Script

The Witches of Scotland: How a New Tartan Became A Living Memorial

Jo: In late February this year a new entry was quietly made into the official Scottish Register of Tartans, number 14651. It says: “This design was created to memorialise those who suffered as a result of The Witchcraft Act 1563 to 1736 in Scotland. This tartan will be woven to make products to help create a ‘living memorial’. The black & grey colours are intended to represent both the dark times of this period and the ashes of those burned. It also incorporates red & pink colours, symbolic of the legal tapes used to bind papers both during that time and now”. There was no publicity around it, it was just a paper design, but it turned the lives of Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi upside down.

Zoe Venditozzi: We didn’t even get a chance to tell people that we designed it. Turns out there’s people in America who watch the Tartan Register like hawks. And when they see something new, they shared it, which is exactly what happened. Somebody who we don’t know, who had no knowledge of the campaign as far as we could see, saw that the Witches of Scotland Memorial Tartan had been registered. He shared it to people he knew, they shared it, and it, it went viral. And then we had all these people going, oh my God, when can I buy this? And we were like, oh my God, we don’t even know what we’re doing with this. This is an idea. It doesn’t exist yet. This is something that Claire Campbell at Prickly Thistle has invented and designed for us. And so, then that’s all it was there’s the description on the Register of what it means symbolically. There’s a picture, a little picture of what it would look like. And that’s all it was at that point.

JA: That’s Zoe Venditozzi – one half of a remarkable duo, who are the Witches of Scotland Campaign. Since that day it hasn’t stopped: the tartan is now rolling off the mills – but don’t ask for a metre of it just yet, it’s all been snapped up in advance and there’s a waiting list of more than 5,000 people. So, what’s going on here? Why should a tartan to commemorate events of hundreds of years ago in one small country be disappearing off the shelves even before it has been physically made? Is this to do with the power of the story or the textile, or is it a combination of both? And is this just a story of the past or are there ripples of this that come down the years to us today? Welcome to Haptic & Hue’s Tales of Textiles. I’m jo Andrews, a handweaver interested what textiles tell us about ourselves and our communities, stories that go far beyond the written word and often explore the lives of those who had little or no voice. Nowhere is this truer than in this episode about the terrible injustice of the accusations of witchcraft made against thousands of people, mainly women, across Europe and America between the mid 1500s and the mid 1700s. But unravelling this tale means encountering violence, torture and terrible abuse and if that is not for you, then listen no further. Scotland holds an unenviable and almost unbelievable record of have accused more people of witchcraft in this time than any other nation, Here’s Claire Mitchell:

Claire Mitchell: It does. It does. So, at the moment, it is thought that approximately 4,000 people were accused, 85% of that number being women. And of those approximately two thirds were executed. Some were just banished from wherever they lived to go into the next place where no doubt, of course, a new woman in town by herself, she’s gonna get accused of witchcraft pretty soon after that, I would imagine.

JA: But Claire and those who have researched specific local areas think that the numbers are probably much higher.

Claire:  One of the people that we’ve come to know along this path and who was involved and interested in witchcraft and took it up, Judith Langland Scott, she has researched her local area in Forfar, and the record shows, I think that there was something like 19 women in Forfar that were accused of witchcraft. But what Judith has done is she has gone back and looked at not the parish records for who who’d been executed. She has followed the money, and she’s looked at how many candles were bought to keep women awake for days on end whilst asking them questions, when was rope bought for executions. And she’s followed the money to show that there were a number more executions than we have official records for. So, the reason why I say is approximately 4,000 is because there was probably a lot more. Just to give you for instance, in records seeing that women were killed as witches. One record for example, just says on, on this date, sundry witches were killed,

Jo: Which just means a number

Claire: Indeed. So, we, we have no way of telling, but I would think it, it’s a lot more.

JA: Claire is a senior lawyer and she and Zoe set up the Witches of Scotland campaign and podcast, after she took her dogs for a lunch time walk five years ago – a walk that involved passing a much-loved Edinburgh landmark – the statue of Wojtek the bear who served with the Polish Army in World War Two and was retired to Edinburgh.

