#witchfinders

Witchfinders by Tania Dreams [IFDB]

Middle ages left their footprints on the history of humankind: rich and poor, steel and wood, pest and wild celebrations mixed together in a one wild sauce. Technology was far from our days, but a true power existed: power, that can heal the weak and poison the strong...Witchcraft.

you said we must do god’s work, whatever the cost

i was just thinking like, in the witchfinders I’d have loved to see Willa being the one who was being ducked, instead of her grandma.

It would’ve had a bit more emotional weight and higher stakes for the Doctor and the companions rather than for the side character.

The Doctor only intervened after Willa started crying. But if it had been the girl chained up instead of the grandma, crying for help she wouldn’t have hesitated I reckon. The pain of that death would’ve been on the grandma, the Doctor, and the companions, if Willa had died instead of her grandma.

Then we’d have Mistress Savage having to confront a maternal figure about the death of a family member, and a very angry Doctor. Plus, creepy mud monster kids :)

Of course, there is an emotional weight to Willa’s grandma dying for everyone, but it didn’t hit me as hard. I’m assuming the grandma had accepted her death and she’d lived a life already. I didn’t feel connected to her character much at all or rather, I didn’t get a chance to.

Whereas, Willa was just starting out, and no parental figure wants to bury their child. They’d still have done their prayer thing, something that Willa’s grandma taught her and that would’ve hurt both the viewers and the character.

Genuinely one of my favourite episodes of all time though. Might rewrite it and condemn poor Willa to make the Doctor go feral—

Thoughts?

Scotlands' Witchfinders.

Down south they were generally known as Witchfinder General's, but were more well known here in Scotland as  Witch Prickers, for reasons that will become apparent.....

The most famous of our Witch-prickers was John Kincaid/Kinkaid, they were the stuff of horror films. A man in the tall hat and the dark cloak of a Puritan would come  to town to terrorise helpless women, the belief was that a witch could be identified by through the process of pricking their skin with a wide variety of whatever sharp object the witch-pricker chose to use, by all accounts they were your needle and thread like instruments, but could be several inches long and very sharp.  

Back in the 17th century this method was considered as safe in court as modern DNA evidence!

There isn't a lot of detail about Kinkaid so here is a much more interesting story.

A woman named Christian Caddell had watched one of Scotland's witch-prickers at work, and thought 'I could do that!' There was one problem: at this time the jobs were for men only.

This was an extraordinary job. But by dressing as a man, she got away with it, perhaps folk did not pry too closely into the affairs of witch-prickers for fear of being put to the test themselves.

The pricker tested for the devil's mark, a spot on the body where a pin could be slipped in without bleeding or pain.

This was seen as proof that the witch had contracted with the Devil, getting powers to harm her neighbours with her spells. The pricker stripped the victim naked and shaved them from top to toe. Then the pin was pushed in, again and again, until the right spot was found.

We all have spots on our body which are surprisingly insensitive, but there was a psychology to this. In a society which prized modesty, women were stripped naked in public and handled all over their bodies. This was humiliating sexual abuse. Many would confess just to make it stop.

So how did a woman end up in this "line of work" The recent civil wars had shaken the north east Scotland to the core.

Landowners were heavily indebted and quick to accuse their hard-pressed tenants of revenge with black magic.

When Christian - now John Dickson - turned up in March 1662 in Elgin, the law was only too pleased to see her. The Baillie of Spynie, John Innes, a local power-broker signed her up.

And what a contract it was - six shillings a day maintenance and £6 pound Scots per witch with the mark. At a time when the ordinary wages for a man were about a shilling a day, these were huge sums.

Christian was bought out for a year. There followed a reign of terror where she pricked witches as far north as Tain. One of her victims may have been the famous witch Isobel Gowdie, the woman whose confessions give us the notion of a 'coven'. Isobel was accused of cruelly killing the babies of her laird with fevers.

You may imagine the mother of those babies was very glad to see "John Dickson" witch-pricker and to hope her next baby might live, but then Christian went too far. In Tain she pricked the wrong person - a man called John Hay.

He was a court messenger, who had the prestige of a job which bore the royal coat of arms and a little legal knowledge too, unlike her earlier victims.

He successfully petitioned the government for her arrest but by this time Christian had skipped on to new patrons.

Now she was involved in a clan battle, where the Chisholms accused their Maclean tenants of sorcery. A whistleblower reached their chief - Maclean of Duart. Now he petitioned the government too. Christian's luck ran out.

She was imprisoned in the tolbooth of Edinburgh, and at last her sex was discovered. She now claimed she wasn't discovering witches by pricking at all, she was telling by looking in their eyes. However Christian escaped the fate of her victims, it seems pretending to be a man and torturing women wasn't as bad a crime as being found to be a witch.

She was sentenced to transportation to the fever-ridden plantations of Barbados, where she could expect a short hard life even if she survived the voyage. Here Christian vanishes from history.

She was transported on 4 May 1663, the day her last victims were burned in Forres. She had helped claim at least six and perhaps even as many as 10 innocent lives.

Scotland's last witch trial was in Dornoch in 1727, when the unfortunate Janet Horne, an old lady probably suffering dementia, was burned alive after being tarred and feathered. She made one final mistake which ensured her condemnation; being asked to recite The Lord's Prayer (in Gaelic) she said, 'My Father which wurt in Heaven' – clear proof her father was the Devil.

The link below is results of a Edinburgh University project which geo-locates victims of Scottish 'witch-prickers' in the 16th and 17th century.

Edinburgh University project geo-locates victims of Scottish 'witch-prickers' in the 16th and 17th century.