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Not Just the Tudors
How to Kill a Scottish Witch
01:00:36
At least 4,000 people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland including men. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb investigates with campaigners Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots to from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
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Nearly everyone has heard of the Salem witch trials, in which around 150 people were accused of witchcraft. But with the exception of the North Berwick trials of the 1590s, it is far less well known that In Scotland, between 1563 and 1736, nearly 4,000 individuals were accused as witches, accusing Convicting and executing someone for witchcraft depended on a number of things, including, number one, a prevailing belief in the reality of magic. Number two, a belief that people could be witches and that they had power to do serious harm. Number three, a willingness to accuse your neighbors of witchcraft, which means resting on a narrow precipice in which you both feared them and did not fear them so much that you thought it could rebound on you. Number four, a commitment to eradicating witchcraft from the highest ranks of society, those with the power to create legislation. Number five, a process for gathering evidence which meant people who are willing to act as interrogators. Number six, a judicial process that would then take that evidence seriously. And number seven, a common conviction that those found guilty of witchcraft should be executed. In fact, it's rather amazing that anyone was convicted of witchcraft at all. But they certainly were. And in Scotland, as in most places in Europe, those accused were mostly women, so it also depended on something else. Number eight, a deep patriarchal and misogynistic belief that the vulnerability of older, poorer women would make them susceptible to the devil's charms. Advocate Claire Mitchell and writer Zoe Vendettosi head up Witches of Scotland, a campaign dedicated to seeking justice for those accused of witchcraft in Scotland. A significant milestone was reached on 8th March, 2022, when First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology to those accused of witchcraft. The beginnings of a recognition of this historic injustice. Claire Mitchell and Zoe Vintertozzi's new book, How To Kill a A Guide for the Patriarchy, is a brilliant and witty analysis of the Scottish witch trials, and they join me now to discuss it. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit.
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Welcome, both of you.
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Claire Mitchell
Hi. Thanks so much for having us.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm really delighted to have a chance to speak to you about this book, which is often very dark material and actually we sort of need to give a bit of a warning, I think, because some of the things we're going to be discussing are going to be really quite difficult to hear. But what I also love about it is I laughed out loud. It was commented at home that I was laughing a lot about a book that was based on people being accused of witchcraft and dying for it. So it's very, very witty and insightful. And throughout your book you highlight individual cases and I thought perhaps as we went along we could pick up on a few of those because they really make it real, don't they?
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Claire Mitchell
Yeah, I think so. I think it's really easy with history to think numbers of people in terms of just a kind of a mass and not really think of them as being individual people with individual stories and cares and families and dreams and all the rest of it. So we've always been very clear since we started the campaign, every episode, we record of our companion podcast that we name people that were accused each time, and we give as much detail as we possibly can. And you'll know yourself, Susanna. There's scant information for a lot of cases, but when we do know things, we try and really paint a picture of the people so that people make a connection. You're listening to it and you think, oh, this could have happened to me. How would I have felt in that situation? Because I think that's how you really get across the horrors of it.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. And one of the first that you mention in the book is Elspeth Riosh. Could you tell me about her and also kind of what important first insights her story gives us?
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Claire Mitchell
Well, I think with Elspeth, there's a couple of really interesting things. The first thing for me is that it really paints a picture of Scotland's approach to magic at that point. So magic was seen as being something that was just a part of everyday life. You know, if you lost your laundry, say you'd hung up your laundry and it disappeared, you might go and approach somebody that was a charmer, what was known as a charmer, who would say charms. These people were also known as service magicians. So you'd go along and you'd say, well, what can you do about this? And they might give you a charm, or they might do a spell or something to help you find your laundry. And that wasn't seen as being a bad thing or a negative thing. But over time, that changed because of religion changing. And then, of course, they were thinking in terms of bad magic, you know, or evil. And that was the devil. And that's when things really changed. And the witches, quote, unquote, were accused of being witches. And so I think that what happened with Elspeth Rioch's story is that she supposedly, what her confession was, that she was approached by two men at the side of the loch. And she was from the Highlands, she's right from the far north. And that she was approached by these two men and that they told her, we can tell you how to tell the future if you follow these instructions. So she did what they said, and then she could tell the future. And ultimately she was accused of being a witch because of that and various Things that happened. But the thing that I find really interesting about it is I'm a teacher that works in trauma informed education. And Elspeth's story is heartbreaking. And as a modern reader, and particularly I think as a woman, you look at her story and you think, well, actually, that sounds a lot like a little girl. She was like 12, 13, 14, was approached by two men, is groomed essentially as we think of it now, lo and behold, has a baby. Not long afterwards, she is having a baby, obviously out of wedlock in a very Christian society, and she ends up getting accused of being a witch. I think her father beat her to try and get a confession out of her and then she became a mute off and on for the rest of her life, her quite short life. And I just think that she obviously, well, I would say looks like she was horribly abused. And this story was kind of woven around it to almost make what happened to her, it's not her fault, and it was magical. So that, for me makes it quite a modern story in some ways.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. And you mentioned this kind of changing definition of water, which was in the 16th century, and it'd be good to kind of think a bit more about that. And also, I suppose, the ways in which we see ideas imported from Denmark or modern day Germany, including, it seems, ideas on how to get a suspected witch to confess.
