A recent archaeological dig at a church in Scotland has helped people get a clearer picture of what Witches were and how they were treated in the past. Scientists in Aberdeen found up to 2,000 bodies and a stash of medieval documents that show the Kirk of St. Nicholas Uniting was used as a “Witch prison” in the 1500s. What is the real history behind this sacred structure? Here’s what you need to know about the Kirk of St. Nicholas.
According to historians, a 15th-century Scottish chapel in Aberdeen was used as a witch prison for convicted witches during the “Great Witch Hunt” in 1597. During Aberdeen’s “Great Witch Hunt,” 23 women and one man were charged with witchcraft, tried, and executed.
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During archaeological excavations in the East Kirk (the Lowland Scots word for “church”) of St Nicholas in 2006 and 2007, the remains of approximately 2,000 people, including 1,000 complete bones, were discovered. Historians believe most of the remains were buried before the 1560s, some of whom had been buried since the 11th century.
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St Mary’s Chapel sits beneath the floor level of the main church. An 1868 drawing of St Mary’s Chapel illustrates how the church was actually a former witch prison before it was converted for religious use.
Arthur Winfield, project leader for the OpenSpace Trust in the United Kingdom, which is restoring the chapel as part of a community-based redevelopment of the East Kirk sanctuary, explained that two parts of the kirk had been outfitted as a prison for witches arrested in the Aberdeen witch hunt- the stone-vaulted chapel of St Mary and the kirk’s lofty steeple, which was the largest structure in the city at the time.
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In the winter of 1597, when those accused of witchcraft awaited trial and likely execution, neither location would have been warm. According to Winfield: “In the winter nowadays, the temperature gets down to 3 degrees (Celsius) in St Mary’s Chapel, and I guess it would be even colder up in the spire.”
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In the 16th century, witch hunting in Scotland was carried out by royal commissions, not mobs wielding pitchforks. As a result, Aberdeen’s city archives now have meticulous historical documents of the 1597 witch trials and executions, including payments to a local blacksmith for the iron rings and shackles used to detain convicted witches at the Kirk of St Nicholas.
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The city records also include the costs of the rope, wood, and tar that were eventually used to burn the guilty witches at the stake in front of enormous audiences on Castle Hill and Heading Hill in Aberdeen. According to the University of Edinburgh’s online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, most condemned were strangled to death before their bodies were burned.
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According to Chris Croly, a historian at the University of Aberdeen- Aberdeen’s Great Witch Hunt of 1597 was one phase of a wave of witch persecutions across Scotland sparked by the witchcraft laws laid down by King James VI of Scotland who later became James I of England in 1603.
Croly explained, “It is often said that Aberdeen burned more witches than anywhere else — that may not be entirely accurate, but what is absolutely accurate is that Aberdeen has the best civic records of witch burning in Scotland, and so it can appear that way.”
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According to Croly’s account, the wave of witchcraft persecution began in Europe in the 15th century and reached Scotland in the 1590s. It later proceeded into the Americas in the 17th century, culminating in the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693.
At the time, many Protestant and Catholic authorities agreed that witchcraft was the result of witches “communing with the devil” and that biblical text authorized their execution. Croly said, “That’s how this wave can sweep through both Protestant and Catholic countries.”
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Two members of the same family were implicated in one of Aberdeen’s most famous cases of the 1597 witch trials. Jane Wishart, the mother, was found guilty of 18 counts of witchcraft, including casting spells that caused illness in her neighbors, enticing a mystery brown dog to attack her son-in-law after a quarrel, and dismembering a corpse placed on the gallows to collect materials for her magic.
Wishart’s son, Thomas Leyis, was also convicted of leading a coven of witches who danced with the devil in Aberdeen’s fish market area at midnight. Both mother and son were strangled and burned, and according to municipal records, the peat, tar, and wood for Leyis’ pyre cost “3 pounds, 13 shillings, and 4 pence.
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The East Kirk of St Nicholas was the site of a large archeological investigation in 2006 and 2007. The project is called the “Mither Kirk Project,” from the Lowland Scots phrase for “mother church.”
The suspected witches’ bodies were not discovered at the spot. Croly speculated that they would have been buried elsewhere, on “unhallowed land.” However, he stated that the excavations had given archaeologists an unprecedented view into the life of the city’s people from the 11th to the 18th century.
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Most of the dead were buried before the 1560s when the Scottish Protestant Reformation prohibited burials inside churches. But the practice was profitable and persisted on a small scale until the 18th century, he said.
The excavations also uncovered evidence of prior church buildings dating to the 11th century beneath the existing kirk and the graves of nine babies laid out in an arc beside an 11th-century wall — presumably the victims of a sickness pandemic, according to Croly.
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The Mither Kirk Project aims to host a burial ceremony later this year to reinter the dead in a vault beneath the existing floor level now that archaeological studies on the bodies from the kirk have been completed.
The former “witch prison” in St Mary’s Chapel will be redeveloped as a “contemplative space” at a later date, according to Arthur Winfield. He said, “That space will be kept as an area of peace and tranquility — essentially, it is going to be respected for the chapel that it was and will be again.”
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