INTRODUCTION

The documents transcribed below comprise the pre-trial interrogations and trial records of four women and one man from the presbytery of Dalkeith, to the south and east of Edinburgh. This area suffered from severe witch-hunts in 1649–50 and in 1661–2. These five witches all received death sentences on the same day, 29 July 1661. They were Janet Daill in the parish of Inveresk, and David Johnstone, Agnes Loch, Janet Lyle and Margaret Ramage, all in the parish of Newton. Early interrogations were carried out at Woolmet and Edmonstone in Newton parish, but after a while the suspects were imprisoned in the tolbooth of Musselburgh, where they were all eventually tried together.

The judges included not only the veteran Alexander Colville, but also George Mackenzie, beginning a legal career that would lead him in 1678 to the post of lord advocate and a role in discouraging witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland. Mackenzie may well have learned his scepticism about harsh legal procedures from these trials. In the witchcraft chapter of his book Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal (1678), Mackenzie wrote of having interviewed a condemned witch who told him that she had confessed, not because she was guilty, but because the prosecution had destroyed her reputation and livelihood, so that she wished to be out of the world. Anna Cordey, who has conducted a detailed study of the Dalkeith prosecutions, has argued that this woman was Janet Daill.

The five accused witches in this group formed only a small part of the panic as a whole.