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Zoe Vendettosi
Yes, we were really interested in looking at other countries to try and see what parts of other countries stories related to our stories. And part of the connection between, for example, Germany and Denmark and Scotland was King James, Virginia, King James VI of Scotland and the first of England was over trying to rescue his young bride and bring her back from terrible weather, which he then took to be acts of the devil. But it is posited at least, that one of the reasons for that was when he was in Denmark, witchcraft trials were taking place. People were having confessions coerced from them, either by physical torture or by keeping them awake for hours on end. And lo and behold, the very same type of thing started happening in Scotland. There were five waves of witchcraft in Scotland and the first wave torture was still allowed. It wasn't until that first wave got, and I'm putting this in inverted commas, out of control, that the Privy Council in Scotland, which was like the Scottish Cabinet, stepped in and said, you mustn't prosecute any more people without getting a say so from us, but. And you're not allowed to torture people. But there were two difficulties with that. The first difficulty was that not everyone listened to what the Privy Council said. And the second difficulty, and much more important difficulty, was that putting people in terrible conditions and keeping them awake, it was called watching and waking for days on end, and asking them over and over constantly to confess to witchcraft wasn't torture. So now we understand one of the worst tortures a person can have is keeping them awake for days on end and not allowing them to sleep because they lose all sense of themselves. So Scotland was apparently at that time, proudly leading the way, saying, we've decided not to torture people anymore, when in fact what they were doing was still very much torture. And as we talk about in the books, there were other forms of extracting confessions from women, including looking for the devil's mark, which meant the devil's mark was a mark placed on a woman to remind her that she was a witch and she may be stripped naked for that, because the devil puts those in places you wouldn't look. Her head was shaved, her private parts were examined, and all of these we would know in the modern day were sexual assaults that were occurring. So really, although on the face of it, it might look comforting to see that we weren't torturing people, we were.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And the search for the devil's mark is, as you say, a form of sexual assault. And I'm also so struck by not only the humiliation of being stripped and shaved and searched in that way, but also the fact that in the end, what counts as the devil's mark, the skin tags, the protuberances, etceter, are really all markers of age. This is a kind of form of shaming.
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Claire Mitchell
Yeah, I think so. We've talked about this before. You know, as you get older, obviously you have, like, sunspots and that sort of thing, or you have scars just from living a life or, you know, illness, marks of illness or whatever. And I think the fact that you've survived to this point, you know, in really trying circumstances, but it's the idea that you've got these marks on you that could be proven, proven again in inverted commas, that the devil has baptized you is really, really amazing to me. You know, like the idea that you might just have a scar, you know, the skin tags. I mean, like anybody is sort of over the age of, I don't know, 45 or something, suddenly these things start to appear. I hope it's not just me, but you, you know, you think that 85% of them were women, are being dragged into a private room by the minister who was the absolute God on earth for these people in these communities. I mean, this Wasn't a time where, you know, people didn't opt into their Christianity. It was absolutely. Their life was. The structure and the rhythm of the week was all about to do with church attendance. You might have as many as three services to attend on a Sunday. And the minister was really involved in everybody's life. He knew what everybody was doing. And if he didn't know directly, he had the men that worked for him, his elders that were bringing him stories, and sometimes that's where the accusations came from. A story that an elder carried to the minister and then these guys who are, you know, very, very serious in the community take you into a back room and incredibly modest times take all and touch you. It would be horrendous if that happened now to us, you know, if that happened. But to have it in those days where modesty was so tied up with your godliness as well, it's just an extra level of horror, I think, for them.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one of the extraordinary things about the cases in Scotland you've already alluded to, which is that it absolutely comes from the top. James VI is so involved in the trials.
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Zoe Vendettosi
Yeah. He was not only involved in really kicking off the first witch trials, the famous ones that you said at the outset, Susanna, the North Berwick witch trials. But in fact, after that time, he felt so strongly about the acts of witches in society, and possibly, we think, in order to put an added string to his bow for a bid to unite the crowns by showing them how godly he was, he decided to write a book, the book famously called Demonology, and he writes these in three different chapters. And the second chapter, he provides a how to guide of his own, I suppose, in relation to witches, how to identify them, how to know what their powers are, how to ensure that if you're making an accusation or you're keeping them in custody, you don't get visited by the devil and their spells. So all those things that James did, he said at the outset of this, I'm writing this not for vanity. The words in my head, I thought at the time were, this isn't a vanity project, which is a very, like, modern explanation. But he was saying, this isn't for vanity, or to show you what I know, this is something that I want you to use. And apparently that book, Demonology, not having, of course, much competition, was a best seller for a hundred years.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah. And so what does he say? I mean, he's setting out fascinatingly to prove that witches exist, because people are saying perhaps they don't. So he's like, no, no, they really do. And let me demonstrate that to you. And what does he say about how one becomes a witch and what they do?
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Zoe Vendettosi
Well, at that time, interestingly enough, there were some naysayers. And he actually mentions the naysayers and says, I need to show you that witches exist. And he poses a number of questions, seven different questions. And the first question is, some people, witches don't exist because they're not mentioned in the Bible. And he says, nonsense. Acts of witchcraft and sorcery are mentioned in the Bible. Next. And he explains that a witch is either a person. He explains different circumstances. If they are rich, then someone becomes a witch because they're wanting vengeance. If they are poor, somebody is becoming a witch because they want riches. And in those circumstances, the devil is easily able to come to them, because at that time, it was thought that the devil could take physical form to come to them, to trade with them, to say, if you work for me and you give your Christian soul over to me and become one of mine and be baptized by me, I will give you what you want if you work for me. And life at that time was clearly poor. People didn't have anything to sustain themselves if their crops failed or their animals died. So people were living really terrible and hardy lives. So a story where somebody comes and gives you everything you want if you just do this one thing for them would have been kind of something people think, well, you might have been in that situation, you might give over yourself to the devil if you think you're going to benefit. And of course, all the other people around them in society when anything bad happened to them was being told by James and written about in his book, if something bad happens to you, look around because it's a witch. So people were living really difficult lives. And James was saying in his book, well, you find a witch by seeing who has done you bad. And if they've done you bad and something bad has happened to you, you look for them. So it gives you a very, very practical demonstration. But the one thing that James explains that unlocked a lot for me to understand witchcraft accusations. And you said at the outset, Susanna, that people at the time balanced very carefully between calling someone a witch but not being a witch themselves. What God was, was he was an omnipotent. Therefore the devil and the witches were secondary to him and could not do anything without him ultimately allowing that to happen. So when people accused others of witchcraft and then they were tortured or they confessed, the prevailing belief system was God wouldn't allow that to happen to someone. That wasn't a witch. God wouldn't allow witchcraft accusation. God wouldn't allow someone to be tortured and then confess. God wouldn't allow people to be strangled and burnt as witches if they weren't. So that belief allowed people to do incredibly inhumane things because they didn't believe that what they were doing was to a person. They believed that what they were doing was something to a witch. And if it wasn't a witch, well, God would have intervened and stopped them.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it means that they never have to really take themselves to task. They never have to analyze their own motives, because if they're doing something wrong, they're going to get stopped.
