It started in May when Mr. Alexander Colville arrived in the town.  He had, he said, a commission to burn witches. In Musselburgh.  Since then, he has travelled here once a week, from his home in Edinburgh.  The Baillie, John Prestoune, sits with the Justice Depute for the trials. The prosecutor is Robert Dalgliesh

The first to be accused were Rab Crafford and Bessie Doughtie of Fisherrow. 

The Baillie took them to the tolbooth for ‘examination’.  The Baillie and the minister were hard on both of them. 

There was a coven, of course.  Kate Cruikshank, Jonet Douglas, Bessie Fowler, Agnes Patersoune. All from Fisherrow like Rab and Bessie. They were discovered, tortured, pricked by John Scobie. Someone named Helen Conker from Inveresk was also discovered.

Now the burgesses have another batch to Satan’s servants in their custody. Jonet Daill, Agnes Loch, Jonet Lyle and Magret Ramage.  Which brings the number to eleven in all; one man and ten women.  The Good Lord be praised for the Kirk’s diligence!

Since the rightful King was restored to his throne, the satanic plots which festered through the years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, are being uncovered. Laws and practices that Marjorie has lived by since she was a child are being abolished.  There is rumour of a Royal amnesty but amnesty is not amnesia and scores remain to be settled.

Marjorie Cossar is a grass-widow at thirty-nine.

After he cut the head from the old King outside his London Palace, the Tormentor Cromwell marched North.  Once again, her husband, Rab, mustered to Leslie’s standard.  The Covenanter army stripped the Lothians of provision, starving Cromwell’s men back to the Port of Dunbar.  Believing them weak, Rab and his comrades marched out to meet them. 

That very night, she heard cannonades in the distance.  Then armoured men on horseback hacked down her neighbours in the streets and parks of the town.  Friend and foe slithered in the mud and the torrential rain.

Next morning, the joined the line of women scanning the trail of desperate, dubby and deranged men as they fled in fright after the rout.  Rab was not among them.  She didn’t find him among the corpses on that rain-sodden field by Broxburn either. There were scores of mutilated strangers – a thorough education in what point and edge and musket ball can do to a human being – but no trace of Rab. 

After the battle, the English marched thousands of starving, thirsty prisoners across the border into England. They shot or stabbed by the wayside those who fell behind, leaving their bodies to the crows.  They say only two-thirds of them reached Durham and half of those died of the flux in the Cathedral there. Cromwell and his cronies sold the dregs into slavery to plantations and estates in Jamaica and their other colonies in the New World. 

Rab was thirty-one when he rode off.  He was a dour, coarse man.  Quick with his hands and never tender.  She wonders what God’s will might have been for him.  But the Lord is inscrutable, unknowable.  Perhaps Rab stands justified in faith by the Lord our Saviour’s side.

Or maybe not.

At the old brig across the Esk, the pathetic draggle of broken men has been replaced by a gaggle of condemned witches being herded from the tolbooth to The Bogle’s Hole.

Jonet Daill, the collier’s wife, is the bellwether of the scrawny flock. The five women look bruised and dishevelled in just their sarks. They shuffle towards the brig on mutilated feet, a testament to ten days of ‘examination’ in the tolbooth before yesterday’s trial began. Their flesh is bruised. Their bones are broken.  We all need feet. We all must walk but especially women who trade and trail the long track back and forth between Musselburgh and Edinburgh with fish or salt or produce in their creels.

She half-knows Jonet Daill.  She minds her flyting with the minister’s wastrel son from the far side of the Esk years before.   The fishwives were playing football on the links.  It was a Whitsunday tradition: the women against the maids. They tucked up their skirts, wore only their sarks. The two mobs pushed and shoved, back and forth, striving to drive the bladder in a bulls-cod towards the gates at either end of the playing field.  The unmarried women of Fisherrow – the maids – contested the married women for the ball.  Their shouts and squeals and grunts drifted across the river to where Marjory stood, on the Musselburgh side, watching the stramash. From there she could still pick out curses from the fog of noise.

These games went on for hours. The women of Fisherrow, and Musselburgh for that, are strong and confident.  Strapping.   Here the women keep their men.

Whitsunday is a a quarter-day and the hired men and servants had been haggling for their fee for the year to come, abandoning bad masters, moving on.  Marjorie let her deemie go that morning.  With the state of things, she saw no merit in replacing her.

