Hi there, I'm Mr. Buckingham and I'm so glad you decided to join me for today's lesson.

And I'm excited today because this is our first lesson in a new unit, but we're going to work towards writing pieces of narrative writing based on a fantastic book called, "A Kind of Spark" by Elle McNicoll and we're going to learn today about a really interesting period of Britain's history.

Let's get to work.

Today's session is called, "Understanding the Historical Context of the Scottish Witch Trials", and it comes to my unit called, "A Kind of Spark, Narrative Writing".

By the end of today's lesson, we'll be able to describe the events of the Scottish witch trials and share our opinions about how best to remember the victims in the present day.

Now, before you start this unit, you will want to have read the book, "A Kind of Spark" by Elle McNicoll and you may want to complete our unit called, "A Kind of Spark, Reading" where we worked through the book together.

However, if you have read the book, you don't need to have a copy of it with you for this lesson.

Let's make a start.

Here are our key words for today's lesson.

Here's our lesson outline for today.

We're going to start off by developing our understanding of what this Scottish witch trials were and then we'll be debating how we could memorialise the victims of the Scottish witch trials in the present day.

So in this unit, we'll be doing writing inspired by the book, "A Kind of Spark" by Elle McNicoll.

And in the book the protagonist Addie, the main character, wants her village to create a memorial to the victims of the Scottish witch trials that occurred there.

Now, the Scottish witch trials occurred in the period around 1560 to 1736 AD.

So let's look at some other historical events that were happening around that time in Britain.

That was around the time of the reign of Elizabeth the First and around the time of the life of William Shakespeare, the two very famous British individuals.

It's also around the time of the beginning of the slave trade in Africa, which was led by countries like Spain, Portugal, England and France.

And it's around the same time of the Great Fire of London, which I'm sure many of you will have heard of as well.

So which are correct, the Scottish witch trials occurred after the Romans came to Britain, before the Second World War and the time of William Shakespeare and during the Tudor period? Can you find all the ones which are correct? Pause video and have a go.

Well done, good job.

Maybe you spotted that they are all correct.

So these are all true.

Elizabeth the First was one of the Tudor monarchs along with Henry VIII and several other kings and queens.

So during this time, the Early Modern Period, religion was extremely important to people's everyday lives and that plays a huge role in our understanding of the Scottish witch trials.

So most people in Scotland at that time were Christians and they believed that both God and the devil could impact their daily life.

So if good things happen, they might call that a blessing from God.

If something bad happened to them, they might attribute that to the devil.

And people also believed that some people were witches who could use magic to influence people in both good and bad ways.

So in 1484, so slightly before the witch trials has occurred, the Catholic church in Rome, which was where the Catholic church around the world, around Europe was run from, declared that witchcraft was real.

So witches were able to do real harm to people guided by the devil.

So that's really important, because the church was incredibly powerful and it was telling people all across Europe that witches were real and that what they did was almost powered by the devil.

So because witches were seen as getting their power from the devil, they were also considered to be heretical, which means they went against Christianity.

Now, when we say that now, it doesn't sound that severe, does it? We would nowadays expect any religion to be argued with and discussed in an open way.

That's what we do in our society now.

But back in these days, going against Christianity was considered extremely bad and wrong and heretical is the word we use to describe that, where you are going against the teachings of the church.

So why would witches have been feared by people in this Early Modern Period? Pause video and have a think of as many reasons as you can.

Well done, good ideas.

So you might have said that people were very religious, so as a result, they would've believed what the church told them.

And of course the church had already linked witches to the devil, saying that that was where they got their power from.

And the devil people believed, was able to affect their daily lives in negative ways.

So the church was saying that witches were capable of doing real harm to people, so they would've believed this, because the church was so influential.

And witches were therefore also seen as going against God, which was seen as being a terrible thing.

So we've got a few key points there.

The church had told people the witches were real and that they got their power from the devil.

The devil was already considered to be able to control people's lives in bad ways and going against the church in itself was a scary, dangerous thing, and witches were seen as doing that because of their link to the devil.

So there are lots of reasons here which would've made people very scared of having witches in their community, because of the dangers associated with going against the church and the dangers that witches brought by being linked to the devil.

So the fear of witches, as a result of all these beliefs, spread across Christian Europe and witch hunting, searching for witches and trying to punish them or even kill them, became widespread.

Now this book is an example of that.

It's called "Malleus Maleficarum" and that means the hammer of the witches, and it was written in 1486 and it explained the author's views about how to spot witches in your community and how to punish them by killing them.

And it was incredibly popular all over Europe, although the church actually didn't endorse this book.

But King James the Sixth of Scotland who reigned from 1566 to 1625, so the period around the start of the Scottish witch trials, was also a huge believer in witches.

He believed in fact that witches had tried to kill him when he was crossing the sea from Denmark to Scotland by creating storms when he was at sea.

And he even had several witches punished for having created those storms that he believed had caused his boat to be in difficulty on the water.

