The North Berwick witch trials were the trials in 1590 of a number of people from East Lothian, Scotland, accused of witchcraft in the St Andrew's Auld Kirk in North Berwick on Halloween night. They ran for two years, and implicated over 70 people. These included Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell,[1] on charges of high treason.
The "witches" allegedly held their covens on the Auld Kirk Green, part of the modern-day North Berwick Harbour area. Confessions were extracted by torture in the Old Tolbooth, Edinburgh. One source for these events is a 1591 pamphlet Newes from Scotland. King James VI wrote a dissertation on witchcraft and necromancy titled Daemonologie in 1597.
The North Berwick trials were among the better known of the large number of witch trials in early modern Scotland between the early sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century.
- ^ Maurice Lee, John Maitland of Thirlestane (Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 229.