Young’s household, while economically successful, was riven with internal conflict. Young’s husband, George Smith, testified against her in 1624 before the presbytery and again at her trial in 1629, although he must have known that she faced execution. Smith accused Young of attempting to kill him with magic after quarrelling about an unsavoury house guest. Smith claimed to have seen Christian Grintoun, a known witch and associate of Young’s, leave his house in the shape of a cat. After a spousal quarrel Young supposedly cursed her husband, saying, ‘gudeman, I rew you saw that sight for it will be worse for you hereafter’.34 Smith then collapsed while ploughing his fields the next day, in front of seven witnesses including their neighbour William Meslet. Young consulted Grintoun on healing her husband and ended up inadvertently transferring the illness to William Smith (George’s nephew), who then died. Young claimed that she was a good wife and that Smith had tried to stab her with a sword.35 Young was found guilty on this charge.
The documents present rich and dense portrayals of economic strife, long-term disputes, and other incidents between Young and other households in the East Barns community. All but four of the seventeen portioners in East Barns testified against Young in 1624 or at her trial in 1629. Three birlawmen of Broxmouth (William Nisbet, Patrick Bryson younger and William Smith), who were responsible for regulation of farming and communal property, also testified against Young.36 So did many other prominent local people and their children, relatives and servants.
The long-term disputes in which Young engaged with her neighbours are an important link between her daily life and her developing witchcraft reputation – particularly when her household was thriving. These disputes, believed to be the root of harmful magic, also reveal Young in action in her community. Young did not deny that the disputes occurred or the bare facts as described by neighbours. On the other hand, nor did she confess to witchcraft. Rather, Young’s defence reinterpreted the quarrels as regular and everyday disputes between neighbours. A few examples are explored below.
Six accusations against Young sprang from a long-term quarrel with three generations of members of the household of Patrick Bryson who in 1581/1582 occupied two portions of East Barns. The Brysons were portioners of higher social standing than Young and Smith within the community of East Barns. By 1600, Patrick was replaced by his eldest son John in landholding documents; Patrick Bryson either died or transferred his land, making John de facto head of that household.37 Young’s eldest son married one of John Bryson’s daughters, so perhaps those households were close in life-cycle age.
Disputes began, according to Patrick, around 1595 after he cut Young’s swine tether. Young supposedly threw the cut tether into the doorway of Bryson’s house while uttering threatening words. Thresholds and doorways held great symbolic import. Bryson claimed that he then lost the power of his right side. He consulted a healer named ‘Dame Bet’ before determining that his illness was caused by Young. Over the next two decades, roughly nine people connected with the Bryson household claimed to have been injured or killed by Young. Members of the Bryson household engaged in a pattern of quarrels over work and money followed by curses from Young, several allegedly resulting from Young’s revenge for calling her a witch in public. Meanwhile, however, Young’s eldest son married Patrick Bryson’s granddaughter. John Smith and Margaret Bryson lived in Young’s household until 1613 when John became a portioner and formed his own household. John Smith stood by his mother, acting as part of her defence team; there is no indication of how Margaret Bryson felt. Young was found guilty of many of these instances of magical harm.
A cluster of quarrels with Thomas Home and his household led to four accusations.38 After 1600, Home owned the largest share of East Barns. This was bound to cause conflict. Smith and Young apparently wanted to buy a piece of land in East Barns that had become available for the sum of 2,000 merks. Home purchased that land ‘over their heads’.39 The land dispute took a more sinister turn after Young and unknown others were seen walking around Home’s dovecote at midnight just before all the doves flew out in a great rush.40 A dovecote was a symbol of status, but also a potential source of friction between neighbours, because the birds ate grain in the surrounding fields.
After this dispute, Thomas Home and his household claimed that they suffered major losses, including twenty-seven horses, oxen and cows, pains throughout his entire body, and Home’s eventual death in Prestonpans, a town northwest of Dunbar parish and closer to Edinburgh. Eventually the Homes lost two of their three portions of East Barns, and John Smith acquired one of those portions.41 This was seen as the culmination of Young’s attempt to acquire their land. Throughout these conflicts, Young and Smith continued to rent some land and borrow animals from Home, and they lent him money.42 The assize found it believable that Young would use magical means to get the Homes’ land for her son. She was found guilty of this accusation.
