INTRODUCTION

The text edited below is the financial accounts for the trial and execution of a small group of witches in the town of Peebles in 1629. Expenses are listed for various officials in the local court, for the cost of obtaining a commission from the privy council, and for materials and labour costs for the pyre. The execution method may have been unusual. Other information enables us to identify the executed persons as Susanna Elphinstone, John Graham and (probably) Margaret Johnstone.

Serial witch-hunting in Peebles seems to have begun in October 1628, a time when panic over witchcraft was gathering pace in numerous Scottish localities. On the 21st, Marion Greig was suspected of witchcraft by the presbytery of Peebles. John Syd, minister of Newlands, and David Plenderleith, burgess of Peebles, stood surety for her that she would appear when summoned. This investigation evidently turned up the names of further suspects, since on 3 February 1629 the privy council issued a commission of justiciary to James Williamson, provost of Peebles, Alexander Muir and Patrick Thomson, bailies of Peebles, and four named lairds, to try Marion Greig, Isobel Rutherford alias Graham, and Katherine Young, for witchcraft. No record survives of their trial, but they may well have been tried and executed. The accounts edited below show that Isobel Graham, as she was then known, made a ‘confessioun aganes the rest of the wiches’ that was used in the later prosecutions.

The presbytery of Peebles then seems to have stepped up its involvement. In June 1629, we learn from the privy council records that the presbytery gave in a list of twenty-seven named people from at least six different parishes who were ‘vehementlie suspect’ for witchcraft. The presbytery seems to have conducted an extensive trawl for suspects.