Series 5 > Miscellany [of the Scottish History Society] XIII

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MISCELLANY XIII
stokkis, wherby thinking to dispatch your self. She refused to mount a
defence at her trial, saying she desired nobody to speak for her except
God in heaven. In addition to her other crimes, she confessed to having
had sex with the Devil in the form of a black man and in the form of the
wind—not uncommon forms for the Devil to take.1
As Michael Macdonald and Terence Murphy have noted in their
study of suicide in early modem England, the act was punished most
severely in the period 1500-1660. It was also at this time that the role of
the Devil in popular interpretations of suicide reached its peak in
England.2 Given that much of this was linked to a shared post-
Reformation Protestant culture, it seems reasonable to assume that these
attitudes were shared in Scotland. Suicide was seen as one of the few
sins which was directly inspired by the Devil; witchcraft was another.3
So perhaps it seemed logical to assume that one of these special crimes
could lead to the other. This may have been what happened in Anna’s
case, as she does not fit the usual career pattern of an accused witch.
Ordinarily witches built up a reputation over a period of years in
which their actions were labelled as constituting witchcraft—a process
described by Christina Lamer.4 Yet in Anna’s dittay there is no list of
wronged neighbours, nor a history of malefice outside of her own
family. It is stated in the general clause of her dittay (the item which
gives the formulaic accusations of witchcraft) that she consulted ‘divers
witches how to undo and wrak therof neighbors in their bodies, guds,
and geir and bereaving them of their lyves’ yet no specific examples
were given. It is notable that the general clause also contained
accusations of speaking with the dead and soothsaying. Nowhere else
was Anna accused of these and no evidence was given for these
accusations; she herself denied most of the points of the general clause.
Another unusual feature of the case is the timing of Anna’s reception
of the Devil’s mark. Usually witches were said to receive the Devil’s
mark at the outset of their careers when they renounced their baptisms,
but with Anna this happened only a week before her arrest and
coincided with her suicide attempts.6 It is tempting to suppose that Anna
1 C. Lamer, Enemies of God: the Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 147.
2 M. Macdonald & T. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modem England,
(Oxford, 1990), 75, 59.
3 Ibid.
4 Lamer, Enemies of God, 99-100.
5 See the remarks of the chancellor of the assize on their verdict against her.
6 Take, for example, William Crichton in Dunfermline in 1648 who made his pact with
the Devil 24 years before his arrest: Lamer, Enemies of God, 100.