Vulgar History Podcast
Witch Hunts in Tudor Era Scotland (ft. Witches of Scotland)
August 26, 2026
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, I’m a historian and an author, and I’ve been curious about the Tudor era since I was a small child. This season on the podcast, we’re talking about the notorious Tudors: who they were, the times they lived in, and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.
Speaking of elsewhere in the world, this week we’re talking about Scotland, which, during the Tudor era, there was not a United Kingdom, Scotland and England were just kind of enemies, and every now and then, like, a king would marry a princess and they’d try to be friends, but they were always kind of enemies. So, Scotland is its own separate place, and what was happening in Scotland during a lot of this era was a lot of witchcraft trials, a lot of witch-hunting.
So, to talk about that this week, I’m so excited for the guests who I have today. It is Claire Mitchell, KC and Zoe Venditozzi from the Witches of Scotland. You might know the Witches of Scotland, or you might be familiar with Zoe and Claire from their advocacy work, from their podcast, Witches of Scotland, and also especially from their book, How to Kill a Witch, which is now just available in paperback. So, the book, How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy. They explain everything so well in this book; this podcast is kind of like a quick bullet point of all the work that they’ve been doing and what they have to explain about witch trials in this era, about religion, what was happening in Scotland. Anyway, it’s such a pleasure to speak with them. So, please enjoy this chat with Claire and Zoe from Witches of Scotland.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Zoe and Claire from Witches of Scotland. Welcome!
Zoe: Hello, hello.
Claire: Hi Ann.
Ann: I’m so happy to be talking to you, and it was such a funny coincidence. I’d just started reading your book, and then I got an email from your publicist saying, “Oh, it’s coming out in paperback. Do you want to have them on your podcast?” And I looked up from the book I was actively reading and thought, “Well, yes!” [laughs]
Zoe: So weird.
Claire: That is fate.
Ann: I summoned you, I summoned you! Not to call myself a witch, but I am here with a cat who is kind of my familiar, and fate brought you to me. I’m happy that your book is coming out in paperback; that’s going to make it accessible for people who prefer that sort of format, just going to be more widely available. We’re here because of your book. But for people who don’t know you and your work, can you, first of all, just explain Witches of Scotland and who you are and how that all started?
Claire: Okay. Well, I can start. I’m Claire Mitchell. I am, to trade, a lawyer, and I am also, from a very young age, a goth, and so I love all things creepy and gothic and all those sorts of things. When I was working as a lawyer in the Old Town of Edinburgh, I was living and working in a building that was from the 16th century. I get up, and when I’m doing my cases, I wear an 18th-century horsehair wig, and an 18th-century silk gown. So, I’m wearing stuff that men wore, you know, two or three centuries ago, I’m talking about case law and books and precedent that are hundreds of years old. I was also living at that time, full time in the Old Town in Edinburgh, so I was steeped in history.
So, it’s perhaps unsurprising, with all those things going on, that I started researching the witchcraft trials, and I wanted to know more about it because we’re not taught anything about it in school. So, I started researching, and I found out that there was this whole world of history that we didn’t know about, and as a result of me seeing that there was no women’s history in public spaces – like the statues are all to men and streets are named after men and buildings are named after men – all these thoughts came together one day when I was in Princes Street Garden, which is our main public space in Edinburgh, and I looked around and I thought there’s not one statue, not one to a named woman. There are statues of men; there are statues of artists, architects, authors, soldiers, generals, but nothing to any named woman. There’s a statue of a bear called Bum the Dog. I got up to the top of Princes Street Gardens, and I just thought, this is crazy. I’m now up standing beside a life-size statue of a bear called Wojtek, and I know everything he did in the Second World War. I don’t know the stories of any woman.
So, all these things came together at the same time, and I looked up where Edinburgh Castle is above Wojtek’s head, and I thought, we’re not celebrating brilliant things women do and putting up statues to them and telling their stories. We’re not, also, recording when really, really horrific things happen to them. And it was at that moment the kind of idea of Witches of Scotland was born. And then, as fate would have it, I met Zoe Venditozzi at a wedding.
Zoe: Yeah, we met at a wedding and realized during our initial conversation that we had not only a very similar sense of humour, but quite a similar outlook on life, particularly in terms of feminism and the way that women are treated in society. We talked about what we each did. I’m an English teacher by trade, but I also do a lot of interviews with writers at festivals and book events, that sort of thing, and I’d said to Claire that I wanted to start a podcast, but I didn’t want to do a straightforward book podcast, I wanted to do something that was a little bit different to the interviewing that I did on stage. But I wasn’t really sure what that would be. And then I realized that Claire, at that point, kind of had an idea. I know what her face looks like now when she’s having an idea that I’m going to be involved with. [Claire laughs] And she said to me, “Oh, do you mind if we meet? You know, I get in touch and meet for a coffee?” And I said, “Yeah, of course, that’d be great,” and we did.
At that coffee some weeks later, Claire said to me, “Right. I’ve got an idea. Now, bear with me, because it’s not a usual topic of conversation,” and she told me about her plan to look at the whole background of the Scottish witch trials, and specifically to do a podcast to support the campaign that she had in mind. And I signed up thinking our plan initially was to have six podcasts. But I mean, that was 85 podcasts ago – the 86th will be out in a couple of weeks – and it’s kept us busy for the best part of, I think, maybe seven years. [laughs] I think it was 2019 that we met, yeah. So, that’s where we started.
Ann: And I do want to direct everybody to, I mean, not only your book, but also your book, How to Kill a Witch, and then also your podcast, Witches of Scotland. And just to get everybody sort of caught up with Scottish witch trials. So, just for context, on this podcast, we’ve just started doing a series talking about the Tudor era, but not just in England, but what was happening during those years and other places. This is our first dipping our toes into Scotland and what Scotland was up at that time.
So, can you set the scene for… Actually, actually, first, let’s just shock everybody with how many people would you estimate were killed during the Scottish witch trials overall? Not just in the Tudor era, but overall?
Claire: Okay. Well, in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, that’s the period of time when the Witchcraft Act was in force, a very, very modest approximation, 4,000 people were accused, and 2,500 were executed.
There were five peaks of execution. The first “peak,” and I’m doing inverted commas here, bunny ears for anyone who’s listening, the first peak got out of control. So, our Privy Council, like our cabinet, our inner government, said, “You can’t do any more prosecutions now after this first great peak, unless you come to us and we grant authority to do so.” And that first great peak, there could have been so many people executed as witches that we don’t know about. Also, even the ones that we do know about, see, sometimes in records, because they’re very, very poorly kept, not like Salem, sometimes they see things like “On this day, sundry witches were executed,” they don’t even give them a name. So, what does ‘sundry’ mean? Is it one, is it two, is it five, is it ten? So, the ones that we actually know the names of or have a date, or have something like that, there is approximately 4,000 of those, but the chances are that the amount is much higher. And we know that because one of our good friends researched it, didn’t we, Zoe?