In her quarrels with Bryson and Home, Young was seen to attack wealthier households. With the Homes, whether she used magic or not, she apparently won. But Young also quarrelled with social equals. Smith and Young entered a bidding contest with their neighbours and social equals, William Meslet and Margaret Ogill. Both sought to purchase a wadset, the temporary use of land in return for a loan, from George Home of Meikle Pinkerton.43 Young’s household was short of ready cash, and Meslet and Ogill successfully purchased the wadset for £400. What annoyed Young was that £200 of this sum had been borrowed from Young’s household. Meslet and Ogill’s failure to repay this loan meant that Young’s household could not compete for land. These were the same neighbours who shared plough oxen with Smith and helped him when he collapsed in his fields after quarrelling with his wife. Young believed that Meslet and Ogill improperly took possession of that land – and she said so in public, using threatening words while removing her kerchief and walking withershins. Meslet and Ogill testified that after this quarrel, they started losing animals, their crops were less productive and their whole household fell into decay. Young was found guilty of these charges.
Young was also accused of wielding her considerable powers against those below her. Her cottars, George Umpherston and Janet Hodge, testified that she damaged their butter after Umpherston took the head shepherd’s job in East Barns away from Young’s brother Thomas. Young’s defence testimony asserted that because Umpherstoun and Hodge were her servants, she owned all that they had; it was illogical that she would destroy her own butter. Cuthbert Simpson, a chapman, testified that Young destroyed his livelihood in revenge for her dissatisfaction with a piece of linen he had sold her.44 Finally, Young was accused of destroying the cattle and worldly goods of Andrew Morton and his family because they were unable to repay a debt to Young when she came to collect.
The documents do not show how Young viewed her own ‘powers’ at the time. Many of the specifics of her behaviour pointed to maleficent magic and potential witchcraft. Young must have known that the incidents, words and deeds described by her neighbours – walking withershins, loose hair, curses and threats – were provocative. She may have been invoking the power of witchcraft in her everyday life. In a small community, she undoubtedly knew about her growing reputation as a witch. Her hint or wink to her potential power as a witch may have helped her get her way in disputes.
V
Young’s case tells us much about household and community in early modern Scotland. The quarrels, words and magically-tinged deeds merged as part of a complex web of female-directed inter-household relations that intertwined economic, social, co-operative and competitive relations. The disputes occurred around the boundaries and interstices between households where status and wealth, co-operation and competition sat uneasily with each other. These disputes reveal a tantalising glimpse into the connections between the social and cultural milieu of East Barns and the witchcraft case made against Young.
The quarrels that began as disputes between individuals rapidly expanded to engulf their spouses, children and servants. Young did not simply attack individuals; she was accused of magically battling whole households. In the accusations alleging misfortune suffered by the households of social superiors and equals, Young was mostly found guilty. However, when accused of harming social inferiors, she was acquitted. It is not clear why the assize found testimony by social inferiors less compelling. It seems that the assize, local men from East Barns and its environs, thought Young most potent as a magical threat when engaged in household battle with other comparable households. Witchcraft victims were identified, not as individuals, but through their position in webs of family and household.45
Witchcraft harm was experienced as intimate violence. Young knew her victims very well indeed – they were her husband, her in-laws and people with whom she dealt every day. Very few witches in Scotland were accused of causing large-scale harm such as hailstorms, drought or other bad weather, natural disasters, plague or famine.46 Typically, in the rare instances where a witchcraft suspect was accused of this kind of generalised harm, their motive was perceived as intending to harm a specific victim. In Young’s case she was accused of interfering with the Dunbar herring drove in order to destroy the wealth of George Sandie, the miller.
This intimate violence played out along the rough-edged lines drawn between households around women’s work. Accusations against Young revolved primarily around the work for which she herself was responsible. Her quarrels followed her working life and were part of her struggles (as a representative of her household) against other households for a better position and her attempt to maximise her resources. Many disputes occurred within the patterns of women’s work – dairying, childcare, ale-brewing and the verbal work of negotiating with other households. Magic, in this case magical harm and beliefs about the Devil, was interwoven with the practices of everyday social and economic life.
Young’s accusers portrayed her witchcraft as a magical assault on their households, emphasising links between incidents based on household connections. So, for example, the family and household connections between the Brysons were explained in the documents rather than laid out as totally separate accusations based on individual attacks. Young’s own defence testimony hinted at these same social and economic boundaries and relationships imbued within witchcraft belief. The defence, however, argued against a household-structured reading by casting each dispute and misfortune as personal in nature. Disputes with her neighbours were thus moved away from the arena of the social relations of work and household and into a vision of interpersonal, individual psychology and personal responsibility for misfortune. Young’s reactions to her neighbours, in her version of the facts, were normal and personal. In her testimony she became the persecuted, honest, honourable, Christian wife and neighbour. Each neighbour’s misfortune was variously portrayed as God’s judgement, individual laziness or incompetence. So the misfortunes experienced by Margaret Ogill were God’s wrath for her covering up the schoolmaster’s pre-marital affair; the rash on Lilias Knowis was because she ate raw wort; the Umpherstoun and Hodge butter failing was due to incompetence. By decoupling her neighbours’ misfortunes from the social or communal aspects of East Barns life, the defence testimony tried to neutralise the magically charged potential within inter-household relations.