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Zoe Vendettosi
Exactly.
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Claire Mitchell
It's that clever thing that humans do, isn't it? And we see it again and again through history. If you can dehumanize a group of people, then you can pin the blame for whatever you're experiencing. That's difficult as a society. If you get rid of them, or at least contain them potentially, then life's going to get better. You know, we can see it happening in various places in the world just now. There are obviously big points in history that we're all familiar with where that has happened, and we don't seem to learn from it. You know, when this is one of the big things that we are keen on with the campaign and with the book is saying, look, look at our history. If we want to avoid that, we need to understand this idea about dehumanizing a vulnerable group. Because obviously, you know, the women that were accused had a lot less power in society than the men did, and they were often poorer or women with potentially mental health issues, or, you know, we've got a friend who does research that's found a whole bunch of people that these days would have basically been given an asbo. They were sort of the town drunks and they were all accused of being witches and dispatched. And in that way, that community got rid of the irritants in their community in a way that then made them feel good about themselves because they'd done the work of God. You know, it's a very neat and clever human trick.
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Zoe Vendettosi
But can I tell you, James also gave some not fun insights, but like, strange insights into witches. He said, for example, people believe that witches can fly in broomsticks. Well, that's nonsense. And you're like, oh, okay. What they can do, however, is they can, as long as they're holding their breath, bob in the air. And when they let go of their breath, they come back down and then they breathe in they can come out again. So you can imagine all these witches are bobbing up and down in the air. And then one of these next questions is, but if that happens, why can' we see them? And then in lovely 16th century prose, or 17th century prose it would have been, then, I suppose, he sets out why that is and describes a force field through smoke and mist that the devil would conjure up to ensure that nobody could see the witches bobbing up and down.
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Claire Mitchell
Basically an early David Copperfield.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, there is that lovely. Lovely is the wrong word for it, entirely the wrong word. But there is this incredible kind of switching of logic. So, you know, it's like, oh, well, the witchcraft is happening, but we can't prove it because the devil hides it. So we need a confession. You know, the sort of shifting of the goalposts all the time.
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Claire Mitchell
So slippery, the whole idea that you can't talk your way out of it because once they've decided, pretty much they've decided, you know, most of the time.
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Zoe Vendettosi
The most amazing, slippery experience that I can think of is when people said that they called witnesses and they said, I couldn't have been doing what you're saying I've been doing. I couldn't have been out at night dancing on a certain night round the fire, because people saw me in bed at night. And these witnesses will come to court and see that. And he said, the devil is very, very clever. The devil can make people think you were there watching that and when in fact you were out doing the devil's work. And that just proves how powerful the devil was. And in fact, that very logic and type of evidence, spectral evidence, was evidence that came from the uk. Matthew Hale, the Lord Justice General, agreeing with it, and went all the way across to Salem. And it was used in Salem as well to convict people.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And as you say, it makes it impossible to escape.
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Zoe Vendettosi
Indeed.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've mentioned the fact that there's really a kind of preponderance of women among the witches. There are male witches in Scotland, but why were women thought more likely to succumb to temptation?
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Claire Mitchell
Well, it was a very, very strongly held societal view that I know that we will struggle to understand this in 2025, but that women were in some way lesser to men. I know that we have reached beyond those points now with all the parity that we have, but they really, really believed in very sort of concrete terms, that women were weaker, not only physically, but intellectually, spiritually, morally. And that way the devil could get in about them and make them do his Bidding because they were too stupid to resist him. Just like Eve, you know, basically it was, that was that long held idea. So this idea was so prevalent. Now there were, as you're saying, there were men that were accused. It was around about 84, 85% in Scotland were women and there's about 1%, they're not sure and about 14% were men. Round about that. And we do sometimes have people say to us, well don't forget the men. And of course, you know, it wasn't just women but a lot of the men that were accused, poor men, it's awful, they're so overlooked all the time. But men were sometimes accused, but often it was because they were almost like a collateral damage. So it might be a woman's, you know, an acquaintance, a brother, a son, a husband, but generally it was, it was just women and it wasn't this modern idea that we've got that it was red headed women who are left handed that were delivering babies and making tinctures. That's been fairly roundly dispelled, so to speak. Now there was some research done by the Royal College of Midwifery Nursing who found that actually the percentage of those accused, what they would think of as early sort of nurses or herbalists, were a very small percentage. And they weren't accused necessarily of being witches because of that. That was just like a thing that they did as well as whatever they were being accused of. There were occasionally cases where somebody'd been brought in to help with say a birth and it had gone wrong and then they were accused of being a witch. But generally the only thing that really you needed to be to be accused of being a witch was to be a woman, you know, in a multiplicity of ways of being a woman. It might be that you had fallen out with somebody, it might be you were in the wrong place, the wrong time, you might have been too poor. There's one case where she was basically too rich and I think that was part of the problem as well. Usually it was poor women or poorer women, but it was just basically being a woman. That's what they had in common.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's talk a little bit about those 1590s cases because you do some great source analysis in this book looking at News From Scotland, which is a great sort of pamphlet that tells us about the cases. So give us a flavour of what it says and what you think we should make of it as a source.
