Original subtitles

January 1591, Edinburgh.

A woman is about to be executed.

Her crime?

She is a witch!

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.

She's been interrogated and tortured,

and now she'll be strangled and burnt at the stake.

BELL TOLLS

How did the execution of this woman

light the fuse on a century of witch-hunts across Britain,

and the state-sanctioned killing of thousands more like her?

The ungodly are not so!

In this series, I'm reinvestigating

some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.

It wasn't just one generation,

it was three generations, losing their lives,

bam, bam, bam.

These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbour mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.

It's chilling to think that this could actually be evidence

in a murder investigation.

But with the passage of time,

we have new ways to unlock their secrets,

using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

It's a horrible psychosexual form of torture, isn't it? Absolutely.

I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses,

I'm going to re-examine old evidence

and follow new clues to get closer to the truth.

It is one of the great British mysteries.

It was one of those moments, I'm afraid, for a historian,

that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

RAVEN CROAKS

Today, when we think about witches,

we think about old hags with pointy hats

and broomsticks and black cats.

But witches have a history that's long, sinister and very real.

400 years ago, thousands of ordinary women

were tortured and executed in witch-hunts.

I want to know who these women were, and why they were killed.

The witch-hunting craze that swept the country 400 years ago

began here, just along the coast from Edinburgh,

in the small seaside town of North Berwick.

The events that were said to have taken place here

would spark the very first large-scale witch-hunt in Scotland.

I'm heading to the scene of the crime,

the Old Kirk of St Andrew.

It looks a bit like a small hut.

Today, this is all that remains of a once-sizeable church.

And it was here, one night in October 1590,

that a group of witches supposedly gathered.

What a great place for a witches' meeting!

Right on the edge of the sea, with a huge, craggy,

devilish-looking rock in the background.

This was a time when everyone believed in witchcraft,

and this is the story of what happened here.

"On the night of All Hallows..." That means Halloween.

The perfect time for some witchy business.

"There were a great many witches, to the number of 200."

And it says that they had flagons of wine...

THEY SING

..they were making merry and drinking,

and they were singing all with one voice.

The story goes that the devil was here.

And these witches were concocting dangerous spells.

They took a cat and christened it,

and afterward, bound to each part of that cat

the chiefest parts of a dead man.

And the said cat was put in the sea.

And then, "There did arise such a tempest in the sea

"as a greater have not been seen".

THUNDERCLAP

This storm had been conjured for one purpose -

to kill the King of Scotland.

WAVES CRASH

James VI had been returning by ship from Denmark,

and was lucky to survive.

This all sounds absolutely bonkers. Ha-ha-ha-ha!

But it's all... Oh!

It makes a crazy sort of sense.

This is exactly the sort of thing witches are supposed to do, isn't it?

They're supposed to play around with corpses and cats.

Witches are supposed to be able to control the weather.

It's one of their powers.

It might sound like a fairy tale,

but what happened here set off a devastating chain of events.

Dozens were executed for this alleged plot.

And it triggered a century of persecution

across the British Isles.

Thousands more would be killed for the crime of witchcraft.

Some of them, men, the majority, women.

To understand why this story had such impact,

I want to see the original text for myself.

It's held here, at the University of Glasgow Archives.

It's a pamphlet, printed in London, called News From Scotland.

And it gives a full account of this plot against the king

and the trial of those held responsible.

Only a very few of these pamphlets survive.

This little book is more than 400 years old.

It's an account, in quite...

In fact, it's quite a sensational, tabloidy account,

of the first major witch-hunt in Scotland.

It was written in 1591, shortly after the events it describes.

I...I have picked up many, many old books,

and it never gets old.

It's a pleasure every single time.

You can't open it too wide.

Don't want it to snap.

Here's a little summary.

It's a true discourse

of the apprehension of sundry witches

lately taken in Scotland, where of some...

Ooh! ..are executed,

and some are yet imprisoned.

These must be the witches.

They're all bustling along in a sort of girl gang.

And it's pretty clear that they are witches,

because here is the devil.

He's in a pulpit, he's making a sermon like a priest would do,

but he's the flip image of a priest.

He is, in fact, the devil.

And these witches here at the top, they are

working magic with their cauldron.

They have cooked up a storm

that has destroyed His Majesty's ship.

You can see it's been wrecked, people are falling into the waves.

And these are the witches

who disrupted the king's journey back from Denmark.

This pamphlet was commissioned by King James himself.

It was distributed in England to tell the story of his triumph

against the witches' wicked plot.

