CHAPTER LX.

Edinburgh and Leith Witches--Black Catalogue--Witches Burned and Drowned--James VI. and the Witches--Complaint to the Scottish Privy Council of Barbarous Conduct--Relics of Superstition--Images found at Arthur Seat--Witch-finders in Edinburgh and Leith--Royal Commission to Magistrates and Ministers to search for and put Witches to Death--Wife of a Judge in Edinburgh meeting a Witch's Fate--Repeal of the Laws against Witchcraft--Opposition to Acts being Repealed--Judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland against a Change of the Law--Witches in Edinburgh and Leith in the Sixteenth Century--James Reid--Agnes Finnie, the Potter-row Witch--Alexander Hamilton, the Warlock--The Devil and Hamilton burning a Provost's Mill--Janet Barker curing a Bewitched Man--Margaret Hutchison, a habit-and-repute Witch--Young Laird of Duddingston--Major Weir and his Magical Staff--A Magical Distaff--Agnes Williamson, a Haddingtonshire Witch--Elizabeth Bathgate of Eyemouth--Isabella Young of Eastbarns burned at the Castlehill.

Against Edinburgh and Leith stands a black catalogue of judicial murders of supposed witches and warlocks. At the Cross, Gallow Lee, between Edinburgh and Leith, and on the sands of the latter town, unknown numbers of unhappy creatures, male and female, were executed in a most barbarous manner, for the imaginary crime of witchcraft. Nearly all the victims were first tortured to make them confess, and afterwards some of them were worried, and then burned; others were hanged at the Cross, Gallow Lee; and not a few supposed witches were fastened to a stake on South Leith sands, and allowed to remain there until the tide terminated their miseries.

Of James VI., and the witches who persecuted him, we have treated in