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Zoe Vendettosi
Well, the News From Scotland was written by one of James acolytes and because Zoe and I aren't in any way historians and not bound by having to be factually correct in the sense that we can have all sorts of speculations. We speculate in the book that, in fact, James might have had a hand in it himself, because so pro James is it in its telling that we think, once again, was this a signaling to those down south that he would be great as king because he would protect them from the devil and be godly. But the news from Scotland is a contemporaneous newspaper report, I suppose, of the trials at North Berwick and how they started. And the trials at North Berwick started when a man who had servants thought his servant Gilles was going out and about too much in the evenings. And people were talking about how she seemed to be good at helping people in the community that were sick become better. And he and his friends decided that she may be a witch and they decided to torture her. I'll not go into the details of that torture, but suffice to say gayless. Thereafter, some considerable time confessed being a witch. Witch. And along with others, started accusing other people at the same time. James came on the scene fresh back from Denmark in his terrible trip back with his wife, where he'd been thwarted at bringing her back and was convinced witches were involved and sought to ask whether or not these were the very witches that were involved in the acts of treason to try and kill the king to stop him coming back, to stop him having a new family with his wife and to stop his regal line. So news from Scotland records this. It records some amazing stories about people accused of witchcraft. One of the ones that I think perhaps is most interesting to me is Dr. Fean. He was a local schoolmaster, and he became, it would appear, infatuated with a young woman. The young woman's brother was at the school, and he asked that young boy, on pain of promising not to beat him again when he was at school, if he would obtain three hairs from her private parts and bring them back to him so he could commit a spell on her and bewitch her into loving him. This plan was foiled when the woman woke up. The young woman woke up and said to her mother, your son has tried to do this to me. My brother has done this to me. The mother herself was a witch, and realizing what Dr. Fe had done, decided to trick him by trimming three hairs from a young bull and giving them to the son to present to Dr. Feehan. And sadly for Dr. Feehan, when he did that spell, on the moment of doing that spell, the bull broke into the church that he was in and started pursuing him in an amorous fashion. So that tells you the kind of detail that it goes into. Now, that's perhaps a slightly humorous example. It was most certainly not humorous then Dr. Fean and the allegations that were put to him and his untimely demise. But the pamphlet itself serves as a really interesting artifact to understand what people believed at the time. And it does show that there were people who were thinking, can this be real or not? Because every turn it was being shored up that I think at one point it says, the devil's greatest enemy on earth is James and therefore he will do anything he can to get him. Therefore, James must be the most godly, because all the attempts for the witches to kill him haven't succeeded, neither by sea or by land. So he must be the man for us. And that's why we think it's so pro James. And in fact, I think he actually put it. Did he put it in the back of demonology? I think he did. I think there's reference to it. So we think if he wasn't one of the writers, he certainly was very close to whoever was doing it for him. Present this very godly picture of James.
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Claire Mitchell
It's very clever pr, isn't it? You know, like, here's a problem that only I can fix and I'm going to get this out to you all through, like the early version of a tabloid newspaper that everybody shared and everybody then had in their consciousness, even if you couldn't read, there'd be somebody that would read it to you. And then Confessions, again in inverted commas, then modeled themselves on the confessions in the news from Scotland, because the people that were asking the questions knew what they were looking for, because James had, you know, this had been listed under his watch kind of thing. And then that we can see in the confessions that they are very similar, often in a way that makes us, as modern consumers of true crime. And also, Clare, obviously working in the law, looks a little bit like people were coerced into giving formulaic confessions. And we know that when the person that's confessing again, confessing goes kind of off piste a little bit that you think, well, hang on a minute, this sounds more like. Like it's their real life. And one of the historians that we spoke to for our research said to us that that's when you seem to get people's real stories. You know, there's sometimes a case of, well, I'm going to get done for being a witch. So I'm actually going to get everything I've done wrong off my chest at this point. But the questioners aren't interested because they're not there to hear about them murdering their ex husband. They're not here to hear about them helping somebody abort a baby. They're there to just hear about the witches. So they're kind of like, yeah, whatever, whatever. But tell us about when you dance with the devil and then sort of looking for that. So side of the confession.
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- [33:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that's so interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, in these early cases there is torture being used, and later we've got the form of torture that is sleep deprivation, but. Exactly. We largely hear the voice of the interrogator, we hear the stories that they want to have recorded, but we do get those details that aren't formulaic that give us an insight into women's stories. I mean, as historians, we get really excited about those because suddenly we get a glimpse, we get a flavour of this real woman in her life. But sometimes we do seem to have confessions which aren't. I mean, you know, Scotland's most famous witch. Skipping ahead a little bit in time here, of course, is Isabel Gowrie, and we have a really detailed account of her confession that you. Or her confessions, because she does four of them that you give in the book. But some of the time there's a sort of question about whether what we're looking at is a confession that has been been exacted from someone, or whether this is something that has been freely given. And sometimes, I suppose, there are questions about those who confess. Why do people confess to things they haven't done?
- [35:05]
Zoe Vendettosi
That is a huge question, and the answer is not clear to anybody who hasn't been in that situation. That's the best way that I can think, if people cannot understand. Yet it is a recognized phenomenon if someone is taken away from things that ground them. For example, being taken to a police station where they don't know anyone and they are placed under stress, even though there might not be torture or the threat of torture, or you know that your family are outside waiting for you or your solicitor is coming to see you. People confess to things that they haven't done, and it is a difficult and strange phenomenon. Now, if in the modern day, people do that with all the procedural safeguards we have in place, and they crumble psychologically and confess to things they haven't done, how much easier would it be to confess to something that you hadn't done when you'd been kept awake for days, when you hadn't eaten for days, when you thought that your life was effectively over. So it's not surprising to find, and indeed, there are speculations that some people would have just said, you know, I've been accused of a witch. I don't want to go through any torture or sleep deprivation. I'm just going to confess because they knew what was coming. They knew, given three or four days, they would start to confess. And they were maybe just saving themselves that trouble and saying, right, okay, I'll just say what you want. My time has come. And that's terribly sad. One of the first reasons that we started the Witches of Scotland campaign was when I had read a book in the Faculty of Advocates library late one night when I probably should have been studying for an appeal the next day. And I was instead looking at Sir George Mackenzie, the Bloody Mackenzie, as he was known in Scotland, the Lord Advocate. And there was a book about him talking about a woman who was being interrogated. And she was saying to her interrogators, pleading with them, can you be a witch and not know it? And that really hit me when she said that because of the difficulty that this woman had knowing she wasn't a witch, but trying to placate those that were telling her that was a witch, the hygiens in society, the interrogators, yes, you may be right, sir, but I don't know that I'm a witch. So maybe I am a witch. Can I be it and not know it? And that was something that really touched me. And one of the reasons why we started the campaign at all.