Claire: And one day I was in the Appeal Court in the morning and had to go back after lunch and went to get my dogs and took them down to the park. And I must have been in some mood stomping about, and I was thinking about public spaces and the lack of women’s visibility and the fact that if you, if you beamed yourself down to Princes Street Gardens and you looked around, you would not know that there were, were any women. And I got to a point in my walk where I was standing beside Wojtek the Bear, the life-size statue. And I was like, this is ridiculous. There’s a lifestyle statue of a bear here. And I know the story of Wojtek because of it, but I don’t know the story of any of the women. What, what were the women doing in the Second World War? What part did they have to play? And I looked above Wojtek’s head, I’ve said many times, and I look up at the Esplanade, and I thought, not only are we not recording the brilliant things that women do, we’re also not recording women’s history. I know thousands of women were executed in Scotland as witches in one of the bloodiest miscarriages of justice that Scotland has had. And nobody talks about it and nobody knows about it. And we don’t have any recognition of it. We don’t have statues and memorials, we’re not taught about it in schools. And I thought, I want to do something here. So I, I went back with the dogs and I wrote, I want a pardon for all those who were convicted of witchcraft. I want an apology for all those that were accused. Because many died, still being accused and not yet convicted. And I want a memorial so that we can remember the women that were executed as witches in Scotland. And that is where it all started.

JA: Part of what set Claire on this mission were the old legal documents she was reading:

Claire: Every day, day in day out, I’m thinking about miscarriages of justice, issues of fairness. And I’m in this incredibly old building. 1532 Faculty of Advocates are so old. I’m wearing a, 19th century man’s wig and a man’s gown and living and working in the Old Town in Edinburgh. I love history. Anyway, I love finding out about it. And so, I became interested, first of all in investigating the bloody Mackenzie, the prosecutor, the top prosecutor, in fact, Lord Advocate of his time during the Reformation. And I was in the Faculty Library when I came across a book, which was a book written by someone else documenting Mackenzie. And he said that Mackenzie had been to a trial of a woman accused of witchcraft. And she was being asked to confess, she was being talked to over hours and hours. And she said in her distress, Can I be a witch and not know it? to her persecutor. And for some reason, that just really affected me in a way that hearing about the fact that thousands of women were executed as witches didn’t, I just listened to that woman in her state of distress being surrounded by all these men, her knowing she wasn’t a witch, that she wasn’t communing with the devil, that she hadn’t renounced her baptism, all these sorts of things. And, she’s trying to square the circle. She’s trying to say, can I, could I be a witch and not know it? Can you be right? And also me not realize it. And I just felt so desperately sad for this woman.

JA: The minute you start to look into this it’s impossible for the plight of those accused of witchcraft not to touch you deeply. It doesn’t matter that this was hundreds of years ago the horror of what happened to them is still very real, ordinary people accused of bizarre crimes in their own communities by local churchmen and the state, stripped, shaved, searched for marks of the Devil and tortured to extract confessions and then banished or put to a savage death: here’s Zoe:

Zoe: It’s a story that’s got it all. You’ve got the big guys, the Church and the law against the little guys. And in this case it’s women. Mostly women, but definitely people that didn’t have much power. You know, it was very rare that it was rich or literate people that were accused. It did happen, but mostly it was kind of ordinary, so-called people out in the different communities in Scotland. And it’s a story that once you start reading about the details initially, of course it’s horrifying and gripping because you’re literally talking about people being kind of snatched off the streets, treated appallingly. You’ve got all the things that modern true crime podcast listeners particularly like, you know, it is brutal, it’s horrible, it’s an abuse of power. But then when you go beyond that and you start thinking about, well, why did this juggernaut roll into action? You can see the lines between then and now, I think. And once you start thinking about the accused as being real individual people, it’s really easy to make the connection think, oh my God, you know, that’s, that’s where I live, or I visited there, or my family are from there. This isn’t something that happened in a culture that’s entirely alien to me, because these people weren’t really any different to us. You know, they weren’t necessarily, you know, stupid or barbaric people. it is only a few hundred years ago, and I know some people might go, well, a few hundred years ago, I mean, that’s ridiculous, it’s a long time ago, but really it’s not, you know, they, they spoke very similarly to us. They obviously looked like us, you know, like, it, it wasn’t really that different.

