Four Notorious Crimes of Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland

By Allan Kennedy

In my recent book, Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland, I use the records of Scotland’s central criminal court, the Justiciary Court, to reconstruct patterns of deviance, and responses to it, in the period 1660-1700. As a result, the book deals with a huge number of sensational and notorious crimes. Here are four of the most noteworthy. Between them, they illustrate the range of serious offences that Scottish judges and juries had to deal with in the course of the early modern period.

Black and white line drawing showing a chaotic scene with several horses, riders and a carriage on grass. The riders are fighting with each other, some holding guns or swords. — Adapted from The Manner of the Barbarous Murder of the Late James, Arch-Bishop of St Andrews
Edinburgh, 1679

1. Patrick Roy MacGregor

The seventeenth century was the ‘golden age’ of Highland banditry, and one of the most infamous of these brigands was Patrick Roy MacGregor, the leader of a gang that terrorised the eastern Highlands throughout the early 1660s. At the height of his power he was said to control an enormous swathe of territory from Moray through Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire to Angus.

MacGregor came unstuck when, as the culmination of a bitter feud, he kidnapped and murdered a local grandee, John Lyon of Muiresk. His gang then launched a full-scale assault on the town of Keith with a view to extorting blackmail money. The attack was repulsed, and MacGregor was captured, taken to Edinburgh, convicted of murder and robbery, and executed in 1667 – but not before being subjected to two rounds of judicial torture to get him to name any secret accomplices who might have sponsored his criminal rampage.

2. Thomas and Jean Weir

Major Thomas Weir was a pillar of the Edinburgh establishment, a man of deep respectability and fierce Presbyterian piety. But in 1670, entering his eighth decade, he suddenly confessed to a horrifying double life. For a period of nearly 50 years, he had been maintaining an intermittent sexual relationship with his sister, Jean Weir, while also regularly committing bestiality with a wide range of animals.

When Jean – a schoolteacher – was apprehended on the strength of her brother’s testimony, she confirmed his story, and confessed that she herself was also a long-term dabbler in witchcraft. Although Jean’s story made it clear that she was the victim of sustained grooming and abuse from her much older brother, this made no difference to her fate: along with Thomas, she was sentenced to death. But she did not go quietly. As she mounted the scaffold, she scuffled with the hangman and angrily denounced the watching crowd as hypocrites. Thomas, by contrast, appears to have had something of a breakdown, and was described as more or less insensible as he went to his death.

3. The Culross Witches

Witch-hunting in Scotland was concentrated in the period 1590-1662, and the number of prosecutions fell sharply throughout the later seventeenth century. But witch-hunting did not stop entirely, and a notable late spasm concerned the small town of Culross on the southern Fife coast.

Kathrin Sands, Isobell Inglis, Agnes Hendrie, and Jannet Hendrie were tried as a group in 1675 on charges of having entered into a covenant to become servants of the Devil. The women all described copulating with Satan and receiving his mark as a means of sealing their pact. They also related how they had repeatedly attended nocturnal meetings – sabbats – during which they had collectively communed with their new master and engaged in wild drinking and dancing. They also admitted to physically assaulting a local man on the beach. One thing they did not mention in their confessions, though, was using magic. Instead, it was the relationship with Satan that took centre stage, a neat reflection of wider trends in Scottish witch-belief at this time. All four women were convicted and sentenced to strangulation and burning.

4. Thomas Aikenhead

The trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead must surely stand as one of the most shocking moments in Scottish judicial history. A young student at Edinburgh University, Aikenhead was repeatedly overheard – usually while in his cups – making a range of blasphemous statements, including denying the Trinity and calling Jesus a conjurer of cheap magic tricks. Such assertions would normally have been enough to earn a slap on the wrist, or perhaps a diet symbolic penance before the local kirk session. But it was Aikenhead’s misfortune to utter these phrases just as Church and State were being gripped by paranoid anxiety over the supposed growth of ‘atheism’. In this context, the authorities chose to come down hard. Aikenhead was arrested, tried, and found guilty of blasphemy at the end of 1696.

The sentence was death, and the young man was hanged in new year – the last person in Britain executed for blasphemy. Even at the time, the relative triviality of Aikenhead’s offences, next to the severity of his punishment, raised many an eyebrow, and the case has since become emblematic – perhaps not altogether fairly given its extreme atypicality – of the brutality of the Scottish judicial system in the pre-modern age.

Featured image credit: Adapted from The Manner of the Barbarous Murder of the Late James, Arch-Bishop of St Andrews (Edinburgh, 1679). Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Scotland (shelfmark S.302.b.2(035)).

About the Book

Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland is the most comprehensive study available into serious criminality in Scotland before 1700. Through in-depth analysis of the records of the Justiciary Court, it assesses patterns of prosecution, the causes of crime, the performance of criminality, and wider response to illegal behaviour, all with a view to reconstructing the social meaning of crime.

Find out more about Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland