Witches at Stob Stanes?

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has recently issued a ‘posthumous apology to the thousands of people persecuted as witches in Scotland, underlining that the deep misogyny that motivated this “colossal” injustice is something women today still have to live with’. See The Guardian website HERE.
 
One of the pieces of evidence that is used is the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft -‘a comprehensive database of known prosecutions, between the first execution in 1479 and the last in 1727, [during which] at least 2,500 people were killed’. The Survey can be accessed HERE.
 
A portion of the map which was produced to display the Survey’s findings is shown above. As can be seen it indicates that there is evidence of two witches near Yetholm and four at Linton. The two witches said to live near Yetholm are said to be resident at Stob Stanes, which seems rather unlikely, given that the site is so exposed and there is no evidence of habitation up there. In fact, the map is unreliable – and demonstrably wrong as far as some of the named people are concerned.
 
The two women who are said to be from Stob Stanes are Katherine Lawder and someone described as the ‘wife of Wilson’. The notes for the latter acknowledge that the person is ‘probably from somewhere in the Lothians’. Katherine Lawder’s case is discussed in Catherine Roberston’s MSc. thesis Panic and Persecution: Witchhunting in East Lothian, 1628-31, available online HERE. This confirms the fact that Katherine came from near Haddington (as the notes that actually accompany the map acknowledge).

‘Stobstane’, in both these cases, must be the place of that name near Coulston, on the outskirts of Haddington. That this is probable is shown by a transcription of some of the documentation relating to the mysterious ‘wife of Wilson’ which is available online HERE (page 51):

The Stobstane near Haddington is no longer extant, but that such a farmtoun once existed can be seen on Roy’s military map of the 1750s, which shows it slightly to the east of the town, spelled ‘Stabstane’ (and near to ‘Monkcraig’, the ‘Monkrig’ mentioned in the trial documentation):

'Stabstane' can be seen on the right of the map.

It seems clear, then, that neither Katherine Lauder or ‘Wilson’s Wife’ lived anywhere near the Stob Stanes on Yetholm Common! There is, admittedly, a ‘Witchcleugh Burn’ below Yetholm's Stob Stanes, but the origin of this name is unknown. It first appears in the mid-1850’s Ordnance maps and does not occur in earlier charters. If it is evidence of witches in the Yetholm area then they are nameless.
 
The evidence provided by the Survey of Scottish Witches map for witches at Linton near Yetholm is similarly unreliable. Three of the witches there – Christian Thomesone, James Doddes and Jeane Abbot – are clearly said in the website notes to be from the parish of Linton in the Presbytery of Peebles. The Linton in this case must, then, be the town now known as West Linton, fifty miles or so from Linton in Roxburghshire. There is less information about a fourth witch, Janet Hogg, and the website notes comment ‘This could be West Linton (Peebles) or Linton in Teviotdale (Kelso), but Prestonhaugh (Prestonkirk) is in Dunbar presbytery. I cannot make a definite decision about the parish/presbytery or county.’

The scholarship behind the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft map would seem to be – at least in these cases – somewhat sloppy. Unfortunately the campaign to pardon early-modern individuals accused of casting spells has generated a lot of publicity and some of the claims on which it is based have leaked out into wider circulation. Alasdair Allan, for example, MSP for the Western Isles (but whose family are from Yetholm), refers to the existence of witches at Stob Stanes in his recent book Tweed rins tae the Ocean (2021), an account of his trek along the Border line.
 
That there were witch crazes in the 16th and 17th centuries may be the case, but might it be said that we are in the midst of a witch craze today – only now with the aim of finding and ‘forgiving’ as many witches as possible? The current campaign to pardon people accused of witchcraft in the past seems driven by contemporary obsessions, at the expense of attempting to see the world through the eyes of those who were actually involved at the time. In an earlier YHS blog we looked at several cases where individuals in Yetholm were rebuked by the Session of cursing others in the devil’s name – HERE. As discussed in that blog post, it is important to recognise that such cursing was viewed as a real and very dangerous thing to do; the devil was not a symbol, or metaphor, but a malign force that could wreak havoc in society.
 
It is also possible that some (many?) of the individuals accused of witchcraft in the past were not innocent victims, but truly sought to hurt and kill others. Clearly in some (many?) trials it was the accusers who were malign (or deranged), but in many cases we simply have the accused’s name with no details of the evidence. Did none of them ever cast spells? We might not believe in the efficacy of such things, but people then did.

The Stob Stanes