INTRODUCTION

John Kincaid was not a witch but the most active of the witch-prickers in Scotland. This document shows him explaining his practices to a sceptical justice depute.

Kincaid was originally from Tranent in East Lothian. His activities in pricking witchcraft suspects to detect the Devil's mark are recorded from 1649 until 1662. On 31 March 1662 he was imprisoned in the tolbooth of Edinburgh on suspicion of malpractice. The document edited below records the answers he gave to a justice depute who interrogated him four days later. Kincaid remained in prison until June, when he petitioned the privy council for liberation on the grounds that he was old and ill. He was freed on 13 June on finding caution to carry out no further pricking without warrant. This seems to be the last that we hear of him.

The Devil's mark in Scotland was usually assumed to be an insensitive spot on the witch's body that the Devil had nipped as part of the process of formalising the demonic pact. Prickers seem to have had some knowledge of where in the body a pin could be inserted without causing unbearable pain or injury. It has occasionally been suggested (notably by Sir Walter Scott in 1830) that prickers might have used a deceptive retractable bodkin rather than a pin, but there seems to be no contemporary evidence for any use of a bodkin with a handle. Kincaid certainly used an ordinary pin, since a drawing of a pin that he used was included in a manuscript of 1657. It is just under 5cm long; some descriptions of longer pins may have been exaggerated. Formally witch-pricking was not ‘torture’, but the two were sometimes conflated by contemporary sceptics. Kincaid's own bond of caution promised that he would carry out no pricking or torturing.