The fishwives across the river had no need of a fee.  Self-employed, woman or maid, they carried creels of haddock and herring, five miles to Edinburgh four days a week.  Barefoot.  200lb of fish packed direct from the boats in the forenoon.  The fish is carried their in relays to reach the market fresh by dinnertime.

Many of the Musselburgh women ply a similar trade but with salt, sand, laundry and garden produce instead of fish. They leave the town at six a.m., returning by early afternoon with merchandise and dirty laundry.  These women bargain hard, are forthright and unashamed.  The Musselburgh men bide at home, weaving linen or making shoes for the market, minding the bairns that are not at school.

Marjorie’s father would have been appalled and impressed.  Women as merchants? In their way, they are, though they belong to no Guild known to man.

The women drove the bladder past the maids’ gate once more. A roar of triumph drifted across the estuary like musket-smoke. Marjorie rubbed the swelling under her left eye where Robert dinged her two days before.

Would he have struck her if she were one of those sturdy fishwives?  She would have dinged him back!

But Marjorie is not a fishwife or even a day trader.  She is a cossar’s wife. Before that she was a merchant’s daughter. 

Rab Cossar was a trader in the town before he marched off to Dunbar: “Cossar by name and cossar by trade,” he said (over and over).  He traded in salt from the works at Prestonpans.  When he could, he also traded produce from the town or bought in Edinburgh.  His salt was carried in the panniers of ponies, South and West.

But then again, as she watched the football match, was she now a soldier’s wife?

The whole congregation of the local kirk had signed the National Covenant the year before.  Soon after that, the Minister began to chivvy the congregation, exhorting parishioners to “shak their purses”.  Eight collectors were appointed in every shire to exact a (voluntary) contribution of one dollar for every thousand merks of free-rent. There was talk in the town of seizing the rents of non-Covenanters. 

Soon after that, Lord Hamilton, the King’s Commissioner travelled down to meet the Covenanters on Musselburgh links where the football game was now unravelling.  The Commissioner said they were all “possessed by the devil” but he had no steel in him. Then General Leslie returned from his service with the King of Sweden and raised an army.

Rab enlisted in a company of horse.  He was keen on his pistols, jack and burgonet.  He had never fired a shot in anger in his life.  The local foot drilled on the links with pikes and muskets in the Swedish manner.  There was talk of hot fighting in the North-East.  Scottish ships were confiscated and Scots imprisoned for no good reason South of the border.

Looking North towards the sea, the flat grey horizon is always pregnant with opportunity and turbulence.

The month before, an English fleet passed Musselburgh and entered the Firth of Forth and anchored off of Leith, its holds packed with thousands of English soldiers.  Their Admiral was that same Hamilton, the King’s High Commissioner. He bade the city magistrates read a proclamation by King Charles to the town.  The magistrates declined and suddenly it was real. 

The Lothian militias were summoned to defend the Capital, not their homes.  Rab went off to Leith, though what use cavalry was against a fleet she could not fathom. He and his comrades  fortified positions on the south bank of the Forth whilst their English adversaries languished on Inchcolm & Inchkieth.  A stand-off.  All this time, Rab was neither trading nor earning.  He was bored with the waiting and his horse still needed feeding.

A few days before he had returned unexpectedly, the second such occasion since he mobilised. He took his frustrations out on Marjory after he has satisfied his carnal appetites.  The pattern was tedious, the fuck and then the fight, one as rough as the other.

Then he was away again, having reassured himself that he was still a man. Marjorie minds an empty house; no bairns yet. An empty, undefended house in an undefended town.  Musselburgh was barely rebuilt since the English razed it after the Battle at Pinkie that left the nearby fields strewn with mutilated men.

There was gossip among the crowd at the football match that the English had moved soldiers across the border.  Everyone in the town knew that any English army marching towards Edinburgh would pass through Musselburgh and cross the old bridge. 

Across the Esk, the game ended. The women won. The skailing fishwives drifted North towards the old bridge, exuberant and fierce and raucous. Marjorie noticed a gang of young men gathered at the Musselburgh end of the bridge. 

“I see ye, harlot witch! Turd-tainted wicked hoor.”

From the South bank, one of the lassies, on the losing side, was being taunted by a well-dressed youth. It was Jonet Daill.

