North Berwick Witch Trials: The Night the Devil Danced in Scotland

In the autumn of 1590, a group of people gathered in the old kirkyard of North Berwick on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth and danced. They danced around the church in the direction that the tradition of the time understood as the direction of evil, widdershins, against the sun, and they did other things besides, things that the subsequent legal proceedings documented in extraordinary detail. They kissed the Devil’s anatomy. They handled wax images. They took body parts from the graves around them. They discussed the best method of killing the King of Scotland.

The North Berwick witch trials of 1590 to 1591 are the most politically significant witch trials in Scottish history. They are also, by a considerable margin, the strangest. They produced some of the most detailed confessions in the entire Scottish record. They directly involved King James VI, who interrogated the accused personally and who became so convinced of the reality of what he had uncovered that he eventually wrote a book about it. And they began, as so many extraordinary events do, with something remarkably mundane.

A servant girl called Geillis Duncan had developed a reputation for healing, and her employer decided to find out how she was doing it.

The Beginning: Geillis Duncan

Geillis Duncan was a young servant in the household of David Seton, a deputy bailie in Tranent in East Lothian. She had acquired a local reputation for treating the sick with unusual effectiveness, and Seton, suspicious of how an ordinary servant girl had come by such abilities, had her tortured. Her fingers were crushed with a device called a pilliwinks. She was subjected to the witch’s bridle, an iron instrument fitted over the head. She was searched for the Devil’s mark, an insensible spot on the skin believed to indicate a pact with Satan.

Under this treatment Geillis Duncan confessed to witchcraft and, crucially, named accomplices. The names she provided began a chain of arrests that eventually drew in dozens of people from across East Lothian and Edinburgh, and the investigation that followed produced a body of confessional material that shocked the court, the king, and eventually all of Europe when the accounts were published.

Among the names Geillis Duncan provided was that of Agnes Sampson, an elderly woman from Haddington who was described as a wise woman and healer, and John Fian, a schoolmaster from Saltpans who became one of the most notorious figures in the entire trials. These two, along with Duncan herself and a number of others, formed the core of what the prosecution constructed as a conspiracy of extraordinary ambition.

They had, the confessions said, attempted to murder the King.

Agnes Sampson and the Conspiracy Against the King

Agnes Sampson was not the kind of person who typically appeared in witch trial records. She was elderly, respected in her community, known as a healer and a wise woman with a long local reputation for helping the sick. Her arrest and subsequent confession represents one of the more dramatic reversals in the Scottish trials, a person of standing and good repute confessing to things that should have been impossible and doing so in terms specific enough to be taken seriously.

Sampson was brought before James VI himself after her initial examination, and the king was reportedly sceptical that an elderly woman from Haddington could be behind the conspiracy described in the confessions. She was tortured, her head bound with a cord in the manner called the witch’s bridle, her hair shaved, the Devil’s mark found on her throat.

What she told James in private, when he dismissed his attendants to speak with her alone, reportedly changed his scepticism entirely. She repeated to him, word for word, the private conversation he had held with his new wife Anne of Denmark on their wedding night in Oslo. This was information she could not, by any ordinary means, have possessed.

James was convinced. He threw himself into the investigation with a personal intensity that shaped its entire subsequent course.

The conspiracy Sampson described centred on the attempt to kill James during his sea voyage bringing his new queen from Denmark to Scotland. A coven of witches, working under the direction of the Devil himself, had raised storms at sea through ritual means, using the body parts of corpses and wax images and a cat that had been christened in mockery and loaded with the severed joints of a dead man before being thrown into the sea. The storms had not killed James, though they had been severe enough to delay and threaten the voyage. The coven had then been directed to try other methods.

The Devil at North Berwick

The sabbath at North Berwick kirkyard was the central event in the confessions of multiple accused, and the descriptions of it are among the most vivid and specific in the entire record of Scottish witch trials.

The gathering was large. Different confessions give different numbers but the accounts consistently describe a substantial group, over a hundred people in some versions, dancing and feasting and conducting the rituals described in the formal charges. The music was provided partly by Geillis Duncan, who was said to have played the Jew’s harp while the company danced. The dancing was widdershins, the wrong direction, a deliberate inversion of the correct order.