JA: And this isn’t just a Scottish story, every European country and, famously, some of the American States, also entered into this moral panic about witches during the same era, which is partly why the tartan seems to have such wide appeal. Juliane Tamasy’s ten times great grandfather, John Carrington and his wife, Joan were both executed as witches in Connecticut in the 1600s.

Julianne Tamasy: Well, when I, I read the news on Instagram <laugh> I, I have to say that like I was tingling from basically my head to my toes. And I think there was just something that I think was so right fitting and proper in designing a tartan to remember those people. I mean, how incredibly Scottish can that be? But I think more than that, I think that textiles hand work, at least in, in my experience, has been something that has been the domain of women. And so whether they were the ones who were spinning the wool, you know making yarns, making threads, they were weaving creating garments of, of all kinds, blankets for the home, et cetera. It just seems so right and fitting to have a textile to commemorate these women.

JA: But a great deal is being asked of a piece of fabric because the extent of what happened in Scotland was extraordinary. Around 3,000 at minimum executed, compared to around 50 in the 1600s across the whole of New England. Here’s Zoe:

Zoe: I think at the heart of it was the idea that women are, were, but I’m gonna say are because some people still believe this, inferior to men. So not just physically, but intellectually, morally, spiritually. We are, were inferior. And because of that, the devil could sweet talk us into doing his bidding. And his bidding was to kill the King initially when it was James First and Sixth, that that started this kind of drive. But then as time went on, it was to ruin the fabric of Good Scottish Christian society, that the devil was out to conquer his, his big enemy. And that was, that was God and all his godly people. And I think it became a really big part of Scottish identity. We are keeping the Devil out. And then of course, wherever the Scots went, this was brought with them. So you can see in countries where the Empire went out, they brought the witchcraft laws with them. Because naturally we unfortunately when things are tough, we look for a scapegoat. We blame the scapegoat and think, well, you know, this person is working for the Devil. If I get rid of them, I get rid of the Devil’s terrible influence. Life goes back to normal. My crops will grow again. You know, my cow will give milk again. My baby will get better. I will have had revenge and, you know, in a Christian way from the death of my mother or whatever it is that you’re, that your fault, your problem was. And I think people really clung onto that idea. And I think that’s something that we see still. You know, we, we see that when things are difficult, we look for somebody to blame.

JA: Scotland was a society in which magic was an accepted part of life and you can trace the vestiges of the old ways of both pre-Christian thought in this as well as the fear, after the Reformation, of a reversion to the miracles of Catholicism. In this newly Protestant state it was short step from accusing them of heresy to branding them a witch.

Zoe: But you know, like, mate, no doubt about it, witches were, were very feared, you know, they were really seen as being powerful and they were absolutely in league with the devil, not this modern interpretation of witches that it’s what some people would think of as white magic. It’s like helping. It’s, it’s a kindness, it’s women’s power. The definition of witches that we’re fighting against with the campaign is people giving themselves over to the devil for terrible diabolic power, right? So that’s a very different type of witch. And I think over the years, because of film and TV and distance and lack of knowledge and general ignorance about the witch trials, witch has become a kind of a jokey laughable thing. You know, women dress up as sexy witches at Halloween potentially, or women are, you know, cariacature as being looking like witches, you know, and there’s, there’s this kind of idea. I think there’s still a thread of fear through it, like the idea of a witch in the woods that might eat your children. I think there’s still a little bit of that, you know, watch herself, she could do something wrong with you, but we’re not a magical society anymore, so we don’t really view that in real terms. When the Witch Trials were happening, it was absolutely a magical society. If you lost your laundry, you could go and pay a charmer to do a charm to try and find your laundry and bring it back. And that wasn’t problematic because it wasn’t bad devil magic, but we believed in fairies, you know, we believed in, in these sort of strange, supernatural things.