Marjory could not hear clearly what was being said. Frustrated by the fogginess of sound, she moved closer to the brig.

On the Northern shore, the crowd of women paused.  Jonet was a lean maid then, hair like straw, her sark dark with sweat from the game.  She stepped to the edge of the crowd,  glancing back to her teammates for support.

“…cuntwracked pisspot poltroon, wee shrivelt baas nae drappt.”

Marjorie was too far away from the South end of the bridge to hear all of the exchange.  Intrigued, she manouevred towards the altercation, one of several spectators content to replace the spectacle of the football match to the contest of the flyting.

“…Glamorous glaiket gype, fey fool. Dry-titted draggle stench of rank fish.”  The young man’s voice was almost as high pitched as the maid’s.

Aware of the audience behind and before her, the maid glanced at the ground then raised her voice.

“Corrupt carrion, this wanfukkit fornicator. Ay moonin in his gonerous mithers kitchen, pulling on his todger as her deemies darg.”

Marjory recognised the youth as Andro Blackhall, son of a landward minister.  The lad opened his mouth but before he said a word, the maid was on him.

“I hinna finished! Ignorant elf, ape, owl irregular, ye are bit skyre an skrumple, skolderit skyn, where real men hae a prick.”

Now it was Andro’s turn to look behind him for support but the women in the crowd far outnumbered the men on both sides of the Esk.  A moment brought him words.

“Light-fingered, lousy thief hoor. I’ve seen yer grisly piteous port; rank an reekin, plooky pultre, hingin mince.”

Younger men in the crowd giggled.  Marjorie recalled Jonet had lately gone to service.  Gone to service with Andro’s father?

Jonet sneered, “Ah, call a cunt a cunt, cunt! Confess yer ettled fornications at yer fashious faithers pulpit, glaiket gype!”

Gone to service with the Reverend Blackhall – yes.  And it was Whitsunday.

“Whore, harlot, witch bitch…” The scholar, for all his book learning, stumbled into silence.

“Gluntoch, word-less gawping glowering brat, piss-the-bed cross-dresser, whore, harlot, witch bitch. At least you hae the means of self-description.” Jonet retorted.

This battle was over: short but, given the lass’ superior skills, inevitable.  Jonet turned and the women opened to accept her into their solidarity.

Andro hurled, “Hoor!” across the bridge.

Which added slander to flyting and probable fornication to the list of Andro’s misdemeanours.  The Session heard soon enough about the pair of them.

Marjorie and Jonet are about the same age. In their years, they have seen Papistic rites restored, bishops imposed, bishops deposed, the signing of the Covenant by all.  At least Jonet’s man, a collier, survived the debacle at Dunbar, thralled to his coal-master and forbidden to rally to the standard.

The English camped on the Links for two months After the battle, stripping the land of whatever was left. All of the burgesses and elders fled or succumbed.  The English ruled by martial law.

Because no word was ever heard of Rab, Marjorie has been neither widow nor wife for the eleven years.  Isolated. Envied. Suspect.

Her eldest, Wee Robert, was seven when his father disappeared, young William was only five. Neither consoled nor freed, she can neither mourn nor marry.   Just tyaav on. 

Taking her lead from the fishwives, Marjorie took to trading in the Edinburgh markets. She leased an acre of good land and traded fresh garden produce.  She joined the trail of women marching West along the firth then back again, her wares carried in the panniers of Rab’s remaining pack horse.

Under English supervision order was. slowly, re-established.  Baillies and Justices of the Peace were re-established but under Commonwealth Law.  The Kirk Elders resumed referring their parishioners to the Baillies for fines, warding and punishments. Folk were punished for swimming in the sea on a Sunday, selling ale or strong liquor though the Minister still insisted there was no merit in their suffering.  Their souls were saved or not. 

The hangman paraded Agnes Scott through the town carrying a sign saying she was a notorious harlot then they exiled on pain of scourging should she return.

But humiliation and pleas for forgiveness encouraged the congregation to moral discipline.  There is still the usual procession of penitents on the cutty stool each Sunday.

Plying her trade in vegetables between her market garden and the mart in Edinburgh town, Marjorie has been impeccably virtuous. They have only discovered eleven witches of thirteen after all.

