Under torture she implicated other people who were also hanged. Geillis Duncan, like all other women accused of witchcraft, was wholly innocent. Jacobean England was home to Ben Johnson, Francis Bacon, John Donne and William Shakespeare and the concluding part of James’ work was used by Shakespeare to write Macbeth (1606). Fagan refers to James in her novel and castigates him accordingly and she gives us a portrait of him at the end of his life as ‘ an incoherent slobberer, his tongue grown too big for his mouth.’Ī pamphlet that was produced at the time of the North Berwick witch trials was titled Newes from Scotland and James used this pamphlet to conclude his work Daemonologie (1597) which was published again when he ascended the English throne in 1603. Witches were blamed for creating the sea storm and James personally supervised the torture of women accused of witchcraft back home in Scotland.

James and Anne were formally married in Oslo and as they travelled to Denmark it became apparent that here was a country familiar with witchcraft and this sparked James’ interest.

James set sail from Leith to fetch Anne personally – although he had a retinue of some 300 men with him. A storm had blown James’ wife to be, Anne of Denmark, off course and the ship was forced on to the Norwegian coast. While the outing of witches had been going on for some considerable time, under both Catholicism and Protestantism throughout Europe, the rule of James V1 of Scotland, 1 st of England, certainly contributed to the frenzied atmosphere. Other characters mentioned in the novel were also real historical characters like Geillis – Doctor John Fian, Agnes Sampson, Barbara Napier and Euphame MacCalzean. Geillis was hanged as a witch when she was only 15 years old. The novel was written for Geillis Duncan and she is in fact the novel’s main character. In her recent novel, Hex (2022), she has returned to the Old Town of the sixteenth century as well as taking us out to East Lothian and to the North Berwick witch trials of 1590-92.

There can be little doubt that part of the success of Jenni Fagan’s previous novel, Luckenbooth (2021), can be attributed to the way she managed to evoke Edinburgh’s Old Town with its grey tenements, cobbles and closes. Jim Aitken reviews Hex, by Jenni Fagan, published by Birlinn

Hansel and Gretel by Jenni James