Introduction

Continuity can sometimes be equated with reactionary attitudes and stasis as much as with elements we perceive more positively, such as stability and loyalty. Given he lived through the religious convulsions associated with the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Restoration, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the Treaty of Union, it may seem surprising to highlight it as a feature of Fraser's life as a clergyman. However, from one perspective, this is an appropriate approach to consider in relation to his clerical role. In particular, one enduring, longstanding intolerant element in his attitudes, mirroring that of the early modern Scottish kirk of his time, is its connection to the witch-hunt, the persecution and sentencing to death of many hundred, possibly above a thousand, women across Scotland, for supposed witchcraft. In the burghs of the firthlands, one sees the evidence that Shakespeare drew on, consciously or not, for his inclusion of a local example in his Macbeth: there is a stream of witch trials and killings of those accused from 1577 to 1727, in amounts rather similar, proportionately, to those found in many parts of Lowland Scotland, and at levels much higher than in the west Highlands. In Kirkhill, specifically, women died in appalling circumstances as a result of witch persecution during Fraser's ministry and it is vital to consider his possible part in this.

The year of 1662 was particularly agitated in the Moray diocese, and parts further west and north, in terms of oppression of, and violence against, women on these grounds. For Fraser and the parishioners of Kirkhill, it was a year indelibly altered by the actions of an individual who they initially knew as ‘James Paterson’. Paterson was one of eight ‘witch prickers’ known to have been active in seventeenth-century Scotland. These were individuals who searched for the ‘Devil's Mark’ on the bodies of those suspected, using a long ‘pin’ to pierce the flesh of their victims and in order to identify a spot which, they argued, marked where the Devil had intervened. In the later words of Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh, the ‘pricker’ would pronounce that ‘if the place bleed not, or if the person be not sensible, he or she is infallibly a Witch’.