being of quite common occurrence in the notes of expenses still on record.
It is to this second or later period of persecution that the record of witch charge and punishment in the south-west of Scotland really belongs, and from 1656 the records of the civil and ecclesiastical courts teem with accounts of searching enquiry and trial. It must further be remembered that over and above the regularly constituted enquiries of State and Church a great number of Commissions were granted by the Privy Council to gentlemen in every county, and almost in every parish, to try persons accused of witchcraft, many of whom suffered the extreme penalty,[13] and of which no particulars can now be gleaned.
It is now our purpose to set forth as completely as possible such relative matter and extracts from existing documents as will describe the proceedings as they actually took place in the distinctive localities of the Dumfries and Galloway district, but it may perhaps be here fittingly noted, not without a certain sense of gratification, that this south-western district, though far from blameless, compares more than favourably with other districts in Scotland, both in fairness of judgment and rigour of punishment.
Proceedings in Galloway.
Presbytery of Kirkcudbright, April, 1662.—A person, named James Welsh, confessed himself guilty of the crime of witchcraft before the Presbytery of Kirkcudbright; but the justices refused to put him upon his trial, because he was a minor when he acknowledged his guilt, and had retracted his extra-judicial confession; but on the 17th of April, 1662, they ordered him to be scourged and put in the correction house, having so grossly “prevaricated and delated so many honest persons.”
Kirkcudbright, 1671.—At an Assize held in the burgh of Dumfries in 1671 eight or more females were charged with witchcraft; five of them were eventually sent for trial to Kirkcudbright.
Dalry Kirk-Session, 1696.—Elspeth M‘Ewen, an old woman living alone at a place called Bogha, near the farm of Cubbox, in Balmaclellan, was suspected by the country-side of various acts of “witching.” In particular, she was believed to have at her command a wooden pin that was movable and that could be withdrawn from the base of the rafters resting on the walls of the cottage, which particular part of the building was in these old days called the “kipple foot.”
With this pin Elspeth was supposed to have the supernatural power of drawing an exhaustive milk supply from her neighbour’s cows merely by placing it in contact with the udder, and this it was reported she practised freely. Other cantrips laid to her door included capricious interference with the laying power of her neighbour’s hens, causing them sometimes to fail altogether, at others to produce in amazing plenteousness.
At last complaint was made to the Session, and the beadle, by name M‘Lambroch, was sent away with the minister’s mare to bring her before the Session. On the journey there is a tradition that the mare in a panic of fright sweated great drops of blood at the rising hill near the Manse, since known as the “Bluidy Brae.”
After being examined she was sent to Kirkcudbright, where she lay in prison for about two years.