Bessie Dunlop: She Would Not Leave Her Husband and Children for Fairyland

Bessie said she could not leave her husband and children, even for fairyland. The man offering to take her there was supposed to be dead. Her account of him became evidence against her.

On 8 November 1576, Bessie Dunlop was tried in Edinburgh for witchcraft, found guilty and sentenced to death. She was a married woman from Lyne, near Dalry in Ayrshire, who treated sickness and helped people search for missing possessions. When she was questioned about how she knew what to do, she gave her interrogators the name of her adviser.

Thom Reid.

At home there was a husband, Andrew Jack, and children, and cattle the household depended on. In Bessie's account, her dealings with Reid began when she had only just risen from childbed. Her husband was gravely ill. A child was sickly. Her cattle were sickening too. She described driving them out to pasture near Monkcastle, crying as she went, when an elderly man with a grey beard approached her. He wore old-fashioned grey clothes and carried a white wand. He greeted her by name and asked about her troubles.

He told her that her husband would recover, though her child would die. Then, she said, he went into a hole in a dyke and was gone. When he came back, the help he offered arrived with conditions.

Reid wanted her to deny her Christianity. In return, he held out the prospect of goods, clothing and cattle, the very things her household had been crying out for that day. Bessie said she refused. When he wanted her to go with him, she explained that she lived with her own husband and children and could not leave them.

There was a family at home.

Reid, she maintained, had been killed at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, nearly thirty years earlier. Yet he kept visiting her in the fields near her house and at her own door, and he now lived among the fairies. She described meeting twelve of them, eight women and four men, who belonged to the court of Elfland. They wanted her to come away with them. They told her to say nothing about their visit.

She also spoke of a stout woman who had come to the door during her last childbed and asked for a drink. Bessie said she had given her one. Later, Reid told her that the visitor was the Queen of Elfland, and that the queen had commanded him to help her. Even the fairy queen, in the story Bessie told, had entered her life through the door of a house with a woman lying in childbed inside.

People came to Bessie with troubles of their own. There were sick children and sick animals, stolen goods and lost belongings. Some of the people who came were ladies of good family. She mixed remedies from ginger, liquorice, cloves and aniseed, and she was paid in kind rather than coin. She never claimed the knowledge as her own. Reid, she said, had taught her the herbs, and when someone needed help, she asked him.

It was an honest answer. It was also the most dangerous one she could have given.

Among the things she described was a green silk lace, which she said Reid had given her. He told her to tie it around a labouring woman's left arm, beneath her clothing, against the skin. The man she had first met in the weeks after her own childbirth was now, in her account, helping other women through theirs. When her questioners asked whether she could still help women in childbirth, she said she had lost the thread.

Scotland had made witchcraft a capital offence in 1563. The law covered practising sorcery and claiming such knowledge, and it also threatened the people who sought help from anyone who professed it. The danger ran through both sides of every visit to a door like Bessie's. The law did not ask whether a remedy worked. It asked where the knowledge had come from.

Bessie's prosecution concerned sorcery, incantations and the invocation of spirits. Harmful magic was not the basis of her conviction. The visits she described, the advice she said she received and the years she had kept consulting Reid supplied the substance of the case. What she called help, the court called dealing with spirits.

She had confessed at Dalkeith on 20 September. In November the case reached its verdict in Edinburgh. Her refusals stood in the record beside everything else she had said. Turning down fairyland did not cancel the admission that she had kept asking its messenger for advice.

Bessie had told them why she would not go away with him. Her husband and children were at home. On 8 November 1576, the court sentenced her to death.