It's clearly designed to be dramatic.

Hmm. So this is quite emotive language here.

They're not just witches, they are wicked and detestable witches.

They had, seduced by their sorcery

a number of others to be as bad as themselves.

So this is a problem.

The number of witches in Scotland is growing.

There are more and more of them every day.

We should be very afraid.

The author tells us that, "God have lately overthrown and hindered

"the intentions and wicked dealings"

"of a great number of ungodly creatures,

"no better than devils."

News From Scotland paints witches

as a serious threat to order and stability.

And the witch-hunt as the necessary means

by which the godly can prevail.

But why was the Scottish king so eager to tell the English

about his triumph over evil?

The late 16th century was a time of huge

political and religious upheaval.

The Reformation was sweeping across Europe,

as Protestants rejected the Pope's authority

and centuries of Catholicism.

Here in Scotland, James was the figurehead

for this new Protestant church,

but he also had his eye on the English throne.

Queen Elizabeth I was getting older, she had no children.

James was positioning himself as a strong and godly ruler.

As a worthy successor to the Crown of England.

Did James VI's desire for greater power

play a part in the ramping up of a war against witches?

Edinburgh's National Portrait Gallery

has a painting of James VI dating from this time.

James has just turned 24,

he has already had two decades of his reign,

and a very turbulent reign it has been.

And remember, he's still quite a young king

who's sort of dealing with noble factions and quarrels.

And he doesn't have the all-important heir.

So, am I right that, in 1590, James has just got married?

Yes. He's just got married to Anna of Denmark.

She's just a teenager.

She is his new bride.

And of course, now James has the hope

that they're going to have children, they're going to produce heirs.

But there've been a few problems in getting her

from Denmark to Scotland, haven't there?

Anna's meant to be coming to Scotland, but there are these terrible storms

and her ship springs a leak.

And the admiral in charge of the fleet says, " No, we have to turn back."

And James makes a decision.

"I'm going to go to Anna!"

Originally, he's driven back by storms.

He has to go back into one of the Fife ports and then try again.

But eventually, they make it through.

But he's had to leave his country.

I mean, OK, he has taken a lot of his nobles and gentlemen with him,

where he can keep an eye on them,

but he has had to leave Scotland.

It's a risk. Yes!

So these storms, this business of the weather in the North Sea,

is psychologically onerous to him.

It's more than inconvenient, it's dangerous.

He's had to take risks to his personal safety to overcome it.

Yes. And remember, we've only James, there's no heir.

If James goes down with the ship, Scotland is plunged into chaos.

Louise, how familiar do you think James was

with the idea of witches and witchcraft?

Witchcraft has been around in Scotland from before the Reformation.

The important thing is that people believed that witchcraft is real.

And it's also about living in a providential world,

where you believe God is looking over everything.

So if the king is godly, then God blesses him,

God blesses his rule, God blesses his country and people.

Now, if you annoy God by letting sinners like witches go unpunished,

well, that's when God might visit your country with famines

and plagues and losses in battle.

So, you know, to show you're a good, strong king,

you must show you're a godly king, upholding God's law.

And especially against the enemies of God, the witches.

What better way to prove that you're a righteous and godly king

than to triumph in a face-off with witches?

That pamphlet, News From Scotland, was clearly good spin for James.

But who were the real women of North Berwick,

branded as witches, arrested and burnt at the stake?

It's not easy to uncover the story of these ordinary women.

They would have been illiterate, so left no testimony of their own,

and many witch-trial documents have been lost.

This book is a history of King James VI.

It's contemporary, it was written in his lifetime.

And there's a whole section in it about witches.

And there should be a reference to the very first woman to be executed

in the North Berwick witch-hunt.

And here, I think...

Yes!

..is her name.

Agnes Sampson.

Agnes Sampson, "grace wyff".

That means midwife.

Somebody who brings you God's grace when you're giving birth.

And it says, "alias callit",

which means otherwise called,

"the wyse wyff of Keyth".

That means a wise woman,

a...a folk healer,

somebody with slightly mysterious powers.

And it looks like she's from Keyth.

So, how on earth did Agnes Sampson,

midwife and folk healer,

get caught up in this brutal witch-hunt?

The answer could lie in the role she played in her community,

and in the tools of her trade.

Hidden away in the storerooms at the National Museum of Scotland

is a unique collection of everyday objects with magical powers.

Well, what we have here is a selection of some of

our large collection of charms and amulets,

which are reputed to have superstitious powers.

So these were objects put to, um...protect you,

and they are also curative.