Zoe: Yeah, do you mean Julian Goodare, or do you mean when Judith was…? Because there’s two things there. So, the big resource that people use for what happened in Scotland was the survey of Scottish witches, which is where the Edinburgh University team, which comprise of, amongst others, Professor Julian Goodare, who’s seen as being sort of the leading light about this in Scotland, and also Christina Larner, and a team of other people as well, used the archives that they could find, and have created this tremendous database where you can go on and you can look by area or by name and various other things to try and find people that are there. But they’ve got a caveat where they said, you know, “We’re bound by time and money.” So, they recognize themselves, they made it quite some years ago, that it wasn’t completely comprehensive and that there would be other outlying archives that either hadn’t been available, or had been lost, or had been misplaced, or they just weren’t able to get to them.
So, I think, Claire, what you’re talking about is Judith Langlands-Scott, who’s a friend of ours, who is an independent historian. She’s been researching the area that she is from, which is a small town in Scotland called Forfar, and she’s been able to identify, I think, around about another ten people that aren’t on the official records, and that’s because she went about it in a slightly different way. She looked at money that was being spent by the town to hold them and then to execute them, so she was able to find another ten. So, if we kind of extrapolate from that right across all the activities in Scotland, there’s probably quite a lot more. There’s been some pretty outlandish claims made in the past about there being, you know, a million, but that’s definitely not the case. There’s more probably than the 4,000, but I mean, I don’t think…
Claire: Not a million. [chuckles]
Zoe: But in Scotland, certainly, it was really shocking numbers. When we first started doing this project and the campaign, I didn’t know anything at all about the Scottish witch trials, even though I’ve grown up in Scotland, and I went to school in a town called St Andrews, which you may have heard of, which is steeped in history. I mean, that’s one of the locations that when people are coming to Scotland to look at the history, St Andrews is the stop-off point. John Knox spent time in St Andrews, but we were never taught at school about the Scottish witch trials at all. So, I knew nothing about it. And even though I’m an English teacher, I’ve taught Macbeth lots of times, but I hadn’t put together the fact that I knew Macbeth was written by Shakespeare to curry favour with King James, but I didn’t really think beyond that. So, I thought it was just entirely made up; it was a fantastical story, you know, like say, any of his comedies might have been, but I didn’t realize that there was kind of a factual basis for this idea about witches in Scotland.
So, it’s been a really big steep learning curve for me, and there was certainly lots of myths that I would have believed when we first started this that I now know are not true.
Ann: Can I just ask for… Just comparatively, Scotland in this time period, at least 4,0000 people were executed during witchcraft trials. How would that compare to another country? Like, because part of what your book is talking about is Scotland was doing this a lot more than other places.
Claire: Well, we can give you an example. One of the examples we quote is England. For the whole time the Witchcraft Act was in force in England, they killed less people than we did in one year, that year being 6061. So, it really is extraordinary because, you know, given the fact it’s only down the road from us that it had such a different effect. The other example that we always give is Salem, because, of course, without a shadow of a doubt, they are the most famous witchcraft in the Western world, I imagine. In Salem, 300 people were accused, and 19 were executed, and one died when they were being tortured. I think that’s the right stats.
Ann: So, Scotland… It’s so interesting to me, Zoe, just that you grew up there, like in St Andrews, in Scotland in general, and this is just not something that you know about. It’s clearly not. So, I can see the importance of this campaign when it’s such a major part of Scottish history.
Zoe: To be fair, we weren’t taught very much about Scottish history, and I think that part of that is because we’re part of the United Kingdom and, you know, cynics amongst us would say that there was more focus given to the Empire, the part of the British Empire, maybe, in the days we were in school, rather than specific to Scotland. Often when you got something that was specific to Scotland, it wasn’t really from the point of view often about people’s history, people’s stories, certainly not women’s stories, it was more, you know, we did the Industrial Revolution and we looked at the machinery and we looked at, you know, what improvements were made; there wasn’t an awful lot about the people that actually worked in the factories. Or when we did the First World War, a lot of time was spent looking at the trenches and how the trench systems worked and that sort of thing, and it was more about movement across the map.
So, I love history, but it’s very much from the human story side of history. In fact, I went through school and took history as electives right until the end of my high school career and still didn’t learn much about Scotland. And partly that’s because in my final year, when we did the deepest historical research, I chose to look at the American Civil War, so I could tell you probably more about that— Well, I could have. I can’t now. I didn’t retain any information, none of it. But I could have told you more at one point about that than I certainly could have told you about my own country’s history.
Ann: Well, and when we’re talking about the Scottish witch trials, and you first mentioned, Claire, like there’s not many statues of women and things like that. So, can you clarify – and you talk about this in your book as well – it was mostly women who were executed, but it was some men as well.
Claire: It was, it was. The numbers in Scotland are also higher than in England. In England, 80 percent were women; in Scotland, 85 percent were women. Again, that’s an approximation because we don’t know exactly. But certainly, the vast majority of people who were executed in Scotland were women. The interesting thing about that is that the Witchcraft Act didn’t actually gender anybody in relation to witchcraft. It just said that you’d be guilty of witchcraft if you committed an act of witchcraft, committed an act of necromancy (that is speaking to the dead), and committed an act of sorcery (that is a spell), but it didn’t specify that you were a woman or a man.
So, when we looked at the people that were executed, one of the questions we kept asking ourselves was: Why was it that women were being accused and not men? And from what we could see, the men that were being accused usually weren’t independently being accused. What would happen is a family member who was a woman was being taken in; they would “confess,” and then they would be forced to confess who else was a witch, and they would name family members. That is occasionally that men sort of got dragged into the story as well. But for the most part, it was women. And it took a long time for us to get to the bottom of why it was women.
Ann: Well, do tell.
Zoe: Well, two things. The first thing was that when we first started the podcast, we were really fortunate because it was during lockdown, so it meant that there were lots of historians that wouldn’t have normally spoken to us, or certainly not in such a straightforward way, they’d have been busy teaching and researching and that sort of thing. But it meant that because everybody was sitting at home and people got used to using Zoom, that they agreed to talk to us for an hour, and so they could actually, I suppose, keep talking about their subject and audience.
The majority of the people that we spoke to initially, not deliberately, it’s just the way that it kind of shook out, were men. And we kept saying to them, “If it was 84, 85 percent of them that were women, why was it women? Was it deliberately that they were going after women?” And the historians kept saying to us, “Oh no, it’s much more complicated than that. It wasn’t…” you know, people sometimes use the word femicide, “It wasn’t that; it was just complicated.” Not necessarily in a patronizing way, but they were just saying there were various drivers. It was only when we spoke to Professor Marion Gibson, who’s a tremendous, really fantastic historian on the witch trials, particularly in England, that we said to her, “Oh, is it gendered?” And she went, “Of course it was gendered. Of course it was.”
