(Noted Elswhere)

Witch trials occurred in Edinburgh from 1542 to around 1700; the first convicted witch was sent to St Andrews for execution, but later on Edinburgh tried and executed witches from all over Scotland. Most were strangled and then burnt. The last victim to die in the city was Marion Purdie, who died of cold and hunger in prison in 1684. There are occasional mentions of music associated with witchcraft in the records of Edinburgh trials, but with one exception, they seem not to have any special ritual texts. The exception is the Witches Song, whose first two lines come from the trial of the witches of North Berwick, accused of raising a storm in an attempt to drown King James VI in 1591. The couplet was quoted in a credulous pamphlet of the time, Newes from Scotland, as being the text of a “reel” sung by the witches to the accompaniment of a Jew’s harp. There are additional lines quoted in a book of 1949 by Thomas Davidson, Rowan Tree and Red Thread, as if they had the same origin, which have since been sung as if they were authentic, but as far as I can tell he made them up. The tune is my attempt at making sense of an incoherent manuscript of Lady John Scott’s from the mid-19th century; she had it prepared by a copyist who seems to have left off the end of the tune. She only gives music for the two older lines. John Leyden, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, said the tune was Fut before gossep, now untraceable. North Berwick is of course not in Edinburgh, but the alleged conspiracy involved people in the city as well as in Fife.

Kilt Thy Coat Maggie is from the Skene Manuscript: a trial report says that John Douglas and the witches of Tranent danced to it on 3 May 1659, along with another tune, Hulie the bed will fa’ or Come this way with me, which survived until recent times as a nursery rhyme:

Hoolie, the bed’ll fa!
Wha’ll fa wi’t?
Twa een, twa hands,
And twa bonnie feet.
Hoolie, the bed’ll no fa!
Wha’ll no fa wi’t?
Wee Robin Redbreist
Soond asleep.

A more explicit version was sung by the Scots emigrant Robert Gordon at the Tuesday Club, Annapolis, Maryland in 1745; “jog hooly” means “thrust gently”. Most likely the first two lines were a chorus and there are two verses here. No tune was recorded for this one either.

Jog hooly good man, or the bed’ll fa,
Jog hooly good man, or the bed’ll fa,
The bed is made of rotten timmer.
And if it fa’s it’l smoor our good mither
And she’ll cry out and shame us a’.
The bed, its tied at head and feet,
With simmer won hay and that’s right sweet,
And in comes the crummie cow she eats it a,
Jog hooly good man or the bed’ll fa.

George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685) reports the testimony of Margaret Hamilton, strangled and burned thirty years before:

She was asked, if ever she had any pleasure in [the Devil’s] company? “Never much, says she, but one night going to a dancing upon Pentland-hills, he went before in the likeness of a rough tanny dog, playing on a pair of pipes; the spring he played, says she, was, ‘The silly bit chicken gar cast it a pickle, and it will grow meikle.’ And coming down the hill when we had done, which was the best sport, he carried the candle in his bottom, under his tail, which played ay wig-wag, wig-wag.”