So, what sort of a world are we looking into here, then?

One...one where people probably believed in God,

but also believed in a load of other sort of supernatural powers? Yes.

We have religious belief, a belief in God, that is able to co-exist,

in their mind, quite happily, with the supernatural.

So a belief in fairies, malevolent elves, evil witches.

What's this neat little black one that looks like a Christmas pudding tied up with a ribbon?

This is a seedpod that's come all the way... Oh, is it?

..possibly from the Caribbean,

and it's floated on the Gulf Stream.

So local people, ordinary people, would pick them up off the beaches

and use these to help them during childbirth.

And as a result, they are called Mary's Nut.

Mary's Nut? Yep, or St Mary's Nut.

So it's really Mother Mary's protection in childbirth.

So it's that combination of a religious belief

allied to something that has more of a folk belief

and a superstitious belief.

And is it the sort of thing that you'd lend to your friend when she was pregnant...

Yeah, I think you could. ..and then pass it on? Yeah.

But you'd probably want your own one, anyway,

cos you're probably giving birth quite a lot. Oh, many times, yes.

A lot of...a lot of use for the Mary's Nuts. Yeah.

This one catches my eye.

Well, this little cross is a wonderful example

of something everyday that anyone could have owned.

It's, um...made from rowan,

and the rowan tree is supposed to be protective

against evil spirits.

So you might just carry this, you could have it on your person,

or you could have it under your pillow. Mm-hm.

And you planted rowan trees in your gardens to keep away the evil spirits.

So, how does a folk healer fit into this world

of the amulets and the charms?

So you'll have had these as your everyday item for everyday protection,

and you would bring in someone, like a healer, a wise woman,

when something's gone really badly wrong.

She will have had knowledge of herbs and so on, like a homeopath today.

But they're also presumed to have magical powers.

This sounds like witchcraft.

What's the difference between folk healing and witchery?

The witch is living within the community

and associated with evil things.

Evil spirits, nasty things happening, disease, crops failing.

The folk healer is associated with good things.

So, the folk healer is on your side... Yes.

..and the witch is against you? Yes.

Indeed, she's a witch-buster.

Because she's associated with getting rid of those evil spirits.

Agnes would have been a pillar of her community.

So, how did that change?

And why did she become branded as a witch,

accused of plotting to kill the king?

I want to see where the wise wife of Keyth lived.

Her village lies in the East Lothian countryside,

about 20 miles south of North Berwick.

So I guess that's the remains of the village.

Looks like it's only one house just now.

But up here this way,

is the...the remains of the church.

BIRDSONG

I'm looking for the ruin, that I think is through this sea of nettles.

Makes a change from being in the library!

Ah! That's brilliant.

MONASTIC CHANTING

It's great to think that Agnes herself would have stood here.

This would have been where she came...

..to services.

Here since the 12th century,

Agnes' village church would have been Catholic for almost 300 years.

Decorated with murals and alive with the chanting of Latin Mass.

But from the 1560s, her church was becoming Protestant.

The shock waves of the Reformation

were felt even in remote villages like this one.

The church was stripped of its Catholic adornments,

the Latin Mass was banned.

Now, Catholic belief and folk belief had sort of peacefully co-existed.

But I'm starting to wonder whether,

as Catholic gave way to Protestant,

a folk healer like Agnes might have been caught in the crossfire.

Religious change brought huge upheaval,

even for a small, rural village like Agnes'.

And they faced other difficulties, too.

It was a period that's sometimes called the Little Ice Age.

Winters were getting colder.

I do know that in the 1580s there was a big famine in Scotland

and population was rising.

There was more competition for resources.

There must have been more fear and suspicion

and trouble of various kinds,

as there always is when something bad happens.

There must have been a sense that something was going wrong

and that somebody must be to blame.

A folk healer like Agnes trod a fine line

between being someone people called upon when they needed help

and someone they blamed when misfortune struck.

It makes me wonder what triggered the first accusation against Agnes.

News From Scotland claims she was denounced as a witch

by a local servant girl called Geillis Duncane.

But I can't find any evidence to back that up.

What I have uncovered is this document,

describing a church leaders' meeting.

15th September, 1589.

The minutes of the synod say

they've ordered the Presbytery of Haddington,

that's the local church committee in Haddington,

to summon before them Agnes Sampson,

suspected of witchcraft.

So here it is in black and white.

On 15th September, 1589,

we have the first reference to Agnes Sampson

in connection with witchcraft.

This is a year before Agnes was implicated

in the North Berwick plot to kill the king.