Claire: She actually said it in much stronger terms than that. Are we able to swear in this podcast?
Ann: You can swear on this podcast. So, please.
Zoe: Well, what she said was, “Of course, it fucking was,” you know? Like, it’s so obvious. It’s obvious to women. It’s bizarre to me that a man wouldn’t look at that and go, “Oh, that’s peculiar.” But the answer is really straightforward and really, really obvious.
So, King James, he of the King James Bible, which, by the way, I only realized while we were working on this, like, put that together as well, that King James, the VI of Scotland and the I of England, was the guy that commissioned that Bible, interestingly. But King James, he was a really interesting person to me. So, when we first started doing this, I was like, “Oh, King James, he was a swine,” because he drove the witch trials. And I think he’s much more complicated than that. You know, he’d been kind of ripped away from his mother’s breast; he’d been raised by these dreadful guys who we now look back and see as fairly dreadful. There’s evidence that he was at least emotionally abused by his tutor that he spent a lot of time with; John Knox was really involved in bringing him up. They hated his mother, so I’m sure there was lots of really horrible chat about his mom. And he was brought up in this very kind of paranoid sort of situation where he genuinely believed, as they all did, that the king was put there by God, he was God’s emissary on Earth, and as such, if you believe in God, you believe in the devil and that the devil was out to get him because he was God’s number one man on Earth. He’d also been kidnapped as a youth. The Jameses that had gone before him, most of them had died young. So, you can understand why he was quite paranoid.
Now, I, as a modern-day trauma-informed teacher, look at what happened to him and see, well, he’d been really traumatized. I mean, there’s so many things that have happened there that would be horrendous, so it’s no wonder he was paranoid. But the overwhelming religious view at that point was very much looking backwards about women, looking back to Adam and Eve, you know, and women were lesser than men. James showed that that was his mindset when he wrote and published his best-selling book for over 100 years, Daemonologie. So, Daemonologie was the book that he wrote that was a how-to guide for how to identify and question and, you know, and put through court and then dispatch those people accused of being witches. It’s a really interesting book; it’s three parts. I’ll not go on too much about it, but our book is an homage to his book. His book was a how-to guide, and that’s why we’ve got, our book is called How to Kill a Witch.
But he wrote in that book… One of the sections says words to the effect of, I’m paraphrasing, but words to the effect of “Who are witches and why are they usually women?” And he makes the strong case that it’s mostly women that are witches because women are intellectually inferior, spiritually, morally inferior, they don’t know their Bible as well as men do, and therefore the Devil can sort of glamour them and talk them into, and seduce them into joining his side because women are too stupid to realize what the Devil is doing. So, I think he himself made a very clear case that it was mostly women. Now, I don’t think that’s that terribly complicated. I think that he signposted to people, “Look out for witches, they’re likely to be women.” So, of course, people found witches, and they found women who were witches.
Ann: Well, and what I really want to have you both explain to the listeners, because just when I’ve been talking about that I was going to be talking to you for this podcast and telling everybody to read your book because it’s so good. So, in popular culture, you have things like the movie Hocus Pocus, or more recently, like Agatha All Along, which kind of like, shows places like those are both showing Salem, and it’s like, oh, well, there’s actually these characters in these fantasy properties that were witches that were like, you know, flying on broomsticks and, like, casting spells. The witch trials were not going after people who were running around being like, “Hey, I’m a witch. Watch me catch—” So, can you explain what sorts of things people did that were seen as suspicious that got them arrested?
Claire: Yeah. So, what you have to understand about Scotland at the time, and this is one of my favourite parts of the book, is that magic was real in that epoch. Everybody believed it, from the person begging in the street to the King; everyone knew that magic was real. One example we often give of that is if you got a magic spell from someone and it didn’t work, you could take them to the local court and sue them. So, the belief system was already there that magic was real. I can buy a piece of magic from someone, and I can get that magic to work, and if it doesn’t work, I can get my money back. Can you imagine? Magic spells: 14 days, or you get your money back. [Ann laughs]
So, at that time, the Reformation, the Church of Scotland, as it became, had taken over Scotland, and the government had taken over Scotland. One of the things it wanted to do was get rid of the ideology and the magic that was in the Catholic Church. So, the Catholic Church was as it was, the Catholic Church. But a lot of the ideas of Catholicism and the stories had become interwoven with magic. So, you get stories of saints meeting people from the other world and all sorts of fantastical stories. They wanted to make sure that witchcraft and this Catholicism that had things to do with the other world was firmly stamped out. That was really the starting point for making sure that witchcraft wasn’t done.
So, they brought about the Witchcraft Act, and they started persecuting people for acts of witchcraft. And as I’ve said, there were acts of witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy. What is really strange is at the exact same time as they were persecuting people for witchcraft, you could still be a magic practitioner who wasn’t using witchcraft and not get into any trouble at all.
Ann: So, it’s like there’s magic; are you using it for witchcraft or are you using it just for general everyday magic?
Claire: Correct.
Ann: Not witchcraft.
Zoe: Even more sort of clear than that, which is that you derive your powers exclusively from the Devil, and the only reason you had the power of witchcraft is because you had signed your soul over to the Devil. So, it wasn’t that you were doing different types of magic and a bit of bad magic. It’s that you belonged to the Devil, which is something that we explain a lot to people today, because sometimes people struggle a bit with the idea of like, “Well, why do you want them to get a pardon? Why should they get an apology? There’s nothing wrong with them being a witch,” but it’s not the witches that we know and think of today.
So, it’s not the modern idea of, you know, finding the divine in nature or, you know, thinking about maybe a more female-centric religion or spiritual practice. There was very, very explicitly clear that the witches that we’re talking about for a pardon and apology were those people who had signed their souls over to the Devil. And remember, this is in a really overwhelmingly Christian society. Everybody pretty much would have identified as being a Christian. You know, there wasn’t really another option. There’s the odd case of a person who calls himself a witch. But broadly, absolutely 99 percent of the time, these were people who had been horrified, horrified to be thought of as being anything other than Christian.
Claire: Yeah. So, you would get Christians who were performing magic. In Scotland, they were called chairmers, and that’s old Scots word for charmers, using charms, and they might have, for example, they might be farmers who had farmed for many, many years and they’d found good ways of doing things. You know, plant your seed early in the morning and do this ritual over it, and you’ll get good crops. Now, it might have had nothing to do with the ritual; it might have been that if you plant seeds early in the morning, the birds don’t take them, and therefore you get better crops. You know, it might have been things that were otherwise useful that came down. So, you might get people who had a history of selling different types of charms and telling people how to do things. But then you would have accusations of witchcraft.
