North Berwick witch trials
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The North Berwick witch trials were the trials in 1590 of a number of people from East Lothian, Scotland, accused of witchcraft in the St Andrew's Auld Kirk in North Berwick. They ran for two years, and implicated over seventy people. These included Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, on charges of high treason.
The "witches" allegedly held their covens on the Auld Kirk Green, part of the modern-day North Berwick Harbour area. The confessions were extracted by torture in the Old Tolbooth, Edinburgh. The main source for this story was published in a 1591 pamphlet Newes from Scotland and was subsequently published in King James's dissertation on contemporary necromancy titled Daemonologie in 1597.
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