Irvine’s notorious role in Scotland’s witch-hunt fever

I did receive a complaint from someone who asked to remain anonymous that I referred last week to the Capitulation of Irvine in 1297 which many Scottish aristocrats signed rather than face the overwhelming power of the armies of Edward I of England.

My correspondent argued that the correct name should be Treaty of Irvine, as “Capitulation” is the English usage, and certainly some local historians and heritage organisations refer to the Treaty as such. Nevertheless having read the document several times, it is clear that Robert the Bruce as Earl of Carrick and numerous other Scottish nobles did indeed put their seal to what can only be described as a “capitulation” and so I’ll stick with that term.

As I explained last week, I relied on the Ayrshire section of the book The New Statistical Account of Scotland (NSA) compiled for the Church of Scotland by the Committee for the Society for the Sons and Daughters of the Clergy and published by Blackwood of Edinburgh in 1845 as a source.

READ MORE: New bid to take historic Glasgow cinema into community hands

I also consulted the works of AJ Morton, widely recognised as the top Ayrshire historian, whose book The Lost Capital Of Scotland convincingly made the case for a new appreciation of Irvine’s ancient past.

That history, as Morton pointed out, was all but dismissed after the creation of Irvine as a New Town in 1966. It took a while for the benefits of its ancient history to be recognised, but no-one can deny that Irvine New Town has a story to tell that goes back more than a millennium.

Last week I showed how Irvine, the last of the five new towns of Scotland, was actually one of our oldest towns and had a good claim to be seen as an ancient capital of this country due to the monarchs who resided there in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Though recognised as a burgh by royal charters, it was not until 1372 that King Robert II formally made Irvine a royal burgh, possibly because his main home was at nearby Dundonald Castle and he probably wanted good relations with his neighbours.

Seagate Castle in Irvine

A few years previously while acting as the High Steward of Scotland, Robert Stewart had given Seagate Castle to Sir Hugh de Eglintoun, effectively making Eglintoun the commander of the town and Constable of the Castle.

The castle at that time was partly a stone edifice. That had replaced the original wooden structure which had stood on the site since the 12th century – it was recorded as a stronghold in 1184.

The castle passed by marriage to the Montgomery or Montgomerie clan, a noble family who rose to prominence under the Stewart

kings, particularly James I who made Alexander Montgomerie a member of his privy council. Montgomerie provided valuable services to the monarchy and was made the 1st Lord Montgomerie in 1445 as recorded in the acts of the Scottish Parliament.

Having been vested with the family lands around Ardrossan, Alexander’s grandson Hugh, the 3rd Lord Montgomerie, was raised to the Earldom of Eglinton by King James IV. The 1st Earl’s great-grandson, also Hugh, became an important figure in the Reformation as the 3rd Earl of Eglinton but he switched to support the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots (below).

He also built the third version of Seagate Castle from 1562 onwards, more as a fortified townhouse than a full-blown castle. There is a plaque at what remains of the castle to show that Mary Queen of Scots visited Seagate in 1563 accompanied by her “Four Maries” – Beaton, Smeaton, Fleming and Livingstone – who were “entertained by Hugh, 3rd Earl of Eglinton, one of her most faithful adherents”.

Although he fought on Mary’s behalf at Langside and was later charged with treason, the 3rd Earl survived and was able to complete the castle before his death in 1585.

To understand Irvine’s history it is necessary to know that the River Irvine and its route to the Firth of Clyde has been a constantly changing entity. The proof of that is that Seagate Castle, which I visited just a few days ago, is in the Seagate which used to overlook the river and harbour but is now several hundred yards inland in the centre of the preserved old town.

In 1965, the author Nigel Tranter, an expert on castles and fortified houses, disagreed with those who said it was a mere townhouse.

READ MORE: Glasgow: Watch as hundreds of pipers march through streets

He wrote of the castle: “Although Seagate Castle stands in Irvine, it is in no sense a town lodging, having all the attributes of a castle or fortalice in its own right, and it may well incorporate all that is left of the strong castle of ‘Irewin’, a stronghold of note in 1184, in the shadow of which the town arose.”

Yet again we have an ancient town growing up around a castle and dependent on the fortunes of a local lord connected to royalty. It’s a pattern we’ve seen over the last 30 weeks, along with arguably one of the saddest parts of Scottish history, the persecution of witches.

It was in the year 1618 with Scotland in the grip of witch-hunting fever, begun largely by King James VI before he moved to become James I of England in 1603, that Irvine gained publicity for the trial and killing of four “witches”.

King James was something of a hero in Irvine as he had signed over all the confiscated land and property of Catholics and their institutions to the townspeople. He gave money for the foundation of King’s School in the town, the forerunner of Irvine Royal Academy.