- [37:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Because in the end, there wasn't another way out. Once they'd got their hands on you. We've already alluded to this, but once they've got their hands on you, they're going to get you to confess. And if you don't confess, they'll just keep going until you do. I mean, I can't think of anybody in the Scottish cases. This could be my ignorance, but I can't think of an example off the top of my head of somebody who is pardoned and let go, and they freely accept that actually they got it wrong and they're accusing the wrong person. Is there an instance of that?
- [38:11]
Zoe Vendettosi
The difficulty is the records are so poor.
- [38:14]
Claire Mitchell
Yeah. And this is the one problem that we've got, is that the records are bad, they're patchy. And it could be in some cases that there's been building problems. You know, there's been damp or there's been fire or things like that. But I think probably, and this is maybe a bit cynical, once they stop doing the witch trials, one of two things could happen. So a community might then think, oh, we absolutely did the wrong thing there. This is really shameful. We killed these people and then wanted to hide it and didn't want to talk about it. But then there's also the idea that in some places, and I've heard people saying this about Fife, which is where I'm from, there's some communities where still, I don't know if this is true or not, where they don't talk about the witch trials because there's still a belief that that was real and that these people, that there might be descendants there. And then that also is then because the stigma of actually being a witch meant that it's kind of hidden by the community as well. So I don't think it's a stretch to say that there will have been a good amount, I think, of documents that certainly not looked after actively and that may have been disagree, disappeared or destroyed or just through time, obviously. But also we're talking about a time where literacy, I mean, people were literate. We had a fantastic legal system, as evidenced by the fact that the witch trials are all through the courts. But obviously normal people didn't, you know, sorry, I'm not saying lawyers aren't normal, Claire, but normal people couldn't read. You know, there wasn't people necessarily sitting journaling about what had happened that weekend in church with who was accused. But I think that again, it's who had access to power, who had access to money, who had access to people to defend them, who was somebody that you wouldn't want to accuse because the repercussions of that, because of who they were connected to, might have been large. So I think generally it was people that didn't really have anybody to speak for them and they were quite easily dispatched. And they did really believe these things were true. I mean, they did. We sometimes get people today saying, well, they obviously didn't really believe that it was just to get rid of annoying people. People sometimes it will have been to get rid of annoying people. But they did really genuinely believe that the devil was about and that the devil was real and they were in great danger and that they had to deal with him. And this was the king who was put there by the, you know, by God and therefore couldn't possibly be lying. He was telling them what to do and they absolutely had to follow it. And then of course, you've got the people that wanted to curry favor with the king, so they would have done what he wanted to shore up their own power. It's a disastrous situation if you're accused. And I often think about. About how frightening it must have been to just be a normal woman just going about your life and thinking, oh, I've just fallen out with it, you know, with my Neighbor about the price of bread or something at the market. You know, should I now be fearful that's going to go badly for me? Or, you know, if you tried to help somebody, you know, deliver a baby and the baby didn't survive, and then you might be thinking, like, oh, my God, am I now going to get accused? I just think you'd be so fearful when those things happened, because of course, when one witch was accused, they didn't believe the witch was working in isolation, so they went looking for the rest of the coven. So once one woman was accused, you might be looking around your group of friends thinking, oh, my God, are we next? Like, you know, genie's been brought in. And then I think the fear would be pretty huge in communities.
- [41:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I think in these communities, these are people who are borrowing and lending and who are interacting all the time, and they can't escape in the way that we can. We can just up and move to another country, you know, we can move to another city. They are living their entire lives in the community they've been born on. Everybody knows that story about them when they were six years old, and they know what they did when they were 14, and everybody knows this stuff. And so you've got this long kind of litany of things that can be hauled out and used against you if people choose to do so.
- [41:58]
Zoe Vendettosi
And that's so interesting that you see that, because one of the tests for a woman as to whether or not she might be a witch is a phrase that Zoe and I have latched on or are trying to repurpose for our own 21st century reasons. And that is that a question was asked about whether or not the woman was a quarrelsome dame. That was the expression. And if the woman was a quarrelsome dame, then she was clearly getting into many fights with people. And then things were going badly for people. Well, it must be her that's doing all of this. So in any way, going out with a stereotypical gender norm of the time, being in any way other than reserved, quiet, godly, eyes down, doing what you're told way was something that would be used against you if you were accused as a witch. And as Zoe always points out. Zoe, do you want to point out the conundrum?
- [42:59]
Claire Mitchell
Well, you know, if somebody says to you, you're a witch, you know, you're quarrelsome dame, and you went, well, no, I'm not. And they'd be like, you see, you absolutely are. I mean, there's no way out of it, you know, And I don't I don't know if, you know, I don't want to stereotype us all, but I don't know if, you know, many Scottish people, you know, we tend to be quite happy to get involved in things. So I don't know if that's. That's. That's part of our nature in Scotland. But I can see why women nowadays will often say to us, oh, I would have been accused. And we say, well, you know, like I've said before, you just need to be a woman. But you can see the idea that, you know, if you pride yourself on being quite a strong character, that you'd think, God, I would be in. I'd be in big trouble in those days.
