ABSTRACT
Between 1661 and 1662, nearly seven hundred men and women were accused of witchcraft during one of the largest and most intense witchhunts in Scottish history.1 At the time, witchcraft was considered not only a criminal offence punishable by death, but also an egregious sin in the eyes of both God and the community. One of the witches accused during the summer of 1661 was Bessie Wilson, a woman from a town just outside of Edinburgh. In her confession before the Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, she reported that the Devil had ‘appeared to her clothed in black lyk a gentleman coming from Mortoun [an area south-east of Edinburgh] homeward … and asked quhar [where] she was going’.2 Wilson told him that ‘she was going home’, to which the Devil replied, ‘thee art a poor pudled [confused, bewildered] body, will thee be my servant, and I will give the abundance, and thee sall never want’. She acquiesced, and six weeks later, Satan came to her at night when she was sleeping. The Devil ‘lay with her and he bad her put one hand to her head, another to the foot, and give him all betwix with the renouncing of her baptisme, which she did’.3 At the end of her confession, Wilson named two other women she had seen at a hillside meeting with Satan.
