THE MIDWIFE’S DOUBLE SIN.
Notably was arrested about this time, Alie Nisbet, midwife; and three others. Alie was accused of witchcraft; and of a softer, but as heinous a crime as witchcraft. This she confessed to; but the breaking of the seventh commandment in Christian Scotland, in the year 1632, was a far more dangerous thing than we can imagine possible in our laxer day; and Alie was on the horns of a dilemma, either of which could land her in ruin, death, and perdition. She was accused, among other things, of having taken her labour pains from off a certain woman, using “charmes and horrible words, amongs which thir ware some, the bones to the fire and the soull to the devill;” but this Alie denied, strenuously, though she admitted that she might have bathed the woman’s legs in warm water, which she had bewitched for good, by putting her fingers into it and running thrice round the bed, widershins; but the spoken charm as given she would have none of. The labour pains, however, left the woman, and were foully and unnaturally cast upon another who had no concern therewith, so that she died in four-and-twenty hours from that time, and Alie was the murderess by all the laws of sorcery. She was accused, also, of having poured some enchanted water on a threshold over which a servant girl, against whom she had a spite, must pass, and the servant girl died therefrom. Alie was wirriet and burnt and troubled the world no more.
KATHERINE GRIEVE AND JOHN SINCLAIR.[32]
Katherine Grieve, too (1633), was brought to judgment and sentenced to be “taken to the mercat crose and brunt in the cheick, in example of others,” with the future prospect, that if she haunted suspected places, or used charms “scho sould be brunt in asches to the dead without dome or law, and that willinglie, of hir owne consent.” For Katherine’s curses had wronged both man and beast, which evil thing she had brought to pass by the power of the devil her master. However, she was forced to undo her evil, and by laying on of hands cure the sore she had made: so she got off with this smaller punishment of branding, and a rebuke. And there was John Sinclair tried that same year; a cruel villain to others, if loving to his own. For under silence and cloud of night he took his distempered sister, sitting backward on the horse, and carried her from where she lay to the Kirk of Hoy. Then a voice came to him, saying “Seven is too many, but four might do;” and in the morning a boat with five men in it struck on the rocks, and four perished, but one was saved; by which fiendish and unholy sacrifice John Sinclair’s sister was cured. He was proved to be their murderer, for when the dead men were found, and he was “forcit to lay his handis vpoun thame, they guishit out with bluid and watter at the mouth and noise.” John Sinclair’s thread of life needed no more waxing to make it run smoothly and easily. The hangman knew where the knot lay; and cut it to the perfect satisfaction of all the country.
BESSIE BATHGATE’S NIPS.[33]
A year after this Bessie Bathgate, spouse to Alexander Rae, fell into trouble and the hands of the police. George Sprot, wobster, had some cloth of Bessie’s, which he kept too long for her thinking. She went and took it violently away, and nipped his child in the thigh till it skirled, “and of which nip it never convalesced, but dwamed thereof and died by hir sorcerie.” Also, said Sprot’s wife, giving her child an egg that came out of Bessie’s house there struck out a lump as big as a goose egg upon the child, which continued on her till her death, which was occasioned by nothing else than this “enchanted egg.” Furthermore she threatened Sprot that “he should never get his Sunday’s meat to the fore by his work;” and he forthwith fell into extreme poverty, by which her words came true. To William Donaldson she said—he outrunning her as she chased him to beat him for calling her a witch—“Weill, sir, the devill be in your feit,” and he fell lame and impotent straightways, and so continued ever since. Other things of the same kind did she, bewitching Margaret Horne’s cow that it died, “and that night it died there was women seen dancing on the rigging of the byre;” also she was seen by “two young men at 12 howers at even (when all persons are in their beds) standing barelegged and in hir sark valicot, at the back of hir yard, conferring with the devill, who was in gray cloaths;” which, with other offences of the same nature, were, we should have thought, heavy enough to have lost a world. But Elizabeth Bathgate, spouse to Alexander Rae, was acquitted; though how the verdict came about no one can possibly understand.
