Witch in the 1500s

Ever wondered what it took to be named a witch back in the 1500s? We've been looking at a nice big database of Scottish witch court cases to answer just this. It covers the time period from the early 1500s to the mid 1700s. With over 3,000 witch related cases to explore we found the best way to deal with such a large dataset was to look for patterns in it. To do this we scraped the most relevant parts of the database and put all the data on the names of those accused, date of court case, case characteristics and notes in one spreadsheet. Unfortunately the database is under a restrictive copyright licence from Edinburgh University, but there is no restriction on exploring the data and sharing what we find. The first thing we found was a range of interesting cases, from women accused of trying to sink ships with a monarch aboard, the most famous of these was the North Berwick witch hunt. There many women were tried for the crime of attempting to sink a ship with Queen Anne on board and then "troubling King James after he went to get her in Denmark". It was also quite common for women to be accused of possessing children. We also found men convicted for associating with accused witches. Studying the database we found 387 out of the 3,212 cases involved male suspects. The team made some graphs of the martial status of people involved in the witchcraft court cases. Their graph shows that the majority of people involved in the cases were married. With the help of Chris Blower from Scraperwiki we were able to identify the top categories of accusations for the witch court cases and display the results in this pie chart: You can see that the most common reason for a court case is being implicated by another women convicted as, or suspected to be, a witch. This explains some of the way that witch court cases spread throughout close-knit villages and towns where groups of friends might be considered as a group of plotting witches. Scary stuff. Let us know what you think of the data in the comments below. Thank you to the work of Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman for putting together 'The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft'.