Now, witchcraft was, you got all your powers from the Devil, exactly as Zoe has said. And what’s important about it was what you did with those things is that you caused harm to society because you wanted to bring down the godly society that King James was making, that the Reformation was making. Therefore, at the same time, we had the church and the King saying, “If bad things are happening in society, if your crops are failing, if stuff is being spirited away and stolen from you, if your child has become ill, then think: Is it in fact witchcraft that’s causing this? And if it is witchcraft, we have to root out the witches, and we have to get rid of them.” So, a very long way to answer the question as in, what were they doing?
What they were doing was nothing. They were not possessed with the Devil, they were not doing his bad work. What were they accused of was very, very mundane things. We give an example of perhaps you go to a market, and you have a fight with someone because they’ve shortchanged you for your butter. You have a standing fight with them, and you get your butter, and you go away muttering in one direction, “That’s terrible they’ve done that to me. They’ve shortchanged me out of that,” and then the butter seller goes home, and the butter seller’s animal takes sick, their cow takes sick and dies.
Society, the church and the state was saying, “Well, who could be to blame for that? Who would be to blame for your cow dying and thus place you in peril because you didn’t have a form of income, and you didn’t have any welfare to assist you?” And you’d think back, and you’d think, “It was that woman that I argued with in the market. She was angry at me, and she has put a spell on me, and put a spell on my animal to kill my animal and to get revenge on me,” or whatever, and that’s why it was.
So, people were being accused with a sort of reverse-engineering logic for things that were going wrong in society. Why did someone’s house burn down? Well, was it because the house is highly flammable and you have an open fire in it? Or was it because you’d had a fight with your neighbour two days before? So, it was these sorts of things that women found themselves being blamed for mostly natural events, for example, very poor weather. There were weather-witch allegations, and that’s the kind of thing that women found themselves being blamed for. Bad things happen. Look around. Who can we blame? That’s the act of witchcraft they’ve done.
Ann: Well, and that’s where, in other countries at that time, and probably at other times, a similar thing might happen where you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, my cow died, and that woman was muttering. I bet it was her.” But the thing in Scotland was they had the Witchcraft Act that empowered that butter salesperson to report them where there wasn’t that… That’s the difference, right? There wasn’t that mechanism in other places where they could… yeah.
Zoe: It wasn’t just as straightforward as, you know, this is a problem that we’ve got with the Devil. It was also a very useful social control method. You know, it made everybody try and behave in the way that the church wanted them to behave. So, this was at a time when you might have had church maybe up to as much as three times a day on a Sunday, and the minister in the town or the parish or the village or whatever, he really was in everybody’s business. So, everybody followed the rules as laid down by the minister, as laid down by the Bible. Then if you were straying out with that, then there was a punishment mechanism that was there for you.
But it was also kind of… It could be kind of mundane as well, you know, the idea that it was done through the courts and there was different rules to follow, and you know, you had to gather evidence. Some of that evidence, we would immediately say today, “Well, what a load of rubbish. You can’t use that as evidence in court.” But at that point, they were like, these are, you know, reasonable things. So, a confession was needed. And I think in the modern day, I think that’s, you know, something that’s quite straightforward as evidence.
But also, other things too, like one of the things that they did was, like, proof that you were a witch was if you were what they called a quarrelsome dame. So, if you were a woman that kind of spoke out a bit too much, that could be evidence that you were a witch because you’re not following the social rules, are you, if you do that? You should be meek and mild, and bowing down…
Claire: Eyes downcast.
Zoe: Yeah, bowing down to the male in, you know, whatever environment you’re in. So, if you weren’t doing that, that could be evidence that the Devil had turned you.
There was also the mark that the devil supposedly left a mark upon your body, called the Devil’s mark, where when you met with him and you agreed that you were going to sign yourself over to him, your soul was going to be working for the Devil, he left a mark upon your body to show you that you were his and to remind you that you were his. That was one of the things that they looked for “evidence.” So, when you got accused, and you were brought in, they’d shave your head, they’d strip you, they’d search every inch of your body. And they brought in somebody who was an expert witness called a witch pricker, and his job – it was always a man, really – was to jab you with a needle, and any marks that were upon your body that looked “unnatural” and that then would “prove” that you had had the mark of the Devil left and that you belonged to the Devil. So, that was one of the pieces of evidence. I mean, we think about that today, and we’re sort of like, “But that’s crazy.” But that was one of the things that they thought was actually very unconcerning evidence; that was really good black-and-white evidence.
Ann: I just want to point out, you know, you’re both Scottish people, and I am of primarily Scottish heritage, and I think a lot of people with my complexion have a lot of freckles and moles. Like, it wouldn’t be hard to find a mark on any given person in that country at that time.
Zoe: I’ve got a port wine stain… [Ann chuckles] Like, it’s not a port wine stain, but it looks like that in the back of my head, so if I have my hair really short, you can see it through. My daughter has a mark like that, and my grandmother had a mark like that. That’s the kind of thing that they would think, well, there’s significance in that. So, if they’d brought me in and they found that mark, they might then start looking at my family members, do you know what I mean?
And it’s that kind of thing where it can get bigger, it can snowball. Because one of the things that they did when they brought you in to elicit a confession from you was keep you awake until, basically, you broke. They didn’t view that as torture, but we know today, of course, we’ve known for quite some time that sleep deprivation is an extremely effective method of torture, and it doesn’t take very long for many people to break, and then they’ll say whatever they need to say to make it stop. Because there was an idea across Scotland of what a confession should sound like, they’ll ask leading questions often, and when people eventually confess, they seemed quite similar.
Now, at the time, they probably would have argued that confessions are similar because it’s the same thing that’s happening to all these people. We’d maybe look at it in a slightly different psychological way, which is they were asking questions that they had particular answers that they wanted, and people across Scotland had in their mind what a confession sounded like. So, they would confess, and during the confession, they would then prod them for more names. So, you know, I might be brought in, and I might be sleep-deprived until I started to just make up a confession, and then they’d ask me for names. So, I might name my daughter, my neighbour, my brother, you know, and sometimes that’s how men got caught up in it, is that they were named in confessions as other people. And they wouldn’t stop until they felt satisfied that they had enough.
Ann: So, just putting it together, and again, you spell this out so well in your book, people are brought in because maybe, you know, they’re a quarrelsome dame or whatever. Then they find a mark on their body, and then they’re sleep-deprived, or other methods of torture until they confess, “Okay, you got me. Yeah, I’m a witch. This is what I did.” But confessing doesn’t mean, like, “Okay, well, you pled guilty, so you get a lesser punishment.”
Zoe: No, no.
Claire: Absolutely not.
Zoe: The punishment for being a witch was death. It was very clear. There wasn’t, like a kind of sliding scale. It was that if you were found guilty of being a witch, you had to be put to death.