- [43:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And yet, interestingly, in one of the individual cases you give is Isabel Duff, which comes from sort of one of the biggest moments of witch panic in Scotland in the 1660s. And so we've talked here about, like, women in exerting their agency to put it in academic speak, you know, basically like saying what they want. But in some ways there we also see possibly the problem comes from a woman conforming to expectations, to please and to be the person who goes along with what's suggested to them. And then yet another part of the kind of gendered nature of it seems to be about a fear of female sexuality. So all these ways in which, which gender is important tell us about Isabel Duff.
- [44:24]
Claire Mitchell
Well, you mentioned there about female sexuality, and that's something that we talked about a lot, which is that these confessions, they're almost laughable because it's always that the devil comes along and basically promises these women a good time. And he's described as being like, you know, well dressed and sort of musical. And he's always described in this kind of what we'd think of now as quite a kind of of rock and roll bad boy kind of description, which I think would be like, really attractive in a really rubbish life where people had really hard lives, they did really horrible jobs a lot of the time, and life was grim and you were constantly told, behave, behave, behave, behave. So I can see why it's so alluring. But some of the stuff that's written in the Confessions, I've read it and I've thought, now who is actually writing this down? Is this just some sort of slightly pornified thing that the men of the community saying, oh, now write a bit about what he did to her then, you know, and they're kind of. They're getting off on it. And we sort of joke about it now, but it's so sexualized and just speaks so much to the repression, I think that was happening at that point in the church.
- [45:38]
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- [46:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and there's always the comments on the devil's semen being cold.
- [46:55]
Claire Mitchell
I know that always. That is a horrible thing to think about. There's two things that always stay in my mind. It's the cold semen, first of all. But that's explainable, isn't it, Claire? That's explicable. Why his semen was cold.
- [47:09]
Zoe Vendettosi
That's explicable. The devil's semen was cold because the prevailing theory was that the devil was a spirit and in order to take on human form, he compressed cold air so that his touch would be cold and anything which exited from him would be cold.
- [47:27]
Claire Mitchell
Yeah. And the other story that I really, really like, I'm not suggesting that anybody tries to replicate this now, but that one woman, and I can't remember who it was one woman was accused of gathering all the penises of the community into a box and that she had magic the box up into the branches of a tree and at will she could open the box and make the penises fly around. And I just think that that's really sort of symbolic of the fear of women. You know, it's this idea that women are powerless, they're lesser, they're not as clever as us, and yet we desire them and we need them and we can't get them getting too confident and we've got to keep them on their toes. And I find that really Interesting, because I don't think that that's changed.
- [48:12]
Zoe Vendettosi
Which is also why, very importantly, in order to become a witch for the devil, you had to truly debase yourself. There had to be sex, you had to be the devil's puppet because you couldn't be powerful. We can't be having powerful witches. The story can't be of powerful witches or powerful women turned witches. The story has to be that any agency comes from the devil, any power comes from the devil, and that these are the devil's vessels. So it's always stressed that it's very important that it isn't the women that have got power. The devil is the one with the power and the devil is one having sex with all these women. I should say there are some almost laugh out loud moments in the confessions, which, again, it sounds terrible, but there's one confession which we mention in the book where Isabel Gowrie says, yes, well, this woman did say that she had sex with the devil. It was much better than her husband, husband or anybody else. And you can just see that someone had got to a point where they're like, right, okay, well, I'm just gonna, you know, do what I can here to make you feel bad about yourselves.
- [49:22]
Claire Mitchell
When we spoke to Professor Marian Gibson, who's really interesting person who's talked about the witch trials as well, she'd said to us, a thing to consider might be that when women gave these confessions, that this was the moment in their life where actually she had all the men had to listen to what she was saying and were writing things down. And it was almost like explos, like Claire's saying, kind of a little bit of power and a little bit of revenge at that point. I don't know whether that's true. I don't know whether, you know, at the end stage where you know everything you're saying, signing your death warrant. But I think that Isabel Gowdy is a really interesting person because her confessions were so fantabulous. You know, they were. She really went for it. And whether she really believed it or she was a little bit mad or she was like, right, that's it. I'm giving you the whole dog and pony show. I don't know, but it is a really interesting document to have and look at.
- [50:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's certainly true that these women's words would not have been written down at any other time. And given that most people couldn't read and write, there was a certain kind of sacred quality to having what you said written down, I suppose. So Maybe it felt like, well, I'm just going to get down everything I can.
- [50:33]
Zoe Vendettosi
Yeah, yeah, certainly. With Isabel Goudie, she managed to prolong her life for quite a while by essentially, we think, bargaining, that she would tell people more and more. What she was really interested in, and Zoe touched on earlier, was she was really interested in telling them stories of the other world and of fairies, good and bad, and recording the work. The reason that we know about Isabel Gowdy is because a clerk called Pitcairn decided to write down all this stuff a hundred or so years later. And when he was writing down all these things, I think that his perception was, in any event, that she was trying to tell them about all this otherworld stuff. And they were just saying, we just want the witch. Can we just get back to the witchcraft? But she was weaving fantastical stories about witches and fairies, and sadly for us, the only parts that they were interested in recording were the parts about the witches.
- [51:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can we talk a little bit about the judicial process in Scotland? Because, as you point out in your book, one of the fascinating about this whole business of the witch trials is that they are trials. So what marked the Scottish process particularly?