She spots her youngest boy, William, flirting with the Henderson lassies. He is standing a mite too close to the eldest, Magret, as the townsfolk follow the condemned across the bridge,

Beyond them, Jonet pauses to look back towards the South bank before a clout from a baillie forces her on, staggering from the blow and the agony in her broken feet.

In court, the day before, all five women confessed before the panel, attesting their dittays, documenting sorcery and witchcraft, liaisons with Satan, shapeshifting and the casting of fairy arrows.  Maleficium and license. 

The prickers and commissioners insist that the misshapen twins of Musselburgh and Fishertown rest on Satanic foundations. But how deep do these Satanic roots run?  What names did Agnes, Magret or the two Janets share, mistaken or misheard, as the minister and their laird crushed the bones of their feet in the vise?  And who might, out of mischief, denounce a rival in trade? 

Marjorie has never pledged allegiance to Auld Nick.  Never kissed an arse. Never changed her shape or made a simulacrum or cast a fairy arrow (except that time towards Rab). Elect or not we are all sinners are we not? 

Jonet’s wit, tongue and temper were notorious in the town.  They brought her to the cutty stool too often.  She had begged and received forgiveness over and over.  But it was healing, as much as flyting, that brought her here.  Always a good Christian, hadn’t Marjorie, herself, sought out Jonet when William was sick and the surgeon’s remedies proved ineffective? Jonet knew Marjorie as she knew Jonet, distantly but, in the nature of their predicaments, both outlanders. 

The head of the procession has turned left now, shuffling on down the riverbank towards Bogle’s Hole.  Black ash and scorching still marks the ground where Katherine, Jonet, Bessie and Agnes were burned five weeks before. The Minister & Baillie Prestoune slog towards the cinders.  John Scobie, the witch-pricker, lurks near the head of the procession, the bounty for his pricking finally in his pouch.

Ahead, Magret Henderson pushes William away from her.  The lass bids him be quiet as the local louts manhandle the witches towards the stakes, new planted on the blasted earth.

The women seem not to care if their fate lies in Heavan with Christ the Saviour or with their erstwhile master down in Hell.  How can they know?  If they have faith but either way? None of them, surely, can be among the elect, their destinies set from the moment of creation?  It is in law and it is in Scripture to burn a witch. But who can know where they are predestined to go?

Jonet is last to be chained to her stake. 

Marjorie wants her to curse the Baillies and the Elders, the Pricker and the crowd.  One last eloquent, extemporised invective against folk who have never been kind, never been charitable, never known love. And if Marjorie wants that is she not like Jonet, like them?

They give Jonet no time to curse.  A loop of rope is tugged over her head, around her throat.  The hangman threads the length through a hole bored in the stake.  Her head cinched back, Jonet is bridled.  

Marjorie feels an ecstasy of anxiety.

The youngest of the Henderson girls has already turned away. 

William is whispering in Magret’s ear, prompting who knows what mischief and suspicion. 

The burghers are stacking faggots around the witches’ legs.  They pile the sheaves against the women’s bodies.  Magret kicks at the lumber.  Marjorie should not have come.  She should not need to see this. Except what rumours might her absence ignite?

Behind the stakes, five men take up their positions. Someone is screaming and then the nooses tightens around each neck as the men haul on their ropes.  The women’s eyes bulge, their tongues protrude. Voice and breathe are looted as their throats and necks collapse. Already, flames are searing their crushed feet.   They are barely gone before their sarks catch flame, skin cracks and fat sizzles. Limbs and nakedness and flesh and meat exposed.

They say it takes an hour to burn a witch to ashes if the pyre is diligently tended.

The Henderson girls leave, pale and shaking. William follows Magret like a moon-struck calf.

Marjorie waits on, watching her neighbours consumed by the flames. Woodsmoke and the smell of roasting meat drift through the warm July evening and out along the river towards the sea.

Lothian ‘Witches’ : witches (ed.ac.uk)

[i] Charles Stuart (II)

[ii] Though by the proxy hand of a notary.

[iii] Charles Stuart (I)

[iv] The rest are buried, nameless, in pits about the precinct.

[v] Cromwell’s cavalry stabled their horses in Inveresk Kirk.

[vi] History of the Regality of Musselburgh: With Numerous Extracts from the Town … – James Paterson – Google Books

[vii] There is one man amidst the 5 of them: David Robertsoune.