JA: At the heart of Scotland’s Witch trials sits the troubled figure of King James the 6^th of Scotland, later King James the First of England as well, when he succeeded his cousin Queen Elizabeth in 1603. He considered himself a great expert on witchcraft, he led witch trials personally and wrote a tract about witches called Daemonologie in which he described the ‘fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devill, the Witches or enchanters’. Here’s Claire:

Claire: So, James the sixth, as he was originally the sixth of Scotland, decided to marry and he decided to marry a queen in Denmark to shore up the relationship between Scots and the Danes. And he tried to get across to marry her. And then he tried to do that, not once I think, but twice. And the whole time was bedevilled, and I use that word, advisedly with bad weather. He went across to Denmark where a number of witchcraft trials had taken place. And it said that he spoke to people who were philosophers at the time, who spoke to him about witchcraft and, such. It said that when he came back from Denmark with his new wife, Anne, again, coming across on a terrible weather where their lives were in peril. He arrived back in Scotland with his new queen. The dowry that he was going to present with his new queen had come from one part of Scotland to another part of Scotland and had sunk. Everything had gone wrong financially. Everything had gone wrong with the crossings.

JA: So, he looked for someone to blame:

Claire: I should pause there to say that there’s a lot of historical comment that James was gay. And there’s a lot of historians who subscribe to that view that may very well have been the case. But what was also clear was he did want to cement his relationship with Anne. He did want to have progeny to take over the role that, that he had. So, he came back and he thought to himself, the devil is out to get me. He’s been trying to kill me, to stop me having a family, to stop my wife: who, who has done this? And then he set about trying to investigate who had caused these freak weather incidents that were trying to kill him.

JA: His interest focused on North Berwick on the coast not far from Edinburgh:

Claire: Accusations started flying because if the king says the devil is afoot in our town, then who is it? Suspicion rises, fingers are pointed. So that woman was out very late at night. I saw her walking back somewhere. That woman shouted at me in, in the street because we did have an argument. And then two days later, my cat got sick. And all these sorts of behaviours turned into witchcraft accusations, which James turned into not only being the accuser, but he also became part of the prosecution team, effectively. He interviewed witnesses that were brought to his inner chamber and sat with the Privy Council where he interviewed them. And also, I suppose technically he would’ve been a witness as well as one of the people who was seeing that the witchcraft was being done to him. And of course, what happened was women were brought in, they were investigated, they were kept watched and waking. So what would happen was men would just come in and say, tell us about the time that you’re with the devil. You have given your life to the devil. You’ve renounced your baptism. Tell us about what sex was like with the devil, because that was very important as well. Tell us about what you’ve done, the devil’s bidding, all these sorts of things. And they would keep women awake for days on end.

JA: And they were physically tortured: their fingers crushed, their feet mashed and ropes tightened around their skulls. Of course, they confessed to anything suggested to them and more and more people were accused and brought into the trials. By 1592 70 people from the small town of North Berwick had been accused, broken and executed, an appalling number.

Claire: And what most historian experts say is that they were strangled usually with something like a garotte rather than being strangled manually. And then in order to make sure they didn’t revenant, they didn’t come back from the dead to do the devil’s bidding. They would burn them very, very occasionally in Scotland. Burning was the cause of death. So the women were still alive when they were executed. That was for someone who was a particularly bad example of a witch,

JA: All of this overseen by King James. Zoe who works as a teacher sees him as less an evil man than a very frightened one. Remember he was the son of Mary Queen of Scots – It’s likely she organised the murder of his father and then James was removed from her at the age of one when she was forced to abdicate:

Zoe: So, I think it looks like he is a, was a vulnerable, traumatized child. And then here’s this idea. So, I’m the king. I’ve been put here literally by God, I’m God’s person on earth. And then that kind of the two sides of his identity, I’m this wee boy that was left by my mum, and I need to find somebody to kind of blame and deal with that. But much, much, you know, more hugely, the devil is out to get me because I am God’s man here. You know? And I think those two sides of him kind fuse and that makes sense. Then that witches, I don’t wanna get too kind of psycho babbly here, but mostly women. His mum had been presented to him very badly, and then disappeared and then had been killed. I think all those things kind of fused and and I think he was killing his mum. And really probably what he needed was some nurture. Now I know they weren’t into that then particularly, but I think that that that does explain a lot of it. I mean, it’s obviously not just that it was the religious sort of framework at those times. It was the philosophical framework. They were trying to shore up this sort of new approach to the way that Scotland was gonna be in Scotland’s philosophy, in Scotland’s religion. And one way of doing that was by saying, right, look how tough we are. We’re tough on crime, we’re tough on the causes of crime, essentially, you know, and the crime is witches and witches are out there causing trouble for us, good godly Scots, and we need to control them, and this is how we control them.

JA: Zoe and Claire set up a great podcast to campaign for an apology and a pardon for those accused and convicted of witchcraft in Scotland. It’s called The Witches of Scotland: give it listen if you’d like to know more because this is a much more complex subject than I am able to do justice to here. They have also just published a book called How to Kill a Witch – A Guide for the Patriarchy which accessibly lays out what we know about the witch trials and relates them directly to modern day social media and misogyny. More on the webpage for this episode. As a direct result of their campaign, both State and Church in Scotland have officially apologised and a Pardon for those convicted is now on the cards. But it is the memorial that has proved tricky. To begin with they thought about a statue, but how would it be paid for, and where should it go? Lots of places wanted it because so many had connections to the witch trials. And then Claire went to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition about Tartan in Dundee:

Claire: And all that I had thought about tartan before were Burn’s Nights, ceilidhs, men wearing military kilts, posh men, I’ll just call it, posh men wearing military kilts to events. And it was to me as a working-class person, not the material of my life or the material of my choice. To me, it was an upper-class thing that people wore on fancy nights out where they would wear a bib and tucker and a a kilt. And it wasn’t something that, that women wore. And I went to the V & A opening night and I saw hundreds of people walking about fabulously dressed in tartan colours of every hue. Different types of material. Some people were wearing, It as headdresses, some people were wearing it as cloaks, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is what tartan should be about. Tartan should be about for everybody. It’s so immediately identifiable as Scottish and the vibrancy and interest people had because you were saying, oh, what tartan’s that and what’s the story behind that?

JA: And she had a moment of inspiration.

Claire: And I suddenly thought to myself, oh my goodness, why couldn’t we use tartan as the National Memorial? Why couldn’t we say we have made a tartan? This tartan is to memorialize those people killed as witches in Scotland and make it available for everybody who wants it to wear it and be a talking point for the history of women in Scotland. How we need to do better, misogyny, feminism, all these really interesting things that we can explore, but we can, if we explore it through positive conversations about fabric and about what we’re wearing and what that means to our personality, it makes it less confrontational than the patriarchy if it’s just, it’s just a way of talking and opening up a conversation. It looks visually stunning. It’s Scottish.

JA: The design Claire and Zoe worked out with Claire Campbell at Prickly Thistle is carefully considered. It has a background of black squares:

Claire: And those black squares are to represent the dark times that the Witchcraft Act was enforced. Each square is 173 threads, and that’s to mark 173 years the Witchcraft Act was in force. So the colour and also the size of the square denotes that history. The colours around that are a pinky red and a grey. The grey is to memorialize the history of the women that were turned to ash. That was what was left of them. And we wanted something in there to signify all, all that they had come to be was Ash. And so, we wanted to, to make very, very clear the very serious outcomes of the Witchcraft Act accusations. The third colour was the pinky red colour. And I, in particular, was keen to let people know that the witchcraft trials weren’t mob justice. They weren’t people taking up with crazy ideas. The, the idea was a, a state run, a legal thing. All these were legal trials that went on with witnesses and experts, experts talking about the Devil’s Mark, expert witch prickers, pricking people’s skin. So as in the modern day, these were proper legal trials. So, I wanted to take the pinkish red ribbon that we had then and still have now to wrap up legal documents. I wanted that to form part of the tartan as well, to remind people that, that this was something done within the law. And I think that’s really, really important because I think people believe that the law will protect them from things that go wrong. But the law is only a procedure put in place. And if you have belief systems which are fundamentally wrong the law will apply those belief systems in the same way as they will if they’re right. So, it’s a warning. It’s to let people know that these things were legal and the law will not protect you in that way, which is kind of a strange thing for a lawyer to say. But it, it’s an important aspect that, that people I think should remember. In between those colours there are three piped strands, and those are to represent the three strands of the Witches of Scotland campaign, the memorial, the apology, and the pardon. So those are the three thin pipings of white strands in between.