- [51:48]
Zoe Vendettosi
Well, you'd be surprised at how modern a trial looked in those days. And when we talk about the witchcraft trials, we are very, very careful to remind people that these were legally organized, that there were, for example, there would be a judge, there would be a prosecutor and there would be, if you had enough money to afford one, a lawyer in your def. So the modern characters were there of a trial. In the trial process, if you were a woman, for the very most part, there are one or two exceptions. You wouldn't be able to give evidence on your own behalf because you weren't competent to do so as a woman, but also as an accused, you weren't allowed to give evidence at that time. So what happened was evidence was brought before the court and the court decided whether or not you were guilty of that offence. So what you would have, for example, is the neighbour that made the allegation they might come along and they would give their story that you were a very poor woman and you came to the door and you asked for alms and they said, I'm sorry, I can't have anything to give you. And when you walked away, you muttered something and then a day or two later, a family member became ill or your dog died or your cow stopped giving milk. So someone would come to court and tell their story of that. Then what would happen is that they would think what other kind of evidence do we have? They would look and they would bring in the evidence of what we call the witch pricker. And the witch pricker. Zoe, you might be able to tell us a bit more about the evidence that they got.
- [53:22]
Claire Mitchell
The witch pricker's really fascinating to me. So that was a person, a man who was brought into the village or the town who had a reputation for being able to work out who had had the mark of the devil. So you needed to have the mark of the devil identified in order to proceed, because that was one of the most important proofs that they had that they were witches. So the witch picker would come into town, they'd have the woman or man shaved, stripped, and then they would investigate them. And as they were examining them, the witch picker would jab any marks with what's called a bodkin or a broder in Scotland. It's like a sharp needle. And you can see illustrations of ones from the time. They look pretty. Pretty unpleasant. And they would jab them into these marks and if they. If they didn't bleed, if they could feel it or if they couldn't feel it, I mean, it just depended. That was proof that it was the mark that the devil had left them. Because when the devil did, like the reverse baptism, he pressed a mark into them for them to remember that he was now theirs kind of thing. So the witch pricker would do that, identify the mark, and then they'd be able to then proceed and go to the privy council and start the trial. But what's interesting to me is that the witch pricker always got paid, paid because he was the one that started the ball rolling. And it was a really good living to make. Like, it was a really nice. It's almost like a rock star sort of a thing that you'd sweep in, you'd get your accommodation paid, you would, you know, you'd have your. Your food and everything paid for, and people treated you with great respect and reverence. Because if you think about it, the witch pricker might pick you and then find the mark on you. If you didn't pay, why are you not paying? Is it because you're a witch? Let's have a look. And you would, of course, pay because you, you know, you'd be worried that you'd be accused. And one of the things that's interesting about the witch pickers to me is that in Scotland there was one person who was actually a woman. It was discovered over time. So Christian Caddell was traveling around Scotland after John Kincaid, who was like the sort of the daddy of the witchpickers. She then went around and plied her trade. And I'm really curious and obviously I can never have an answer for this. Did people recognize that Christian Caddell was a witch woman? But it was a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes. They didn't want to go, hang on a minute, you're a woman. Because then they might get accused. Or was she convincing as a man? It's really interesting to me. But she was caught out and eventually she was sentenced to be sent away to Barbados. And the day that she was to get on the ship that was taking her away, there was two of the women who had. She had accused were executed on that day. That could be just a myth, but that's the story that's told. But then there's no trace of Christian Caddell after the day of her being on the boat. And I'd love to know if she went to Barbados, if she was then involved in what happened with magic in the Caribbean, with what happened sort of going forward from there, or if she was killed by the sailors. Who wouldn't want, you know, somebody that had been troublesome, or if she just disappeared somewhere else in Scotland and was able to just kind of hide out or whatever. She's a really fascinating case to me because it just shows that during those times there were people that made money and made sort of power. Power through other people's misfortune.
- [56:29]
Zoe Vendettosi
Yeah. So you would have. We talked about witch prickers. So you'd have evidence given in the form of either them coming to court or because they were so busy, because, as Zoe said, they were paid per witch, they would go away and you'd have affidavit evidence that they would sign. And it was very, very modern to my eye. You know, on this day, at this time, I examined this person, I found this signed by, and that would be cast up as evidence as well. So the trial system was incredibly sophisticated and modern and had evidence, both physical evidence, both oral evidence, expert evidence. It was a proper trial.
- [57:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And if someone was convicted and found guilty of witchcraft in Scotland, unlike in England, they were burned, possibly strangled first, but burnt. Why was that?
- [57:23]
Claire Mitchell
Well, they were usually strangled or hanged. We can't seem to pin down, like, a good answer to that one. And again, I think it's the records, but I don't think it's likely if you had multiple witches that were being killed and executed, that you'd move down the line manually strangling them. So I think it's likely that they would. I know that's a horrible thing, Suzanne. You're making a face serve like that's why you even consider just the image of it.
- [57:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It was quite, quite visible.
- [57:47]
Claire Mitchell
It takes, I now know, about three minutes to strangle somebody to death. Don't ask me how I know. That'd be what you would have to have done. So they hanged them and then they burned their corpses. They burned their bodies. This is really fascinating to us because there was an idea in Scotland that the devil could still sort of keep the body, the puppetry going beyond their death, so that they called it revening revenant, you know, as in coming back in the French. And so what they did was they executed the women and men and then they burned their bodies. And it was partly to stop them being reanimated by the devil. So a kind of a version of a kind of an evil zombie type situation. So it was largely that, but I think also it was that final indignity. You didn't get your Christian burial. You then didn't have the chance to reunite with your family in heaven, you know, and this was a Christian society that they really, really believed these things. It might seem a bit woolly to us now, but. But that was absolutely their reality. So I think it was just a really, absolutely belt and braces approach to getting rid of these people that had been such an appalling, disgusting, evil element of their community and society, erasing them from history.
