ABSTRACT
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, prosecutions and executions for witchcraft in Scotland declined in number and eventually came to an end. The decline was marked by a reduction in the number of trials, a rise in the number of acquittals, and a drop in the execution rate. The decline began in the early 1660s in the wake of the largest witch-hunt the country had ever experienced, but it took more than 50 years for the trials to end altogether. The decline did not follow a linear path. After the hunt of 1661–2, there were brief local panics in 1678 in East Lothian and again in 1697 at Paisley. The overall trend, however, was unmistakable. The witch-hunts that occurred after 1662 claimed far fewer lives than those of the 1590s or of the mid-seventeenth century, and the number of individual prosecutions was gradually reduced to a trickle. The last executions recorded in the central records of the country took place in 1706, while the last trial, one of questionable legality, occurred in 1727, a mere nine years before the British parliament repealed the Scottish witchcraft law of 1563. The British statute of 1736 officially determined that witchcraft in Scotland, as well as in England, was no longer a crime.