The Devil himself presided, appearing as a man dressed in black, his face dark, his voice harsh and commanding. He stood at the pulpit of the old kirk and preached to the assembled witches in a parody of the church service that was calculated to outrage the deeply Presbyterian sensibility of the court that subsequently heard it described. The witches kissed him in homage at the conclusion of his sermon.

The specific location, the old kirkyard at North Berwick, was real and identifiable. The church it referenced was real. The detail that grounded the confessions in a specific, visitable, verifiable place gave them a quality of physical plausibility that more vaguely located accounts lacked. James could go to North Berwick and stand in the kirkyard and know that he was standing where the sabbath had been held, where the conspiracy against his life had been planned.

He did not go, but he knew where it was. That knowledge was itself significant.

John Fian: The Schoolmaster Who Would Not Stay Broken

Of all the accused in the North Berwick trials, John Fian is the one whose story carries the most sustained and disturbing quality. He was a schoolmaster, educated, not the kind of person the stereotype of the witch accommodated easily, and his conduct during the trial produced a sequence of events that the contemporary account struggles to make coherent.

Fian confessed under torture to being the Devil’s secretary, to presiding over the North Berwick gatherings in a senior capacity, to various specific acts of malefice. He was examined before the king. Then, while in custody, he managed to get hold of the key to his cell, escape, and flee. He was recaptured.

On his recapture he recanted everything. He had confessed under torture to things that were not true, he said, and he would not confess again regardless of what was done to him. What was done to him was severe. His fingernails were pulled out. Needles were pushed into the exposed flesh. His legs were crushed in the boot, a compression device that could shatter bone. He did not reconfess.

He was executed anyway, strangled and burned, maintaining his recantation to the end.

The Fian episode sits uneasily in the trial record and has attracted significant scholarly attention. A man who confessed under torture, recanted on recapture, and refused to reconfess despite escalating torture was a man making a specific and costly choice. What he knew about the truth of his original confession, and what that truth was, died with him on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh in January 1591.

The King’s Personal Involvement

James VI’s direct participation in the North Berwick trials was unusual by any standard and shaped the entire subsequent trajectory of the investigation, the executions, and James’s own intellectual development.

He was not merely a bystander who received reports. He attended examinations personally. He interrogated the accused himself, including Agnes Sampson. He questioned Geillis Duncan, who played the Jew’s harp tune from the North Berwick sabbath for him on the instrument itself, and by some accounts he recognised the tune. He directed the investigation’s attention toward specific individuals and specific questions.

His personal investment had a simple explanation beyond mere intellectual curiosity. The conspiracy described in the confessions had been aimed at him. The storms that had troubled his return voyage from Denmark had been raised by these people for the purpose of killing him. The wax images and the rituals and the sabbath at North Berwick had all been directed toward his death. He was not examining an abstract theological problem. He was examining the people who had tried to murder him.

This personal stake gave the investigation an intensity and a focus that it might otherwise have lacked, and it also shaped the specific questions asked and the specific confessions extracted. The accused were being interrogated by a man who needed to believe in the reality of what they described, because the alternative was that the storms at sea had simply been storms and the private conversation Agnes Sampson had repeated to him had some ordinary explanation he could not immediately account for.

James needed the conspiracy to be real. Whether this need distorted the investigation, and how much, is a question that the evidence does not resolve cleanly.

The Earl of Bothwell: The Shadow Behind the Trials

The North Berwick trials did not occur in a political vacuum, and the political dimension of what happened is inseparable from the supernatural one.

Francis Stewart, the Earl of Bothwell, was James’s cousin, a powerful and ambitious nobleman with a documented interest in the occult and a fractious relationship with the king. He was named by several of the accused as the instigator of the conspiracy, the human authority behind the supernatural apparatus, the man who had engaged the witches to raise storms and harm the king on his behalf.