Claire: It was because the Devil sa— The Devil said, geez. It was because the Bible said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” so it was the Christian thing to do if you had found a witch to execute the witch. Strangely enough, it does seem as the Witchcraft Act got older and older, there were more people, and we wonder – it’s pure speculation on our part. We’re not experts, and we make that very clear in the book. We talk to experts, and we’ve had the stuff fact-checked, but we ourselves aren’t experts, so it’s the experts that are telling us. But we have maybe a theory that the longer the Witchcraft Act went on and the later it got, we see sometimes that people were banished very occasionally. It just says “banished” or… Is that the right word, Zoe? Banished?
Zoe: Banished, yeah.
Claire: Yeah, banished. We wonder whether or not people were starting to get a wee bit queasy about the fact that they were executing people, perhaps, because we can’t really work out why someone would be banished. But even if they were banished—
Zoe: I think sometimes it would be just if the evidence wasn’t quite strong enough, but there was enough of a suspicion that they were kind of like, “Mmm, this person is not innocent,” because, you know, 4,000 people were accused and 2,500 people were executed. So, there were people in between that, who weren’t found guilty, necessarily, originally. But then sometimes people were accused, they were kind of like, “Oh, we don’t have enough evidence,” and then some years later or some months later, they might be accused again, and this time they might have enough, you know, so-called evidence.
Claire: But the difficulty was, as Zoe and I have sort of thought about, like, what would happen if you were like a middle-aged woman, you had no visible means of support, and you turned up in a new village distraught, possibly your head had been shaved – because they’d been looking for the Devil’s mark, and other parts of their body, their private parts – but from what people could see, a shaved head woman looking particularly raggedy might turn up and say, “Oh, hello. I’m just coming to start a new life with you.” Well, of course, people would know, or at least have a good suspicion that these people were coming because they’d been accused of something elsewhere and were either fleeing it or had been banished. So, their life was not going to be in any way positive wherever they went.
Ann: And in terms of execution, we’re going to do some myth-busting right now. You talk in your book, and I’m so glad you do, because this phrase drives me bananas, like, “We are the daughters of the witches that you didn’t burn.” One of my neighbours puts out a sign that says that every year at Halloween, and I’m just like, “Eugh! No!”
Zoe: What is that saying? Is that saying that my distant grandmother was too tough to get killed as a witch? Like, so she wasn’t able to get burned. Is it sort of victim-blaming in some way, that some of the people that got burned weren’t tough enough? It’s just not thought through. It’s illogical.
Claire: Yeah, I think it’s trying to – and I think it’s totally understandable – I think it’s trying to reclaim power to say, “We come from a long line of strong women, and we’re still strong.”
Zoe: I think it’s really poorly thought out, though, and I think that it’s a silly phrase.
Claire: It does. It does. It’s made available to so many women, though. You know, like there’s posters of it and there’s all sorts, T-shirts.
Ann: There’s something… Yeah, I think people like my neighbour, I haven’t talked to her about it, but I presume it’s something, it’s somehow empowering. But to me, when you think it through, and we’ll talk about this in a second, they weren’t actually burned, that’s not the method of execution for most people. But also, so you’re saying that your ancestors were a witch that were so cunning and so clever that they were never caught? And they were witches, but the people who were executed weren’t? It’s just… I don’t understand it.
Zoe: Because it’s sort of, it’s saying that there were other women that they could burn, and you’re kind of like, “Okay, so there were people that weren’t strong enough to escape being executed, but your ancestors somehow managed to be a witch and not get into trouble for it.” I just think it’s bananas. So, we much prefer the strapline that we’ve used since the beginning for our campaign, which is “Women Not Witches,” because they were just ordinary people.
Ann: How were witches executed? Please explain.
Zoe: Okay. So, in modern sort of popular culture, we have this idea that witches were all burned at the stake, but they weren’t. We’re not saying that people weren’t burned at the stake because they were for particular things, but not as sort of a witch. So, you were burned at the stake if you were found guilty of treason, so trying to kill the king, or of what’s called petit treason, which is trying to kill your husband. In those two lovely instances, you could be burned at the stake.
But generally, in terms of witchcraft, the execution method was hanging or is called strangled in old, sort of, language in Scotland and Scots, but really, what that means is generally being hanged. There’s a case to be made that sometimes they were garroted. But when we first started and we were saying, “Strangled?” Like, if you have multiple people that you were executing, is the executioner moving down the line and sort of hand-strangling every person? Obviously, I don’t see how that could work, so they were hanged, is the best possible sort of definition for it. We know from lots of cases that there’s evidence of how much rope was used because of how much the rope cost and invoices, basically, that were put in. So, what they did was they hanged them, and then they did burn their bodies, but only after they were already dead. The reason they burn their bodies and the reason why this is kind of become all kind of intermingled in popular culture is because it was an idea that if you didn’t destroy the body, that the Devil could still reanimate the body, because once you’d signed your soul over to the Devil, you’d stop being who you were originally and you’d become a puppet of the Devil.
I think that’s one of the, kind of, psychological ways that people in a community were able to dehumanize the accused. Because if you think about it, say you lived in a little village like the village I live in, and there was a woman, [phonetic] Jonnett, who everybody had always known, and then one day she’s accused of being a witch, and then everybody just kind of accepts that she’s taken away and questioned, and then she’s found guilty, and then people have to go and watch her being executed. If she’s somebody from your community, how do you cope with that? Unless you’ve dehumanized her to a point where, like, “Well, she’s no longer Jonnett. As soon as she got taken over by the devil, she was just the Devil’s plaything,” essentially. And the reason they got rid of their body was so that he couldn’t keep them going beyond the moment of their human body’s death, so they destroyed the body. But it also meant that they couldn’t get a Christian burial, and they weren’t able to go to heaven in the way that the construct was at the time. It was particularly cruel.
Ann: Well, that’s the thing. Like you were saying before, people believed in magic, and people also, like, their religion did believe that your body needed to be intact to go to heaven. So, this is… For the people left behind, I’m just thinking, if that was your loved one, to think that, like…
Zoe: Horrible!
Ann: Yeah, because in a very Christian country, you think, like, the end of this for all of us is we’re going to go to heaven, and we’ll be together again.
Zoe: But as we all know: There’s no hate like Christian love. So, I think when things like that get done, they get done in a very complete sort of way. And we think now, in a modern way of looking at psychology and about trauma and stuff like that, if you had a family member who was accused of being a witch and they were found guilty, you would imagine that the greater family would also be tainted by that, you know? There’d be a suspicion that your aunt or whatever had been found as being a witch, and that must have then echoed through communities as time went on. I think that’s quite interesting, sort of from a psychological viewpoint of what Scotland is like.
Ann: Well, and then you talk in your book as well, you talk about the Salem witch trials, sort of contrasting how that happened and then stopped, and then there was sort of a retr— Compensation. There was a reckoning right after, and that’s kind of why it’s well known, because it sort of wrapped up, and then guilt was admitted, and that’s kind of why we know what happened. But in Scotland, you said there’s kind of, like, the two peaks of witch… And then it just kind of stopped, and it’s like, let’s just not talk about this anymore. How and why did it stop?