It was not that any fit of mercy or humanity had come over the people. More than twenty poor wretches suffered about this time, Sir George Home of Manderston, being one of the chief of the prosecutors: for Sir George and his wife did not live very lovingly together, and she was given to witches and warlocks—or they said she was—to see if she could not get rid of him by enchantments and sorceries: so Sir George had a pleasant mixture of spite and self-defence in his onslaught, and the whole country-side was in a stir. About this time too, John Balfour, of Corhouse, took on himself the office of witch-finder and pricker by thrusting “preens” into the marks; but he was not accepted quite blindly, and measures were taken for examining his pretensions to this special branch of knowledge. In general the pricker was the master of the situation, and brought all the rest to his feet.
BESSIE SKEBISTER.[34]
All the honest men of the isle knew Bessie Skebister. She was the shrewdest witch in the whole country, and it was a usual thing with them when they thought their boats in danger to send to her to know the truth; and, “Giff Bessie say it is weill, it is weill” was a common proverb in the Orkney Islands. She did other things besides foreknowing the fall of storms, for she took James Sandieson when in a strange distemper and tormented him greatly. “In his sleip, and oftymes waking,” says the dittay, “he was tormented with yow, Bessie, and vther two with yow, quhom he knew not, cairying him to the sea, and to the fyre, to Norroway, Yetland, and to the south—that ye had ridden all this wayes, with ane brydle in his mouth.” Moreover, Bessie was a “dreamer of dreams,” as well as a rider of sick men’s souls; so she was strangled and burnt.
THE TRIAL OF SPIRITS.[35]
The trial of Katherine Craigie (1640), had a certain dash of poetry and romance in it, not often found in these woeful stories. Friend Robbie—now friend, now foe—lay a-dying, and Katherine must needs go see him with the rest. The wild waves were beating round that rugged Orkney Isle, when Katherine went over the heather to Robbie’s house. “What now, Robbie! ye are going to die!” she said. “I grant that I prayed ill for yow, and now I see that prayer hath taken effect. Jonet,” quoth she, turning to the wife, “if I durst trust in yow, I sould knaw quhat lyeth on your guidman and holdis him downe. I sould tell whether it was ane hill spirit, ane kirk spirit, or ane water spirit that so troubles him.” Jonet was too anxious not to promise secrecy or help, or anything else that Katherine wished; so the next morning, before daylight, Katherine brought three stones to Robbie’s house, and put them into the fire, where they remained until after sunset. While the night was passing, they were taken from the fire, and put under the threshold of the door, then, in the early morning, thrown, one after the other, into a pail of water, where Jonet heard one of them “chirle and chirme.” Upon which Katherine said that it was a kirk spirit that troubled the guidman Robbie, and he must be washed with the water in which the stones had “chirled and chirmed.” This ceremony was repeated thrice, and at the third time Katherine herself washed Robbie, on whom this unusual cleansing had most powerful and beneficial effects. When one thinks of the normal state of filth in which these honest people lived, it is not surprising if any form of ablution proved of a most supernatural benefit. But Katherine Craigie got into the trouble from which there was no escape; and friend Robbie went back to his dirt, persuaded of the Satanic agency of a bath.
Quite as full of poetic feeling was James Knarstoun’s manner of charming with stones, when he took one stone for the ebb, another for the hill, and the third for the kirkyard, listening carefully as to what stone should make the “bullering” noise that would betray the tormenting spirit, and enable the magician to send him home again: a process through which Katherine Carey went (1617) when she found that her patient was troubled with the spirit of the sea, which would not let him bide in peace and quiet. Such touches as these redeem the subject from the sad monotony of sorrow and death which else pervades it from end to end, and lift it from the domain of the devil into the brighter and lovelier world of the Spirits of Nature.