- [58:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, in your book, you move through to look at the last mass executions for witchcraft in 1697 in Scotland, the last person executed as a witch in 1720, all the way through to the last person convicted under the Witchcraft act in the uk, which was much more recently. But people are going to go and have to read to get all of that stuff, because I want to ask you about the modern reclamation of witchcraft as we come towards an end. Because we've got Salem as a tourist resort. We've got the T shirts that say we're the granddaughters of the women you couldn't burn. We've got people identifying as witches, We've got the search for a pardon. I'm particularly interested in the distinction between pardoning the convicted. And you can correct me if I'm wrong here, Clare, but that partly implies to me that they did something wrong, but we're gonna pardon them versus admitting it's a miscarriage of justice. So tell me about this kind of modern reclamation of the women historically named as witches. Where does it go? Right, where does it go wrong.
- [59:52]
Zoe Vendettosi
I can start off at the sort of end and answer your question about the pardon. In Scotland we don't have a method of exonerating generation of people. So we have had only two pardons so far in relation to the Scottish government as now is. And those pardons make clear that the crime that they were convicted of, they ought never to have been convicted of. So that is the best we can do. And the two groups of people that have happened to are those people that were convicted of same sex sexual offences, offenses, homosexual offences for men, and those people were pardoned and also the people that were convicted in relation to protests at the minor strikes that we now understand, looking back, there was a real right for people to be able to protest and that right to protest wasn't protected. And in both those instances it would need clear that those people ought never to have been criminalised for various different reasons.
- [60:54]
Claire Mitchell
So.
- [60:54]
Zoe Vendettosi
So it's an imperfect system, but it's the best we can get. We've told this so many times because Americans come on and say, you're asking for the wrong thing. And I say, I swear to you, I was an appeal court advocate for 15 years. If there was any other way to overturn each of these people's convictions individually, not to blow my own trumpet, but I would be one of the very few people that know how to do it. But there's not. So we do the next best thing and that's why it's a part of and not anything else.
- [61:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, lastly then, I want to ask you about what you achieved and what you hope to achieve. Because the last time I was in Edinburgh, I was once again shocked by that tiny and inaccurate memorial to witches just outside the castle. What do you want to do from now on?
- [61:44]
Zoe Vendettosi
So the aim of the campaign when we set up on International Women's Day 2020, was to get that pardon, was to get an apology, and was to have a national memorial going backwards. The national memorial was something which plagued us for a long time because, and I'm cutting this very short, statues are very expensive to make. No one can agree on what it is that they have to look like or where it should be. And as a result of that, it was becoming more and more complex because sadly, so many places around Scotland, Scotland hold some kind of gruesome title in relation to the number of people they executed as witches. So a statue was really problematic until I went to the V and E exhibition in Dundee which held a tartan exhibition. And I stood at the entrance and looked at all these amazing people wearing tartans of all hues. They were talking about the colours, what they meant, what the stripes meant, what it meant to their family. And I thought to my myself, how amazing. If we could tell the story of the women of Scotland convicted of witchcraft using the actual materials that these women would have worn 100 years ago or hundreds of years ago. Yes. They wouldn't have been called kilts, because people say kilts are a modern thing. Yes. Kilts are perhaps a modern invention. But wearing the clothes that the women would have been wearing weren't. And having colors that represented those peoples, those clothes, those weren't new things either. So we decided to commission the Witches of Scotland tartan along with. We designed in collaboration with Clare Campbell at Prickly Thistle, this amazing tartan that, as we spoke about earlier, has gone global. So to us, that's us tick to our box, we have our memorialization. People around the world are now talking about the history of women in Scotland. And as I've said elsewhere, that act of remembrance, when the patriarchy wants you to find, forget that act of remembrance is an act of rebellion and people around the world will be able to show that act of rebellion and are doing already as the tartan goes worldwide. The next thing we wanted was an apology on International Women's Day 2022, while discussing a misogyny bill, which has unfortunately been dropped, that bill, Nicola Sturgeon, gave the first formal state apology to all those convicted of which witchcraft.
- [64:07]
Claire Mitchell
And the very last thing is the pardon. So the pardon, unfortunately, we had a fantastic msp, a member of Scottish Parliament called Natalie dawn, who was taking it forward as a private member's bill. So it had gone through the different stages of a public consultation, which was overwhelmingly supportive. But then Natalie, good for her, bad for us, got promoted to the Cabinet. Once you're in the Cabinet, you can no longer do a private member's bill. So we're now on the search for a different MSP that can take it forward. Forward. We've got somebody that's looking into that and seeing who she can kind of canvass and see that can take over the reins of that. It's not been abandoned, it's not been kicked into the grass. But these things take time. But the work's already been done for the public consultation. We had thousands of responses to that. We didn't. The government had thousands of responses to that that were very supportive. So we think that if we can just get the right msp, we can get it back up and running and they can get the pardon because it's not something that takes a lot of money or a lot of hassle. Because as Claire's already said, there's much too two fairly recent pardons that have been given, and it would just follow the same sort of language as that. So it'd be fairly straightforward.
- [65:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So if you're an MSP listening and you want to attract the support and encouragement and love of women around the world, but particularly obviously in Scotland, where you want their votes, then perhaps you should be getting in touch with Zoe and Claire and taking that on.
- [65:27]
Zoe Vendettosi
Thank you, sister.
- [65:28]
Claire Mitchell
Thank you so much.
- [65:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you. Thank you both so much for coming on. I greatly enjoyed your book. I very much enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
- [65:37]
Claire Mitchell
Thank you. It's been lovely.
- [65:39]
Zoe Vendettosi
We enjoyed it.
- [65:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith.
- [65:46]
And my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from history Hit.
- [66:05]
Claire Mitchell
When.
- [66:06]
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- [66:40]
Claire Mitchell
Is that even possible? He goes to Carvana.com what is this, a movie trailer?
- [66:46]
Zoe Vendettosi
He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate. Wow, that's a great offer.
- [66:51]
Claire Mitchell
The car is sold, but will Carvana.
- [66:53]
Zoe Vendettosi
Pick it up in time?
- [66:54]
Claire Mitchell
They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning. Done with the dramatics. Car selling in record time. Save your time. Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pick up these may apply.