Witchcraft was not simply an interpretation of, or commentary on, daily life. It also influenced how people lived – their work, alliances and disputes – and how they thought about their troubles and other people’s successes. Neighbours’ experience of witchcraft harm created, enacted and upheld small chains of interpersonal domination that were lived in thought and practice. Young’s work – the work of a female head of household – became imbued with magical harm. The widely held beliefs about magic and witchcraft made her everyday work stronger and more potent within her community. Here Young’s intimate and everyday practices shaped community belief about her, her work, witches and witchcraft. The local experiences and practices as described in Young’s trial partook of and helped to shape people’s understandings about witchcraft and magic that were shared across Scotland.
Quarrels followed by harm arose from the practical, day-to-day experiences of households. Young’s supposed magical healing, her associations with other known witches, the rumours that she had a Devil’s mark, and other magical happenings provided the context in which her quarrelling for land and household gain came to be seen as causing magical harm to her neighbours. Domestic arrangements, particularly of middling peasants such as Young, structured the cultural content of witchcraft accusations and community witchcraft beliefs. The intimate details, both magical and ordinary, of witchcraft accusations in Young’s case were clearly drawn from her daily life as the wife of a portioner and a female head of household. These local-level accusations dovetailed with elite theology and understandings of the demonic pact. Further, they wrapped around and reinforced the construct of the domestic – marriage, household and community. A similar pattern can be found in other Scottish witchcraft cases pertaining to wives and widows of middling peasants and mid-level inhabitants of towns and burghs.47
The argument made here is different from the idea that witches were quarrelsome neighbours. Young’s physical and verbal work, as the female head of household, structured both the quarrels that resulted in witchcraft accusations and the supposed objects of her malice and revenge. Much of this work brought Young out of her home, into fields, villages and other people’s homes. Local witchcraft accusations revolved around the practical aspects of Young’s domestic arrangement as she lived it: production and consumption of goods, the running of her household, raising children and co-operating with neighbours. Individual households were viable economic and social units only through intense, and often tense, links with other households, the larger community, landlords and state institutions. Witchcraft accusations demonstrate that women played a key role in maintaining, or sabotaging, those connections.
Witchcraft highlights the ways that household configurations structured daily life and the ways that people’s lived lives expanded outside their households. Households were deemed vulnerable to witchcraft, as if their necessary connections to the community were the very thing that could let in harm. Young’s defence arguments were structured against a reading of East Barns’s misfortunes as patterned by household, instead presenting misfortunes as random and individual, and denying her agency. The accusations against Isobel Young simultaneously talk about witchcraft and the structures of everyday life.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Ewan, ‘ “Many injurious words”: defamation and gender in late medieval Scotland’, in R. A. McDonald (ed.), History, Literature, and Music in Scotland, 700–1560 (Toronto, 2002); Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1998), 268.
2. Ronald Hutton, ‘Anthropological and historical approaches to witchcraft: potential for a new collaboration?’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 413–34.
3. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970). For further discussion, see Lauren Martin, ‘The Devil and the Domestic: Witchcraft, Women’s Work and Marriage in Early Modern Scotland’ (New School for Social Research PhD dissertation, 2004), 42–4.
4. See, for example, Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC, 1994).
5. Raymond Firth (ed.), Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski (New York, 1957). See also Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988).
6. Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973), 9–19; Kate Crehan, The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia (Berkeley, Calif., 1997). Frances Dolan places this understanding of culture within the discipline of cultural studies, although it also has roots in the anthropological colonial critique: Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 4.
7. David W. Sabean, Property, Production and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), 10.
8. Crehan, Fractured Community, 2, 227–32.
9. Ibid., 9.
10. William Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History and Political Economy (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Language (Oxford, 1977), 27–36.
11. William Roseberry, ‘Balinese cockfights and the seduction of anthropology’, in his Anthropologies and Histories, 29.
12. A distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘conduct’, or ‘thought’ and ‘action’, in anthropology suggests that culture provides the road map and structure for action. This has been a common way that language and practice have been understood in anthropological thought. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973); Richard A. Barrett, Culture and Conduct: An Excursion in Anthropology (Belmont, Calif., 1984), ch. 3.
13. See, for example, Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (2nd edn., Oxford, 2002); Annabel Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, politics and “good neighbourhood” in early seventeenth-century Rye’, Past and Present, 133 (November 1991), 31–66; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).