JA: The academic Marion Gibson says in her book, Witchcraft, that the aim of all witch trials ancient and modern is to exercise power over others – to silence, to hurt, to judge, to kill. What is interesting about the Witches of Scotland tartan is although no-one’s life can brought back, those women and men accused of being witches were utterly destroyed, this comes as a kind of echo after all these hundreds of years, one that says here we are, whatever you have done to us, we live on in this fabric, and for me there is a real magic in that. A magic that many others, it seems, want a part of.

Zoe: The interest in the tartan is far exceeds people that know about the campaign, right? I’d say maybe a third are campaign people. Okay. The rest of it are people that have seen it on Instagram or they read the article that the Smithsonian Museum put out, or they’ve got friends that told them about it or they’re in groups where one person’s heard about it in the group and said, oh my God, you need to know about this. So, we’ve been contacted by people like Americans and Canadians that, that are involved in competing in highland games and they’ve got in touch and said, right, we want our whole team kitted out in this. And I think part of the reason is because it looks great, it’s black and with some red and some white and some grey, it’s gorgeous. I personally think it’s a very cool tartan. Okay. It’s modern and it’s striking, it just looks brilliant. Okay? Some of it is because the story of it, of where it’s being made, people really like that. But I think most people like it because it’s a rebellious thing, you know, it’s revolutionary and a lot of people have said that to us. They want to wear it, particularly Americans want to wear it so they can kind of do the twos up to the patriarchy and to the men that are running that country at the moment. And they want it to be a kind of a form of, of rebellion and of standing up and, and saying, right, I’m telling you who I am by wearing this tartan. I’m a woman that will not be pushed down. You know, I’m a woman that, that has struggled against things and at the end of the day, I’m a survivor. Now that, that’s all really complicated because we’re talking about women that didn’t survive and it’s a memorial tartan.

JA: A couple of years ago, Julianne Tamasy discovered that her many times great grandfather and great grandmother, John Harrington and his wife Joan, were both found guilty of consorting with Satan as witches and hanged in Connecticut in March 1651. They left a 10 year old son John – from whom she is directly descended – and an infant daughter, Rebecca:

Julianne: I was stunned, to be perfectly honest. Really stunned, it hit me very hard because I think many of us know from experiences in our life what it’s like to be accused of something that you haven’t done. And to be accused of something that was a matter of life and death and to be found guilty of it is just profoundly tragic, profoundly saddening to me. And as a mother, I can’t imagine going to the gallows and leaving children behind, and a father as well, because I think children were extremely precious to their parents. So, I can’t imagine what that was like for them at that time and for their children. And one of the things I’ve often wondered, were their children present for the hanging? Because I know in many instances, children were present at hangings.

JA: Julianne has been through the court records and, just as in Scotland, has found them frustrating in their lack of detail:

Julianne: I think what’s strange about this record is there’s minute detail about all kinds of crimes that occurred in Wethersfield and in these settlements, but very little about John and Joan. We don’t know who accused them. We do know who the jury was. They are listed and there are town elders or elders from the Hartford area. But we don’t know who accused them, what precisely they were accused of. We don’t know if they pled innocent or if they pled guilty. We don’t know if they were tortured, because many times they would torture a confession out of people. So there, there’s really nothing. And if you compare it to, for instance, the Salem Witch trials or other Connecticut witch trials, there is precious little incident or information about them.

JA: She says that in all the lurid stories about American witchcraft trials, it is the families who have been forgotten.