Claire: Exactly. Well, there are a number of factors that came together. Some of the reasons that it got so bad were James was in charge and had put out the book Daemonologie. The church had a vice-like grip on society. Magic was a real thing and was believed. People had really good access to courts in the central belt of Scotland, at least. So, those are factors that made the witchcraft accusations in Scotland particularly bad.
As time went on, the power of the church waned somewhat in everybody’s life. So, there was less control as a social force of the church. It was still there, people still went to church, but it wasn’t all-consuming in all parts of your day. People started to believe different things, including in science and, particularly the Enlightenment that happened in Scotland, where we started looking at the world in a more scientific way, and more and more doubt was put on it. So, it didn’t just stop in one day. Over the course of those two centuries, it tapered out and by 1736, when the Witchcraft Act changed and the crime of witchcraft moved to a crime of pretended witchcraft. So, implicit in the crime was that you couldn’t do an act of witchcraft because witchcraft didn’t exist, but what you could do is pretended witchcraft. So, you could pretend to speak to the Devil, you could pretend to have charms, but that wasn’t real. And the crime went from a capital offence of murder down to getting a fine for it.
The period of time that it stayed in people’s minds was much, much longer. For example, on the podcast, we speak to people. We spoke to an expert on Robert Burns, and Burns wrote the poem maybe about 30 years later, 40 years later, about Tam o’ Shanter. It’s a famous Scottish poem Robert Burns wrote. That was about a man going home drunk from a night out and going past old Alloway Kirk and seeing witches having a party. And so, the witch in popular culture at that time was still really, really strong. Just because the legislation doesn’t like— Legislation stops at one point doesn’t mean that everyone believed in magic of witchcraft one day and didn’t the other. It took a lot of time to sort of…
Zoe: It’s a bit like in America, the South, particularly when slavery had happened for a long time, and then slavery was outlawed, and there was still sort of, like, lingering from certain groups, lingering belief in that and sort of ill treatment towards people that had formerly been enslaved. It just takes a while. And I’m saying that now, fully aware of two things. One, which is that racism is absolutely on the rise and is becoming more and more acceptable. And that the idea of women being witches seems to be back on in the popular imagination. And I don’t mean like, you know, in a good way. I mean, like, you know, with certain sort of fundamentalist Christian politicians and speakers saying that there is a danger of witchcraft being abroad. So, I think that people’s prejudices are held on to by certain groups, whether or not there’s law that’s around it, do you know what I mean?
These ideas kind of linger, and that when we’re under any kind of social anxiety— So, at the moment, I mean, I’m personally quite worried about climate change because this level of heat in Scotland is extremely bizarre and, you know, we’re hearing from experts that that’s going to get worse, or there’s war, or the threat of war, or people are struggling in a very personal domestic way with the cost of bills or whatever. Then we tend to look, just as they did during the witch trials, for vulnerable groups to say, “Right, well, if we deal with that group, we get rid of that group, if we punish that group, then we’ll be able to get back to, you know, the good old days where we all had jobs for life and, you know, petrol costs…” whatever petrol used to cost. I think that that’s a kind of a natural, unpleasant aspect of humanity. It’s something that I would hope that we would, in the modern day, in 2026, have more of an understanding about how we get those kind of thoughts and those kind of, you know, ways of approaching life.
But I saw somebody today talking on Instagram, and he was talking about racism, but he was saying, “We had to get through yesterday to get to today.” What he meant by that was we had to experience the history in order to land where we are today, and everything that happens today is because of stuff that’s happened in the past. It’s stupid to not recognize history’s long shadow. I think that we’re at a point now where we’re seeing people specifically talking about women using witchcraft. Like, we saw Kamala Harris being accused of using witchcraft during her campaign. We’re seeing people like, you know, Turning Point and stuff like that, talking about women being witches, which when Claire and I started this campaign, we sort of talked about it in kind of abstract terms, not expecting that sort of five years later that people would actually be going on stage with a microphone and saying “There are witches amongst us.” I mean, that is an incredibly short amount of time to regress so hugely.
Claire: Or that guy at the Turning Point event who debated a child and explained to the child that the problem with the Salem witch trials was that they weren’t organized well enough.
Zoe: [chuckles] It’s laughable, but it’s really serious because it’s so bananas.
Ann: There’s something so… Just the way the witches have sort of permeated culture, where these were real trials that happened, but then it’s a Halloween costume or it’s a fun thing. So, it’s kind of like, the myth is still kind of there, and it’s always connected to women.
Zoe: Always.
Ann: And it’s always kind of like “unpleasant” older women.
Zoe: When we talk about witches, and then men get mentioned online, people call them wizards, and we have to say to people, “No, it’s not like witches are women and wizards are men. These are totally different vibes.” So, witches could be men or women, largely women, but it’s definitely, definitely gendered, and it’s definitely ageist. We’re generally talking about older women, and it’s like they’re no longer “useful” to society, so therefore they become kind of dangerous because, you know, these women have got nothing to lose, they could cast spells on us.
I think a lot of it is about the fear that men have towards women, and a lot of it’s sexual, and a lot of it is to do with wanting to control women. One of my favourite stories about one of the accused witches was that, in her community, stole the penises of all the men, the ministers, the bailies, the men that are in charge and put them all in a wooden box, and she put the box up into a tree, and that she could, at will, open the box and make the penises fly around. [chuckles] I’m not sure what women would really want to treat themselves to that vision, to be honest, but I think that’s very telling about the psychology of how men – at that point, certainly, and I would argue a lot of men today in 2026 – view women. They’re just worried their [ph.] peens are going to get stolen.
Ann: [laughs] For some sort of… I don’t know, that’s quite a tale.
I wanted to just sort of give you both a chance to talk about your campaign and the successes you’ve had and what… Just talking about the successes you’ve had! Like, the apology and everything that’s happened.
Claire: Sure. Well, when we started, what we wanted was a pardon for all those that were convicted, to change their status from convicted people. And when we say about a pardon, sometimes American people get in contact with us and say, “It’s not a pardon, it’s an exoneration.” It is an exoneration in America, because exoneration makes it clear that you should never have been convicted of the thing, that you are free of guilt. The same is done in Scotland, but the word ‘pardon’ is used. But when the pardon is given, and it’s given by legislation, the legislation, when it’s passed, makes clear that the people ought never to have been convicted.
So, since the Scottish Parliament has been back in the early 2000s, it’s given two pardons. One for same sex sexual offences, where men were convicted of that historically. The other was for when people were convicted for protesting in relation to the miners’ strikes that occurred in the ‘80s. Both those groups of people were given pardons, and it was made clear that they were being pardoned because they ought never to have been accused and convicted.