It doesn't tell me exactly what she's accused of,

but we do know what happened next.

By this time, the Scottish Church

was in the hands of radical Protestant reformers

who'd been led by John Knox.

Knox had wanted to create a new godly state

based on the pure message of the Bible - obedience and discipline.

Ushering in a new age of religious puritanism in Scotland.

CROW CAWS

This is St Mary's Church in Haddington.

Both North Berwick and Agnes' village of Keyth

came under its jurisdiction.

And it was here that church elders first put Agnes under investigation

as a suspected witch.

Hello?

And this church was at the forefront

of the religious and moral reforms sweeping the country.

Hello. Will you be Stewart? Hello. I'm Stewart, yes.

It's really nice to meet you, Stewart. Nice to meet you.

Welcome to St Mary's. Thank you for having me. Not at all.

So, Stewart, what's your connection

to this really huge and beautiful church?

Well, I'm a member of the church and I'm also one of a team

who guide visitors around during our open season.

And my late wife was a minister here for ten years.

Is that quite unusual, to be a female minister in Scotland? Not nowadays.

There have been female ministers in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years.

Mm-hm. But it's relatively recent, yes.

And my wife was the first one here.

The first one here? A trailblazer! Absolutely.

Now, I know... Every historian knows, that in the 16th century,

the big thing that happens in Scotland is the Reformation,

which is led by John Knox.

He's...he's a Haddington boy, isn't he?

Well, John Knox was born about 200 yards from where we're standing,

on the other side of the river.

And he was almost certainly baptised in this church.

Oh, wow! So this church...

He was baptised here?

This is right at the cutting edge of the Reformation, then, this place. Yes.

And how would you characterise this...

..this Scottish Reformation religion that John Knox was keen on?

Of course, it was a much simpler, stricter and very...

In some ways, very harsh religion.

So, what kind of behaviour

did the Reformed Scottish Church disapprove of?

What we you might describe as frivolous behaviour.

Singing, dancing, drinking.

And, of course, fornication.

You could be called up in front of the congregation

if you're misbehaving in some way.

And that's because the devil is just around the corner

and your soul is at risk of eternal damnation if you step out of line.

Yep. And John Knox didn't approve of women, did he?

Well, he didn't approve of women being in positions of authority. Mm.

So, if the new church did not like to have women in positions of authority,

someone like Agnes, who was a wise woman,

who had the trust of the community,

do you think maybe they felt threatened by that?

That's quite possible, yes.

BELL TOLLS

I wonder if Agnes was aware

that she was being watched by the church

as she went about her business as a midwife and a healer?

It's starting to look like there's no place

in this new Protestant order for women like her.

She is a woman in a position of authority.

She's got this power of healing,

people in the community trust her,

need her, look up to her.

Do the church authorities feel a bit threatened by that?

Agnes' fate now lay in the hands of these fervent Protestants.

And these religious leaders were absorbing new ideas

circulating in Europe about the nature of witchcraft

and how to deal with it.

They were laid out in a book written by two German Catholic theologians

in the 15th century.

This is a direct translation

of a text that's more than 500 years old.

It's called Malleus Maleficarum -

the Hammer of Witches.

And it's a sort of a...a manual

of how to spot a witch

and what sort of things they're going to get up to.

One of the things that pleases me about the book

is that it's a sort of series of, um...questions and answers.

Like a listicle that you might get in a magazine.

How are witches transported from place to place?

How do witches perform their spells?

How is a formal pact with evil made?

Central to this text was the idea that witches

were in cahoots with a dangerous enemy, the devil.

It's all part of a general turning up of the temperature

on religion in the 16th century.

You've got new Protestants saying, "No, this is the way to do religion!"

And you've got those Catholics, who suddenly become a lot more defensive,

and they say, "No! We feel under attack now.

"This is the way to do religion."

So that's why people just start to think

that it's a matter of life and death, this.

The devil is really wandering around your church,

tempting you, tempting your wife,

and it's like the end of days.

In the 16th century, everybody gets utterly obsessed with the devil.

Demonology books like this made it clear

the devil was specifically recruiting women to do his evil bidding.

Why is it that more witches are female than men?

I'm quite interested in what they're going to say about that.

Well, it's basically because of the wickedness of women,

as spoken of in the Bible.

In Ecclesiasticus 25 -

"There is no wrath above the wrath of a woman!

"I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon

"than to keep house with a wicked woman."

"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust.

"Which is, in women, insatiable."

And that's why the devil's able to recruit them more easily.