Julianne: You know, I, I think growing up in the United States and particularly living in New England, witchcraft to a large degree, I think has been fetishized because of the Salem Witch trials. And so many times we’re thinking it about it as like a curiosity or you know, perhaps it’s a distant memory, but we don’t really think about the impact that it had upon the people in those families. You know, it’s something that I come to and I think of very often, and I think because of the Salem witch trials, the incidences of, of people being condemned as witches in other parts of the colonies were overlooked, particularly Connecticut.

JA: In the 1650s these small communities were under immense strain.

Julianne: There had been a lot of hostilities between the, the settlers and many of the indigenous people of, of Connecticut. On top of that there had been like a horrific hurricane, I’ve heard it was one of the worst hurricanes that we know of. It just devastated the coastline of Connecticut. So, crops were wipe wiped out, settlements wiped out. All peoples were feeling pressure coming from all around them. And then on top of it, you have like this a very fundamentalist religion where everything is black and white. There’s really no room for nuance, and I think a whole bunch of, of superstition.

JA: Julianne says people may no longer be charged with witchcraft but the urge to judge and shame hasn’t disappeared.

Julianne: No, I think we still do it. We do it in other ways. And I think that shadow is always lingering amongst humanity and looking for the right time to, to re-emerge. It just, it may take different shapes. We may not be or calling people witches but we certainly can scapegoat people. Maybe not we, you and me proper, but our society or political leaders. I don’t think it ever goes away. And so, there may not be witches, but the effects of being scapegoated are devastating.

JA: And there are many places in the world where it is still common to accuse the old, the odd, the ill or just the inconvenient of witchcraft as a way of judging them or gaining power over them. Connecticut has its own Witch Exoneration Project which has succeeded in having those who were executed pardoned by the State Senate. At present the campaign is fundraising for a monument to the victims. There are other monuments too – one in the far north of Norway, Finmark, where at one time over 4% of the population was accused of witchcraft. It was designed by Louise Bourgeois. These are deeply moving and sad places, as they should be. Scotland won’t have anything like that, its response has turned out to be something completely different. Here’s Claire.

Claire: The joy of it is that we know people from around the globe have bought this. We know that there are people who are going to be wearing the scarfs, the sashes for their wedding in New Zealand. So, we know that people are going to take that everywhere and ask about it and people are so excited about it. But I want to pick up on what Zoe said about the issue of it being a sign of something. Because one of the important things that Zoe and I latched onto quite early was when people were being accused as witches in Scotland, one of the questions that was asked at their trial as to whether or not they were a quarrelsome dame, and we love that phrase quarrelsome dame because it probably describes both of us quite well in our own ways. But what we want to do is we want to encourage people to be quarrelsome dames. We want to encourage women to take up space, to talk about things, to assert themselves. And one way they can do that is to wear the tartan. I mean, I want to go somewhere one day and be walking along a street and see a woman across the street. It makes me feel quite emotional and walk across a street and see a woman wearing the tartan scarf and be able to go right up to her and go, oh, your ideals are my ideals. And that’s a real interest and a real comfort.

JA: Thank you for listening, when the waiting list has diminished I will put Haptic & Hue’s name down for some of the Tartan and hope to be able to offer it to Friends, but it may be a wait! Thank you to those magnificent quarrelsome dames Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell for trying to right the wrongs of history and for seeing how this story echoes in modern times, and thank you too to Julianne Tamasy for sharing the tragic story of her ancestors’ needless suffering and death. If you would like to see pictures of the memorial Witches of Scotland tartan and links to Zoe and Clare’s new book, as well as more information about witches ancient and modern, then head over to the www.hapticandhue.com/listen and look for Series Seven. Haptic and Hue is hosted by me Jo Andrews. It is edited and produced by Bill Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. It is an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners, who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a Friend of Haptic & Hue. Friends get access to free textile gifts every month and an extra podcast hosted by me and Bill Taylor, where we cover interesting events and the textile news of the day. To join Friends go to www.hapticandhue.com/join.

Its time for our summer break so Tales of Textiles will be back in September with more good textile stories, although Friends of Haptic & Hue will continue for much of the summer. So, until then its good bye from me and enjoy whatever you are making.