So, we wanted the pardon. We wanted an apology because the pardon only deals with people who were convicted. But as we know, two-thirds of the people were accused and may have gone through all sorts of horrors. But up to one-third of them, hopefully, were acquitted. So, we wanted them to be recognized as well and for the state to give recognition. The third thing was a national memorial.
So, two years after our campaign started, we did and continue to do the podcast. We raised awareness. We spoke to people. We did talks, just trying to let everyone know about it. And as a result of the work that we did on that, on International Women’s Day 2022, we had written and asked the then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon whether or not she would give, on International Women’s Day, an apology to all those that were accused. We’re delighted to say that she did, and it was the first state recognition ever of the people that had been executed as witches. So, it was quite an incredible day.
The second thing that we have been working on, was a pardon. We have done all the legwork in that, we have raised the public awareness, we’ve had a public consultation that was overwhelmingly positive, we’ve been to our Justice Committee, we’ve got cross-party support. But just as we were wanting to get the matter put into Parliament, unfortunately, the person who was proposing it— I say unfortunately. Fortunately for her, she got promoted. And the promoted role that she took meant that she could not take this bill forward. So, Parliament has restarted in Scotland now, and we’re working towards that. But we’ve done most of the work on that.
The third thing was a national memorial. When we started off, we wanted some form of statue. We spoke to the government, the government said, “We think it’s a great idea. We’d love to help you, but we’ve got no money.” For a long time, we were absolutely stumped on what it was that we could do. There were lots and lots of problems. You know, where would it be? What would it look like? Who would design it? Who would keep it up? These sorts of problems seemed insurmountable to us, and people were getting in contact with us saying, “Well, we should have it here because of this. We should have it here…” and we’re like, we’re not the arbiters of where things go or what things do! And Zoe turned to me at one point and said, “Are we going to have to build this ourselves?” In a strange sort of way, we eventually did. And the reason is because we moved away from the idea of a national memorial as a statue and came up with another idea.
Zoe: Which was we went to— Are you familiar with, there’s a museum in London called the Victoria and Albert that’s known as the V&A. It’s a big design museum, really old. And there’s one of them in Dundee, which is near where I live. Beautiful modern structure that’s all about design. They had a show opening called Tartan, and it was just all about, unsurprisingly, tartan. And we went along to the opening party for that, and there was loads of people dressed in tartan there, and there was, like, a real buzz about it. People were talking about the origins of it, not just being in Scotland, but in different cultures, but also about the colours and what that symbolizes and about the link to families and the link to clans and stuff like that. And Claire just kind of went, “Oh, this is interesting. Maybe we should look at getting a tartan commissioned and designing a tartan as a memorial.” And our good friend, Leonie Bell, who runs the V&A, said, “I know the very person to put you in touch with.”
So, it’s a woman called Clare Campbell that runs a small, women-owned, women-run mill in the Highlands of Scotland, and it turns out it is the only mill in the Highlands that makes tartan, which we were, like, mind-boggled by. We thought there would still be an industry going on there. But in fact, for a number of years, there had be no mill. And Clare had been an accountant, and she’d retrained to become a weaver because she was determined that tartan would be made in the region that she’s from, which is the Highlands. So, she started up this mill, Prickly Thistle, which is all environmentally friendly, and it’s got a really great ethos behind everything. We spoke to her, and we worked with her, and we designed a tartan that’s incredibly symbolic of the witch trials.
So, the colours mean different things – I’ll not go into everything – but the black symbolizes the dark times, the gray symbolizes the ashes that these women were reduced to, the reddy-pink that runs through it symbolizes the legal tapes that bind up legal papers in Scotland, and they’re used less now, but they certainly were used a lot then. So, these different colours, things like the thread count, you know, like the size of different bits of the design, all symbolize different things.
We created it, and the first thing you have to do is you have to have it registered online. Now, we didn’t realize that there are people in America that sit online and watch the tartan registry, and then tell everybody about it when a new tartan appears, because this was a completely whole new world to us. So, I was at the gym one day – I was on the treadmill, just walking fast, don’t get excited – and I got a text, and it was from a friend, Gemma, who said, “Is this you two?” And lo and behold, there’s this thing on Facebook that was starting to kind of go global, saying a new witch trials museum, a new witch trials memorial tartan is being created. And all these people started going wild for it, and at this point, it didn’t exist, really, it was just a computer image, it hadn’t been woven.
So, we spoke to Clare at the mill, and we decided we’d do a Kickstarter to see if there was an interest in it, and long story short, there was a huge interest in it. It still didn’t exist, and people were preordering the idea of it. But then we went into production. And since then, it’s the fastest-growing tartan in Scotland, and it’s amazing because it means that people have it all around the world. When they wear their tartan, it’s primarily a scarf that they get, people say, “What’s your scarf mean? What does your tartan mean?” And then they can tell them the story of it, and it means that our big educational aim of the campaign is being done by all these amazing people, mostly women, that are out in the world, that want to know about it, and want to tell people about it. It’s just amazing, the wings it’s taken.
Ann: And I believe, I didn’t— The paperback of your book is just coming out, but I believe the paperback incorporates the tartan in the inside covers or something like that?
Zoe: The hardback did in America.
Ann: Okay, that’s what I’m thinking of.
Zoe: We’ve not actually received the paperback yet, so we’re not entirely sure what it looks like. So actually, Claire, I don’t think we’ve seen an image of it yet, have we?
Claire: No. Who knows? No, no. I don’t think so. I think if you take off the dust sheet in the hardback, then the tartan is there, and that’s still available in the UK and US.
Zoe: Yeah, we’re not sure, long story, we don’t know what the paperback looks like.
Claire: No, the book in the US, for anybody looking it up, is titled slightly differently. It’s called How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women.
Zoe: Yeah, it’s slightly different to the UK version. So, the UK version has got some fiction that’s scattered through it as well. I wrote the fiction, which is taking the viewpoint of different people that were involved in the trials. So, not the witch per se, but like, you know, John Knox has got something to say, and like, the minister’s wife has got something to say, and stuff like that. But the American publisher felt that it was better to stick to nonfiction for the States, so you have a slightly different version in the States. But confusingly, the audiobook that is available to you in the States is the UK version. So sometimes people – I didn’t realize this was a thing – sometimes people like the audiobook and they like to follow it with the actual book in their hands.
Ann: Oh, but it’s not the same, yeah.
Zoe: They’re like, “What are these extra bits?” So, they’re slightly different, just to give people a— It’s a slightly different thing that they’ve got in the States than in Britain.
Ann: And so, if people want to get their hands on one of these tartan scarves, what’s the… Do you just have a general website that’s just kind of like, about your campaign and about the book and about everything? Yeah.
Claire: Easy peasy. It’s WitchesOfScotland.com.
Ann: Perfect.
Claire: So, you just go on there.
Ann: One stop.