They're so desperate to fill their wombs

that they will consort even with devils.

If there aren't enough men to go around, devils will do.

"The witches meet together in conclave on a set day.

"And the devil appears to them

"in the assumed body of a man."

And he says to them, "Look, if you have sex with me, ladies,

"I will give you long life. That is the deal!"

And this witch is showing her allegiance to the devil

by kissing his backside.

LUCY LAUGHS

Oh, dear!

What has surprised me, reading through this book,

and I really wasn't aware of this,

was just how much witchcraft and sex seemed to be mixed up together.

Fear about sexual matters and the lust of women

seems to be absolutely fundamental.

Now, this brings to life the devil

having his meeting with all the witches who were in his power.

So that's like our coven of witches meeting in the church in North Berwick.

Here's the devil, sitting on his throne, with his horns.

And this witch here, she's got her fire and her cauldron.

Look, she's putting in little cats, I think.

Oh, and look, here's a witch taking off on her broomstick.

I like the way that the things that witches used for their magic,

cauldrons, broomsticks, um...cats, even,

are just...just things from around the house.

They're ordinary, domestic things.

And the things that women would use, not men.

So, poor Agnes!

She's had the bad luck to be born at a really bad time.

For over 100 years now, this conspiracy theory,

kicked off by theologians, has been growing in power.

People now genuinely believe

that witches are largely female,

that they gather in groups,

that they have this kinky sexual pact with the devil,

and that their number is growing.

More and more witches are being recruited.

So, what are the authorities going to do

to deal with these wicked women?

For centuries, accusations of witchcraft

had largely been settled within the local community.

But now, driven by Protestantism

that cast witches as the devil's agents,

the authorities had to crack down.

Well, this is the Scottish Witchcraft Act.

So this act was drawn up by Scotland's Protestant Reformers.

John Knox may even have had a hand in it.

It is statute and ordained

that no manner of person or persons,

of whatever estate, degree or condition,

is to use any manner of witchcraft.

And if you do do that,

they'll be under pain of death.

It actually says under the pain of "deid".

That means death. You will be killed.

It has become a capital offence for the first time.

So the act is really clear that the whole weight of the law

is going to come down on anybody doing witchcraft.

But there's a... It seems to me there's a huge problem here.

It doesn't actually say what witchcraft is!

So witchcraft is open to interpretation.

And that means the law is open to interpretation.

And that seems to me to be very dangerous.

The Witchcraft Act put in place a legal framework

for the prosecution of witches.

Now, if enough evidence could be gathered,

a suspected witch could be tried in the courts

and sentenced to death.

GULLS CRY

By autumn 1590, the church elders in Haddington

had been investigating and building a case against Agnes

for more than a year.

I'm told that very few witch-trial documents still exist,

but remarkably, Agnes' have survived.

I can't access the originals in the National Records of Scotland,

but the History Centre in Haddington has a copy.

Incredibly, they include detailed transcripts

of the evidence against Agnes.

It says here - Here follows the articles of her "dittay"...

..whereof she was convicted

by number 53!

Now, a dittay,

it's from the French, dittay meaning said.

These are the things that were said against her,

and there were 53 charges.

That's quite a lot, isn't it?

OK. Here, she's charged with using of witchcraft in healing

of John Thompson in "Dirletoune",

who remained...

Oh, I see what she's done.

She's... She used witchcraft to heal John Thompson,

but he remained "crepill", that's crippled,

notwithstanding thereof.

I can see that if you'd...you'd booked Agnes to heal you

and then it failed,

then he'd want his money back, wouldn't he?

You might be so cross that you reported her to the authorities.

Let's have a look at this one.

Item - for coming to Bessie Aitkenhead

and using her prayer and devilish charms

for the recovering of her health to her.

Well, here's someone who's pleased.

Betty...Bessie...Aitkenhead has been cured.

So when I look at the list of people who've been

either cured or not cured by Agnes,

it's a bit confusing, cos you can't see what the problem is.

She's sort of going about her business as a healer.

But perhaps the problem is

that this old, traditional way of doing things, of healing people,

has now become suspicious

because people are increasingly worried about witches.

There's a lot of talk here about witchcraft and prayers...

..to the devil.

I mean, I cannot know whether all of these people,

who were Agnes' clients,

whether they really said these things,

or were these important people who were determined to catch a witch,

were they taking the evidence and twisting it

and putting on this whole witchy layer?

There's much to question about this document,

but it does offer a tantalising glimpse of Agnes herself.

