Grampian Club > Scotland, social and domestic

General Folklore. 225
Dalkeith, on the 14th June, 1641, held Christian Wilson
guilty of the murder of Alexander Wilson, her brother,
because, on touching the body of the deceased, "the
blood rushed out of it to the great admiration of all the
behoulders, who tooke it for discoverie of the murder."
In 1680, a woman was charged before the Kirk-session
of Colinton with the murder of her illegitimate child.
The minute of session contains the following :— " There
is one thing very observable in that business, that, when
the mother laid her hand upon the child's nose, there
came a little blood from it, which was seen by many
persons."
In December, 1687, Sir James Stanfield, of Newmills,
was found strangled in a stream near Haddington.
According to the testimony of James Muirhead, the
surgeon, and of another witness, when Philip Stanfield,
the son of the deceased, assisted to place the body in
the coffin, blood darted from the left side of the neck
upon his touch. With his hands soiled in the blood, he
fled from the corpse, exclaiming, " Lord have mercy upon
me ! " Without any further evidence, Philip Stanfield
was convicted of parricide, and executed at Edinburgh,
his body being afterwards hung in chains. Law, in his
" Memorials," relates, that, when the bodies of two mur-
derers, who had been executed at Glasgow, in June,
1683, were removed to the place where the murder was
committed, there to be hung in irons, the arm of one of
the criminals " did gush out in blood." James Guthrie,
the Presbyterian martyr, executed at Edinburgh, in
1661, was afterwards decapitated, — his head being set on
the Netherbow. When the Earl of Middleton, who had
been actively concerned in his death, was driving past
the spot soon after, some drops of the martyr's blood