14. SJC, i, 96–120 (books of adjournal); RPC, 2nd ser., iii, 4, 540; Edinburgh City Archives, town treasurer’s accounts, vol. 5 (1623–1636), p. 598 (record of execution); NRS, Tyninghame kirk session minutes, CH2/359/1, fo. 60r.; NRS, JC26/9, ‘Issobell Young’ bundle, nos. 1–15 (pre-trial witness depositions, a dittay, interrogatories, witness lists, Young’s statement).
15. See Martin, ‘Devil and the Domestic’, 202–4, 289–95, for full description and implications of kerchief removal.
16. SJC, i, 97–100; NRS, JC26/9/1, item 1. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 174–9, documented a similar pattern of witchcraft diagnosis conducted by folk healers, whom he called ‘witch-doctors’.
17. NRS, JC26/9/12.
18. NRS, JC26/9/1.
19. Ibid., item 5.
20. NRS, JC26/9/4. The interrogatory for this ‘interview’ survives.
21. Bellenden was involved in at least eleven other documented witchcraft cases during 1629–1631. He was assigned as an investigator (read interrogator) and commissioner to cases in the central and southeast of Scotland (Stirling, Haddington, Berwick and Perth). Colville was involved in ten documented cases as an investigator and commissioner to cases from the central and southeastern areas of Scotland (Clackmannan, Perth, Edinburgh, Fife and Haddington). He was involved in cases from 1629 to 1662. These figures probably under-represent their full involvement.
22. RPC, 2nd ser., ii, 540; iii, 4.
23. RMS, v, 357; vi, 490; Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, xxiii, 144.
24. Witnesses suggest that Young’s witchcraft reputation probably started after her marriage. The average age of women’s first marriage was the mid-twenties: R. A. Houston, ‘Women in the economy and society of Scotland, 1500–1800’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds.), Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), 127; Deborah Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA, 1997), 99. Since her reputation spanned forty years, she was probably at least 65 years old at the time of her execution.
25. RMS, v, 369. Marriage and occupation of land tended to occur around the same time for men in early modern Scotland: Houston, ‘Women’, 126–7.
26. For further discussion, see Martin, ‘Devil and the Domestic’, 255–9.
27. Martin, ‘Devil and the Domestic’, 248.
28. NRS, CC8/8/8 fol. 205–7. His son worked with Smith and testified against Young.
29. NRS, CC8/8/37, 623–5.
30. NRS, JC26/9/5; see also SJC, i, 96–120 (books of adjournal).
31. Martin, ‘Devil and the Domestic’, 307–8.
32. For fuller accounts of women’s work, see Symonds, Weep Not for Me, ch. 4; Houston, ‘Women’; Margaret H. B. Sanderson, A Kindly Place? Living in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (East Linton, 2002), ch. 8.
33. NRS, JC26/9/1.
34. Ibid.
35. Kirk session records contain many references to marital violence: Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, Conn., Mass., 2002), 284–90.
36. NRS, Original Courtbooks of the Baron-baillie of Broxmouth and Pinkerton from 1620 to 1649 and from 1735 to 1764, GD100/289.
37. Martin, ‘Devil and the Domestic’, 248.
38. NRS, JC26/9/3. The Home quarrel consisted of charges 9 and 15–18.
39. NRS, JC26/9, document 1. The timeline for this dispute is roughly confirmed by charters in the Great Seal register: RMS, vi, 907.
40. In a separate charge, Young was accused of conducting a magical protection ritual for her cattle near the Home dovecote.
41. NRS, JC26/9/9.
42. Thomas Home’s widow Lilias Knowis testified that her husband ‘cost’ with George Smith for two cottar’s houses and one rig of land: NRS, JC26/9/9. Cost means ‘payment in kind for rent, dues or wages’: Concise Scots Dictionary.
43. NRS, JC26/9, document 1.
44. NRS, JC26/9 item 1; SJC, i, 118. Cuthbert appeared personally at her trial.
45. Lauren Martin, ‘Scottish witchcraft panics re-examined’, in Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller (eds.), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (Basingstoke, 2008), 119–43; Scott Moir, ‘The crucible: witchcraft and the experience of family in early modern Scotland’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent (eds.), Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Aldershot, 2008), 49–59.
46. Julian Goodare, ‘Scottish witchcraft in its European context’, in Goodare, Martin and Miller (eds.), Witchcraft and Belief, 26–50, at pp. 28–30.
47. For instance, the cases of Janet Cock (1661), Agnes Finnie (1644) and Margaret Oswald (1629): SSW.