We're told that she's a widow and has children,

and that she learnt her folk-healing skills from her father.

So I love the way that hidden within this formal document

written by men who had it in for Agnes,

we're actually meeting the real person.

And then, here... Now, this is really extraordinary.

Because this is just what you don't normally get.

You do not normally get the recorded words of somebody

living in a tiny village in remote Scotland

in the 1590s.

That's not somebody that we normally hear from in history.

But here, we do, because recorded here

are the words to Agnes' prayer to her patients

for life or death.

All kinds of ills that ever may be

In Christ's name, I conjure thee.

I conjure thee...

..Both more and less with all the virtues of the Mass

And right so the nails sore

That nailed Jesus and no more.

And right so the same blood

That reeked over the ruthful rood.

Forth of the flesh and forth of the bone

And in the earth and in the stone,

I conjure thee in God's name.

These are supposed to be her very words.

It's like she's speaking to us.

It gives a wonderful, tingly feeling.

This is...this is...this is why we do this,

to bring people back from the dead.

But one thing is clear,

even if some of Agnes' clients were grateful for her powers of healing,

and even if she claimed that her prayer was to God,

the authorities were intent on painting her as a witch

in league with the devil.

And there's something else in here that's really intriguing.

People are summoning her from far and wide.

And it's not just villagers who are after her services, it's...it's the toffs.

Posh people are after her, too.

Perhaps her far-reaching reputation as a healer

helps explain why, when the king was looking for a scapegoat

for the storms that beset his ship,

Agnes Sampson was a ready name on people's lips.

In late autumn 1590,

just weeks after the alleged witches' gathering at North Berwick,

Agnes was arrested,

taken to Edinburgh and imprisoned.

And in early December, she was brought here to be interrogated.

This is the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

This was the home of King James VI.

This part of the palace here has been altered,

but this part is the original palace that Agnes would have seen.

She would have set eyes on these two

rather sinister-looking turrets.

So I really am walking in Agnes' footsteps at this moment.

This is the actual chamber in which James VI received visitors.

His bedchamber is just through there.

And it was here, in this room, to the best of our knowledge,

that Agnes came face-to-face with the king.

What an extraordinary encounter.

A woman from a tiny rural village brought before the king.

A Protestant monarch determined to prove he had the power

to drive out the devil.

So, what on earth happened in this room?

News From Scotland offers this account...

Agnes Sampson was brought here to Holyroodhouse

before the king's majestry

and sundry other of the nobility of Scotland.

But it says here, she stood stiffly in the denial

of all that was laid to her charge. So she stood up to them!

This is a fearsome situation,

to be questioned by the king himself in his royal palace,

but she wasn't giving way an inch.

Despite this, at some point, Agnes cracked and confessed.

It's chilling to realise that all the detail

of what happened in North Berwick, as recounted in News From Scotland,

actually comes from the confession

Agnes made right here in Holyrood Palace.

It was Agnes who said 200 witches gathered together

and used a dead man and a christened cat

to raise the storm that almost killed the king.

This is her story.

But why would she say all these things?

Reading on, I think I can see why.

Agnes Sampson had all her hair shaven off

in each part of her body

and her head thrawn with a rope.

But during this time, she would not confess anything,

until the devil's mark was found upon her privities.

Now, to my mind, this is...this is torture

of a really horrible sexual nature.

It's a sort of a sexual assault.

And then, when this happened, when they did this to her,

she immediately confessed whatsoever was demanded of her.

And...goodness me, I'd do exactly the same thing.

Poor Agnes.

It's hard to be sure whether these descriptions of torture are true.

Was this the sort of treatment inflicted on women like Agnes?

To find out, I'm travelling to Forfar, just north of Dundee.

When a witch-hunt happened here in the 1660s,

more than 50 women were accused from this small town, alone.

Ah! It's Judith! Hello!

I meet you in the flesh at last! I know.

One local historian has been doing ground-breaking research

into the experiences of these so-called witches.

She's uncovered shocking new evidence of their interrogation

from unlikely historical documents -

the town's financial records.

Accounts of the town officials sounds a bit dull.

LUCY CHUCKLES

Yes, it does, if you...

if you don't realise what's going on.

And what's going on in Forfar at that time

is a witch-hunt that's been described as

being like no other in Scotland.

And when you follow the money,

you find some really interesting things.

OK, on the first page, the first section

that you examine here of Girsell Simpson.

She was a suspected witch.

But she was arrested and she was put in the tollbooth.

It says - An item to Andrew Taylor

foreclosing of the high tollbooth yay time,

that Girsell Simpson was therein

and foretaking down of them again.