Bothwell was arrested, tried for treasonable conspiracy with witches, and escaped from Edinburgh Castle in 1591. He subsequently made several dramatic and audacious incursions into James’s own apartments, appearing in the king’s rooms at night in ways that suggested either supernatural assistance or an extraordinarily well-developed network of informants and corrupt palace officials. He remained a thorn in James’s side for years.

Whether Bothwell was genuinely involved in the conspiracy described at North Berwick, whether he had used the accused as instruments of a political plot, or whether his name had been produced by terrified people under torture looking for something that would satisfy their interrogators, is a question that historians have argued without resolution. The evidence connecting him to the actual events at North Berwick is entirely the product of confessions obtained under torture, which is not a reliable evidential basis.

What is clear is that the North Berwick trials served James’s political interests by providing a supernatural framework for what might otherwise have needed to be addressed as straightforward noble conspiracy, and that the person most damaged by that framework, other than the executed accused, was Bothwell.

Daemonologie: The King Who Wrote the Book on Witches

The North Berwick trials had a consequence that extended far beyond Scotland and far beyond 1591. James VI, who had entered the investigation as a somewhat sceptical observer and left it as a convinced believer in the reality of witchcraft and the urgency of prosecuting it, wrote a book.

Daemonologie, published in 1597, was a serious theological and philosophical treatise on the nature of witchcraft and the obligation of Christian rulers to pursue and punish it. It was not a popular work in the sense of being aimed at a general audience. It was a scholarly argument, made by a king who had personal experience of what he was describing, intended to answer those who were sceptical of the reality of witchcraft and to provide a theoretical framework for its prosecution.

When James became James I of England in 1603, he brought Daemonologie with him, and it was reprinted for an English audience. Its influence on the subsequent history of witch prosecution in England and on the cultural understanding of witchcraft in the English-speaking world was substantial. Shakespeare, writing Macbeth for the court of James I, drew on the king’s own work and on the North Berwick material in constructing his witches and their storm-raising abilities.

The three women on the heath with their cauldron and their prophecies are, among other things, a reflection of what James VI had heard described in the examination rooms of Edinburgh in the winter of 1590 and 1591.

What Actually Happened at North Berwick

The honest answer is that nobody now knows with certainty what happened at North Berwick kirkyard or whether anything happened there at all.

The confessions are detailed and internally consistent in ways that suggest either genuine shared experience or a shared template, a set of expected elements that tortured people learned to reproduce because reproduction was the only route to ending the torture. The specific details, the widdershins dancing, the black-clad Devil at the pulpit, the kissing in homage, the wax images, the use of corpse parts, are consistent with what the interrogators of the period expected a witch sabbath to look like, which raises the question of whether the confessions reflect what actually happened or what the accused understood they were required to say.

Agnes Sampson’s private revelation to James is the detail that resists the simplest sceptical explanation most stubbornly. If she genuinely told him what was said on his wedding night, she had access to information she could not normally have obtained. The explanations for how she might have obtained it by ordinary means are possible but not entirely satisfying.

The people who were executed were real. Geillis Duncan, Agnes Sampson, John Fian, and a number of others died for what was described in these confessions. Whether they died for things they had done, for things they had said under torture that bore no relationship to things they had done, or for something in between, is a question that the record cannot now resolve.

The Kirkyard Today

The old church at North Berwick still stands, roofless now but still present on the edge of the town that has grown considerably since the night the witches were said to have danced in its kirkyard. The town is a pleasant East Lothian seaside resort, well-kept and prosperous and not obviously haunted by anything.

But the kirkyard is there. The ground where the dancing was described has not moved. The same earth that was identified in the confessions of 1590 as the site of a sabbath, a conspiracy against a king, a gathering of the damned under the instruction of the Devil himself, is still there between the town and the sea.

Whether anything happened in that kirkyard on the night the confessions described is unknowable now. What is beyond question is that the belief that it did happen changed the course of Scottish legal history, shaped the intellectual development of a king who became the king of two countries, influenced the most celebrated playwright in the English language, and sent a number of people to their deaths.

The night they said the Devil danced in North Berwick turned out to matter a great deal.

It still does.