Ayrshire had seen witch hunting before, notably in 1576 when Bessie Dunlop, the so-called “Witch o’ Dalry” was found guilty of witchcraft and executed by strangulation and burning at the stake. The wife of a farmer, her “crime” had been to consort with fairies and ghosts and predict the future, as she confessed. Deranged, yes, dangerous, no.

The same verdict could be applied to the Irvine witches in 1618. The eminent historian Dr John Strawhorn noted that: “Witches were certainly associated with this locality, because nearby at Patons Thorn, the devil in the shape of a black foal is reputed to have appeared to Margaret Barclay and her associates”.

The wife of burgess Archibald Dein, Margaret Barclay, was young, apparently beautiful and quite feisty – church records had details of a spectacular fallout between Margaret and her sister-in-law Janet Lyal, the wife of John Dein. Some time later Margaret was said to have uttered curses against John Dein and was further alleged to have consorted with an elderly woman Isabel Inch, a travelling juggler John Stewart and a clearly demented Isobel Crawford to bring about the sinking of an Irvine-based trading ship The Gift of God off the coast of Cornwall.

Only two men survived the sinking, with the ship’s co-owners John Dein and Irvine’s Provost Andrew Tran both drowned.

You can imagine the scene in Irvine when the news of the tragedy arrived – some scapegoats had to be found and Isabel Inch was first to be arrested and tortured for a confession.

She managed to escape from her prison and then threw herself off a church tower, dying of her injuries five days later.

READ MORE: Scottish actor Alan Cumming wins prestigious Dorian TV Award

John Stewart also killed himself in jail after he was accused of witchcraft, but not before he had implicated the three women in a fantastical tale of attempts at sorcery using clay models of a ship flung into the sea.

Margaret Barclay was tortured by having iron weights piled on her shins, and not surprisingly she confessed to everything that was suggested to her.

Despite retracting her confessions, she was found guilty by a special justice commission and strangled and burned at the stake.

Isobel Crawford met a similar fate, again after being tortured into confessions – Margaret Barclay had blamed her but withdrew the allegation.

Sir Walter Scott researched the case and wrote about it more than two centuries later. He concluded: “This tragedy happened in the year 1618, and recorded, as it is, very particularly and at considerable length, forms the most detailed specimen I have met with of a Scottish trial for witchcraft — illustrating, in particular, how poor wretches, abandoned, as they conceived, by God and the world, deprived of all human sympathy, and exposed to personal tortures of an acute description, became disposed to throw away the lives that were rendered bitter to them by a voluntary confession of guilt, rather than struggle hopelessly against so many evils.

“It is scarce possible that, after reading such a story, a man of sense can listen for an instant to the evidence founded on confessions thus obtained, which has been almost the sole reason by which a few individuals, even in modern times, have endeavoured to justify a belief in the existence of witchcraft.”

Witch-hunting continued well into the 17th century in and around the town, with 17 witches accused of being part of the “Irvine coven” in 1650.

They were mostly women but two men were also persecuted and all were executed. Three more women were strangled and burned as “witches” in 1658.

To put the Irvine events into context, similar witch-hunts happened all over Scotland even into the 18th century. The ancient towns of Scotland were not always the happiest of places.

The biggest leap forward in the development of Irvine took place in the 1660s and 1670s when a new harbour was created on the river away from the old harbour which had been regularly closed by the effects of silting.

The new harbour still suffered from the fact that a giant sand bar was a feature of the river meeting the sea, but Irvine greatly prospered as a port, and by 1760 was reckoned to be third only to Glasgow and Leith in tonnage of goods imported and exported, with the growth of coal exports to Ireland from the Ayrshire coalfields a huge factor in the town’s success. Shipbuilding also developed on the riverside and continued until after World War II.

Other industries prospered in the 18th century including the manufacture of goods based on locally grown flax. Though then but a tenant farmer’s son, in 1781 our National Bard Robert Burns came to Irvine to learn the trade of flax dressing, an important stage in linen manufacture.

Burns would later write: “Partly thro’ whim and partly that I wished to set about doing something in life, I joined with a flax-dresser in the neighbouring town of Irvine, to learn his trade and carry on the business of manufacturing and retailing flax.”

In this first sojourn of months in a town that greatly broadened his horizons, Burns made many friends through his Masonic connections, and he also met a salty sea captain Richard Brown who was the first man to encourage Burns to have his poetry published.

The Wellwood Burns Centre and Museum in the town’s Eglinton Street is a huge source of information on this important period of the poet’s life and is home to the Irvine Burns Club, founded in 1826 by admirers of Burns including friends from his stay there.

I’ll write more about later developments in Irvine and all the other ancient towns, but for now I must close this series.

Hope you’ve enjoyed it and found it informative.