Oh! So, when the suspected witch was in the prison,

they closed up the windows... Yep.

..and then, when she had been executed,

they opened up the windows again. That's right.

And that would be to keep her in the dark?

Well, it's the devil, and you don't want the devil

cursing the people in the street when they walk by. Wow!

Oh, look at this!

For the making of two pairs of stocks for the witches. Oh, yes.

The stocks are really interesting,

cos stocks sound like they're quite innocent.

You know, we have images of people in stocks outside.

Being hung up like this and people throw eggs at them. Yeah.

That's not what's happening here.

In Scotland at the time, stocks were used on the accused witches

as a form of torture.

It says here that candles are bought for those who did watch

Girsell Simpson, who's the suspected witch.

What does that mean, to watch her, do you think?

Watching usually comes with waking.

So watching and waking was a form of torture in itself.

It's sleep deprivation.

Later on, we'll see that there...

..there are other prisoners in. They're male prisoners,

and they're murderers, and they're not being watched.

There's no candles being paid for for them.

Mm! So, the suspected witch is treated worse than the murderers?

Yes. Wow! Absolutely.

These women, they're a danger

because they endangered the whole of society.

Yeah. They put the idea of the godly society at risk.

If you go down to 13th September... Yes.

..John Kincaid and David Cowan come to Forfar.

So John Kincaid is the famous witch-pricker.

The witch-pricker. Yeah.

That's a very resonant phrase. What exactly does that mean?

Well, they pay for two...trois preens for him.

Here it is. This...this is the purchase of two preens

for the pricking of Catherine Porter.

Preens are pins.

They're made of iron and they're usually about three inches long.

Or some people would say... Three inches? Yeah.

Oh, not tiny little dressmaking pins, big...? Big pins.

And what ex...? Why...why do they want to stick these pins

into the suspected witch?

They're trying to find the devil's mark.

What's that? It was usually thought to be a blue mark.

It could be a mole, it could be an extra nipple, it could be scars.

Anything that they thought was unusual on a woman's body

that doesn't respond to pain or it doesn't bleed.

That was evidence, pure and simple,

that you had convened with the devil.

So what they would do was, they would...they would shave the woman,

they would shave all her hair,

and they would... She would be naked.

She's in front of a panel of men.

She's having these pins stuck in all over her body.

And they would prick people for hours.

There's mention in one of the Privy Council documents

of a woman dying from witch-pricking.

It's...it's a really...

It's...it's a horrible psychosexual form of torture. Absolutely.

What really shocks me, Judith, is that the evidence is here.

That they've recorded it for us to see. Indeed.

When I read these treasurers' accounts,

and I've read them many times,

the hairs never cease to stand up on the back of my neck. Um...

And I think, how could they have treated people like this?

And then, you have to remember what they had in their mind.

And in their mind, they were absolutely convinced

that they were not people.

You know... They were devils. Yeah. Inhuman.

They are the devil.

How long have you been trawling through all of these records, Judith?

About ten years. Oh, wow!

At least ten years.

And what...what motivates you to do this?

Well, erm...

..one, it's just so incredibly interesting,

and two, there's the real sense of injustice.

Judith's research shows how the authorities devised a system

for rooting-out witches.

Torture was an acceptable means to elicit a confession.

And the so-called devil's mark, which wasn't too hard to find,

provided undeniable proof.

Under this kind of duress,

in December 1590, Agnes made her confession.

Remarkably, the National Records of Scotland holds an account

of what was said during Agnes' actual interrogation.

It also offers clues as to why Agnes' case

triggered a craze for witch-hunts across the country.

Is this word-for-word, then?

Was there someone in the room making notes?

How was it put together?

This has been written up afterwards.

There was probably a scribe in the room at the time

jotting down a few things,

but this isn't a transcript of her actual words,

this is a summary in the third person.

You know...you know, "She confessed that...

"She denied that..."

Um...and so on.

And we see breaks in the document, where,

perhaps she was tortured. It's hard to tell.

We do know in general terms that she was tortured.

And we can see this text as a kind of negotiation,

because Agnes probably didn't know anything about those storms at the time,

but they're asking her about it,

so she knows she can't just remain silent,

she has to tell a story, otherwise she'll get tortured more.

Do you think that the interrogators were asking

what we might call leading questions to get a particular answer?

Oh, undoubtedly, yes. You know, "Tell us about when you met the devil".

And, "How does one worship the devil?"

And so, one of the things that witches do

is that they kiss the devil's arse.

