INTRODUCTION

The presbytery of Stirling compiled dossiers of evidence against three accused witches early in 1633: Janet Taylor from the parish of Alloa, Marion Mathie from the burgh of Stirling, and Helen Keir from the parish of Clackmannan. All three places were within a few miles of each other. Taylor and Keir lived in Clackmannanshire rather than Stirlingshire, but the presbytery's jurisdiction crossed the county boundary. As we shall see, all three were investigated and tried in Stirling itself. The investigation provides an example of how a presbytery approached community witches and magical practitioners.

Janet Taylor's dossier is the longest, and she also appears again in the dossiers of Mathie and Keir. She was a magical practitioner, or ‘charmer’, with a wide repertoire of healing practices. Some of her rituals were everyday ones, using nail parings, the client's clothes, or south-running water, but she ranged more widely, and her interrogators took an interest in several details. She recited a verbal charm mentioning a hedgehog, which they wrote down in full. She had a healing stone that she had brought from the Highlands long ago. She named the person who had taught her healing, John Dow Buchanan, who may well have been a Highlander; he had a partly Gaelic name (‘Dow’, or dubh, meant ‘black’), and there were Buchanans in the south-western Highlands. Her interrogators questioned her as to how her rituals worked; she explained that she had a special ‘charge’ to heal. She seems to have had a good reputation, having by her own account practised for thirty years.

The interrogators seem to have been willing to accept some evidence of Taylor's healing without trying to reinterpret it as overtly harmful or demonic.