Zoe: It’s got the stuff about the campaign, it’s got the history of that, it’s got links so you can find the podcast, it’s got the links to the tartan, and it’s got a bit more about what we’ve been doing over the last seven years.
Claire: We should say that because the tartan is bespoke, it’s handmade, it’s zero waste, it’s done on very old looms, the same ways it’s been done for hundreds of years, that everything’s made to order, and it can take up to six months in order to go from the order to actually getting it in your hands. But if people want to Google online, they will see many, many people now worldwide that have their Witches of Scotland…
Zoe: Beware, because this is not a thing that we have in the UK, but in America, you have these things, they’ve got Renaissance Fairs where people dress up, and we have had people getting in touch to say, “Oh, they’re selling your tartan at the Renaissance Fair.” It’s not our tartan. It’s a really, really inferior, wrongly-coloured, wrongly-patterned rip-off. So, just know that it’s not actually our tartan; ours is much, much…
Ann: The only place to get the actual one is from Prickly Thistle…
Zoe: We don’t have a shop, we don’t have a storefront; it’s only through us. And we’re doing that really deliberately so that we can maintain the integrity of it, and that it’s made by women. You know, we really like the fact that it’s this very small, really special thing that’s happening, and we’re going to keep that going rather than go to mass production.
Ann: Well, I was so looking forward to talking with you. As I said, the hand of fate just had me reading your book just as I was contacted about this. I’m just so happy to talk to you about this, and it’s just lovely to hear about the success thus far of your campaign. You know, there’s so many people who advocate for so many things, and you’ve had success. I hope that that inspires other people to do similar sorts of work.
Zoe: Definitely.
Claire: Zoe has said when people ask us or some people criticize us for anything, Zoe says, look, luckily and presently, we live in a democracy where if you want to tell people your views and promote it and find community for it, then we’re still able to do that. It’s really, really important that particularly for women and particularly for women worldwide, where their rights are on the slide, and the UN has written and told us about that, it’s very, very important to form a community, and for that community, not only necessarily to be your own small community, but knowing other people worldwide, because in my view, it’s time for the matriarchy.
Zoe: Yeah, yeah. So, to that view, actually, we should mention: we started our own clan. So, we’ve got Clan Witches of Scotland. If anybody listening wants to join our clan, it doesn’t cost anything. You don’t have to buy tartan or anything like that. You just go to our website, WitchesOfScotland.com and sign up for the mailing list. We’re already 25,000 people or something in the clan. It’s huge. And it’s just the whole idea is that if we band together, as largely women, then we’re better when we’re all working together, you know? It’s really nice to know there’s a community of like-minded women all over the world, and it means that connections can be made and that stuff can change at a grassroots level, which we know is the only way to topple fascism.
Ann: I love the Scottishness of this. I love that there’s a tartan, I love that there’s a clan. It’s like, there’s no question about what country this is all based out of.
Zoe: Also, we should say, because sometimes we get people from North America, particularly getting in touch with us and saying, “Oh, I can’t wear a kilt. I can’t wear tartan. I don’t want to do cultural appropriation.” It’s not cultural appropriation in this instance, because A) We, as Scottish people, really like seeing the kilts and stuff everywhere. You know, you could see that with the Tartan Army at the football. We’re really proud of it, and we really like it. It’s not cultural appropriation. And B) it’s because we are like a dominant power structure, so it’s not coming in and going, “Oh, I’m going to take this, and I’m going to make money off your culture.” It’s something that is absolutely available to anybody, and it just means that you get what the campaign is and that you believe in understanding history, and you believe in a better present day. That’s basically what we’re seeing with our tartan.
Claire: Exactly. And it absolutely echoes the clan system. The clan system in Scotland was about standing behind someone that you believed in and principles that you believed in, not where you’re from, or where you were going necessarily. It was about do you stand with us? And that’s what we’re asking people to do: Stand with us.
Ann: That’s fantastic. So, everybody should go, first of all, WitchesOfScotland.com just to learn more about everything that you’re up to, and everybody should go get your book in paperback or in hardcover, or however, or an audiobook, however people prefer to read.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. This is such a fun conversation.
Zoe: Oh, thank you.
Claire: We really appreciate it.
Ann: And my cat Hepburn, she’s loved it all as well.
Claire: She has [laughs]. She has been fully involved in this process.
Ann: She’s been very, very active. Yeah.
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So, you can get all the links to find all the ways to keep up with Claire and Zoe and how to support them at their website, WitchesOfScotland.com. Listen to their podcast, get their book, How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy, now available in paperback everywhere. You can also, up there at WitchesOfScotland.com, you can join clan, the witches clan. You can find ways to order the witch tartan. I love everything they’re doing, and it was such a treat to speak with them.
If you want to keep up with me and what I’m doing, I have a Patreon, which is a site where you can join either for free or for a small monthly donation. And you can get bonus treats when you join my Patreon. So, you can get ad-free episodes of this podcast, Vulgar History, for one dollar a month. And if you up that to six dollars or more a month— And I’m saying US dollars, but whatever country you’re in, it converts; you can do the conversion. Anyway, for the six dollars a month or more level, you get bonus episodes as well as access to our Discord where we can just hang out with other history nerds. I’m starting to do, every now and then, hopefully eventually every month, a Zoom Live and people at that level get to watch it live. Anyway, in terms of bonus episodes, it’s basically me and some of my friends just chatting about historical stuff, including costume dramas and some plays and books. Like, there was a recent episode where I was explaining why Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus is both my favourite play and maybe the greatest play ever written by anyone ever.
Anyway, so if you want to join the Patreon… And I should also say it where it’s like, you know, you pay the money and get these things. It’s like, why am I doing this? It’s like, to support this podcast, babe. Like, I’m hustling. I’m doing the thing. It helps to pay for things like my editor, for my social media helper, for the artists who we get to design our merch. Supporting the podcast to help support the whole Vulgar History infrastructure, and I appreciate that a lot.
You can also support us by telling a friend about Vulgar History or by leaving a nice five-star rating wherever you listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever. To join the Patreon, you can go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWrtier. And if you’re like, “I don’t know if that’s for me. I don’t know if I like this Patreon life,” get a seven-day free trial, see what’s up. See if you like it there. I hope you will. Again, it’s Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Why is Ann Foster Writer? Because I’m also a writer. I wrote a book, it’s called Rebel of the Regency, and it’s available now wherever you get your books. Get more information about that at RebelOfTheRegency.com. And until next week, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Pick up a copy of Zoe and Claire’s book How To Kill a Witch – now in paperback! (affiliate link)
Keep up with their podcast, advocacy work, tartan, and clan at the Witches of Scotland website
Get Discord access, ad-free episodes, and bonus episodes by joining our Patreon patreon.com/annfosterwriter
Buy a copy of Ann’s book Rebel of the Regency
Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at commonera.com/vulgar15 or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR15 at checkout
Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)
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