That is... Does it say that in her confession? Yes.

Before they departed, they all kissed his arse.

That almost certainly comes from a leading question from somebody

who has come across the European learned idea

of how witches worship the devil.

And Agnes has been made to say it.

If people torture you enough, you do get so confused

that you lose confidence in your own memory

and you start thinking, "The interrogators are right

"and perhaps I am a witch after all".

That's awful. They're breaking her body

but also her mind at the same time. Yeah, I'm afraid so. Yeah.

It seems to me that they're fitting her up.

You certainly could say that. I mean, they're doing it unwittingly.

They're terrifyingly sincere, these guys.

You know, they think they're getting the truth.

They are trying to save themselves and everybody

from the terrifying power of the devil.

And, you know, it...it certainly,

by this time, has become a conspiracy.

They...they think it isn't just one witch, you know,

it's a group who has done this.

And this is what the elite understand that witches will do.

They will gather in groups.

So they're asking Agnes, you know, "Who else was there?"

Whether these were names that she gave, or names that were fed to her

and then she repeated, you can't always tell.

You ask for names of accomplices

and you get a sort of snowball effect.

And once you've got one witch, you can then go to another and another and another

and, you know, the snowball can go on getting larger

until everyone's sick of it.

How many people eventually get pulled into the whole thing?

How many people, ultimately, is one of the very difficult questions to answer.

Almost certainly dozens, probably hundreds.

But, you know, many of the records have disappeared.

It's very hard to put numbers on it, for that reason.

Julian, why is the North Berwick witch-hunt, in particular, so important?

There have been earlier trials with individual witches,

but they never get into large numbers.

They don't manage to interrogate them properly

and it all fizzles out.

This is the first big, successful one

where we see the witch-hunters really working out how to do it.

So this provides a sort of blueprint

for how to have what you might call a successful witchcraft panic

that actually leads to large numbers of executions.

And versions of that then get repeated time and again

over the next 100 years or so in Scotland.

SOMBRE STRING RECITAL

What's so horrifying is that clearly, if you torture someone,

they'll say anything to make it stop.

It's this that made Agnes into a witch.

And, in a final tragic irony,

offer up the names of 59 other people, too,

who'd go on to face the same fate.

But here's the problem -

she's now officially confessed to causing storms

and to conspiring to kill the king.

Six weeks after her confession,

Agnes was put on trial in Edinburgh.

The building Agnes' trial took place in stood right here.

It was in the shadow of the great cathedral.

She would have been the only woman in a courtroom full of men.

The trial took one day,

and the verdict was guilty.

The following day, 28th January, 1591,

Agnes was brought here, to Castlehill.

She was to be strangled and burnt at the stake.

A sentence reserved only for the most dangerous of heretics.

I can't begin to imagine how petrified she must have felt

as she was being brought here, knowing what was going to happen.

RAVEN CROAKS

WIND WHISTLES

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,

nor standeth in the way of sinners,

nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

But his delight is in the law of the Lord,

and his law doth he meditate day and night.

In this moment, religious zeal,

fear of the devil, and an ambitious king

had collided to create a system of persecution,

from which there was no escape.

And Agnes Sampson paid the ultimate price.

This event, it makes me angry.

It seems like a terrible, tragic miscarriage of justice.

This is a woman who tried to help people,

but who ended up being punished for it.

Agnes' case set the blueprint for a century of witch-hunts.

Soon after her death, the Scottish King became James I of England,

and extended the English witchcraft laws,

leading to witch-hunts south of the border, too.

But it was Scotland that would have one of the highest rates

of witch-killing anywhere in Europe.

In total, 2,500 people would be executed,

the vast majority, women.

These were mothers,

sisters, daughters.

And imagine what it was like for other women in this society.

The fear they must have felt that they could be next.

The only national monument to the thousands killed

is this small drinking fountain, known as the Witches' Well.

But a campaign is now under way for a more significant memorial

and an official pardon.

It's hard to know what to do

with these dark chapters from our past.

It seems to me there's a double injustice

for the women caught up in the witch-hunts.

They were wrongly convicted,

but on top of that, their stories have been forgotten.

They've been buried under a pile of stereotypes.

Now is the time to restore the voices of women

like Agnes Sampson...

..and to make sure they're heard.

How did a catastrophic plague

that wiped out around half the population change Britain?

I am tempted to think that these 11 men thought,

"Right, the plague is coming,

"we're jolly well not going to go to work, we're going to go to the pub.

"Because tomorrow, we die".