So you can see there was an incredibly powerful belief in witchcraft around this time.

So do you agree with Jun and why or why not? He says, "It's crazy that people believed this stuff.

There's no way I would've fallen for it." Do you agree or not? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done, good thinking.

So Laura says this, "In the Early Modern Period," which is the time period we're thinking of, "The church remember was incredibly powerful and it was saying that the devil could use witches to hurt you.

So you probably would've believed that, because the church, which was hugely important in your life, was telling you that it was true.

And also imagine if your king was telling you that witches were real like James the Sixth did in Scotland." He's one of the most powerful people in the country and he's saying that witches are real.

"And remember at that time, there were also fewer good explanations for why bad things happened, 'cause we didn't have the scientific knowledge that we have today.

So using witchcraft to explain them made sense." So if something bad happened to you, then you could blame it on witchcraft, because you didn't have a good scientific explanation perhaps for why your crops had failed or why something bad had happened to your body or some other bad thing that you needed an explanation for and there just wasn't any explanation.

So witchcraft filled that gap.

So we can see that perhaps we all would've fallen victim to believing in witchcraft at that time if we had been living under these same influences and these same beliefs.

So there was a desperation as a result of all this, to get rid of anything from the community that was linked with the devil, because that could cause problems in your life.

And it was this atmosphere that led to the Scottish witch trials, because remember, witches were linked to the devil by the church itself.

So in 1563, the Witchcraft Act, a law, was passed in Scotland, which made practising witchcraft a crime punishable by death.

And alongside that, there was a series of bad harvests happening.

So that was making life very difficult for people who would've relied a lot on these harvests.

And so a scapegoat was needed to explain these bad harvests and that was part of what led to witches being hunted down around this time as well.

So we can see there was bad things happening, someone needed to be blamed, and the witches were seen as an easy target, because they went against the teaching of the church, because they were linked to the devil.

But remember, these people did not usually say that they themselves were witches.

They were called witches by people who were looking for a scapegoat in this situation.

So the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft were women, usually older women and often they built up a reputation of using witchcraft over many years.

There was a bit of a complication here in that sometimes the women had tried to curse a local person who had then received some bad news and blamed the witch leading to a trial where they were accused of witchcraft.

Now, these women were mostly illiterate.

They couldn't read or write and they often lived alone.

So you can see how they might have been vulnerable to these accusations and they might have had very little power in their community.

So perhaps they used these curses to try and get a little bit of power, but obviously it could have backfired if they were accused of having caused some damage to a person leading to an accusation of witchcraft.

So do you agree with Andeep, why or why not? He says, "It sounds like the women brought it on themselves by cursing people." Pause the video and have a think.

Do you agree or no? Well done, good thinking.

Maybe you agreed with Sophia.

She says, "These women sound quite vulnerable.

They were older, they lived alone and they couldn't read or write.

So if people were looking for someone to blame for all the bad harvests and for bad things that happened to them, they were easy targets.

And maybe as I said, they used these curses to try and have a little bit of power in the community, but obviously it backfired in this case." Now we know of course that curses aren't real, witchcraft is not real, so they weren't actually cursing anyone, but that accusation of having done it was enough for them to be put on trial and in many cases, punished.

So once there have been an accusation of witchcraft, trials then took place.

And often as part of these trials, the suspects were tortured in order to get a confession of witchcraft from them.

And usually in Scotland, that torture took the form of sleep deprivation.

So they were stopped from sleeping.

And if you were stopped from sleeping from several days, you'll become so out of your mind with exhaustion that you could confess to almost anything.

And we know that there was nothing to confess to, because of course witchcraft isn't real.

And the neighbours of the suspect were often also called to the trail and they were called to give evidence and they would tell the court about any bad things that had happened to them, blaming it on the person who was accused of being a witch.

Suspects were also often pricked with a needle as a test and the idea was that if they didn't bleed, they were a witch.

And what happened in practise was that the person doing the pricking with the needle would keep pricking them repeatedly until they found one spot in the body which didn't lead to bleeding, which obviously made them more vulnerable to being punished for being a witch.

And finally, suspects had their bodies searched for what's called the devil's mark, which could be any blemish or a birth mark that showed, they believed, that they'd been touched by the devil.

So there were lots of ways of trying to show that these people were in fact witches.

And the result of that was that around 5,000 people were tried for witch graft in Scotland and in those trials, that led to an estimated 2,500 people being executed.

And mostly they were executed by burning.

So we can see this was a large number of people who as a result of these witch trials were sentenced to death.

So true or false, everyone accused of witchcraft was executed.

Pause the video and decide.

Well done, you're right, that is false.

But what's the explanation for that? Pause the video and decide which is the best justification here.

Well done, you're right, it's B.

So although these methods they used to identify witches were obviously unfair and obviously to our eyes, make no sense at all, many still escaped execution and there were many different courts dealing with these matters and some of the courts were much fairer than others.

So in some courts, you'd have a very high chance of being executed.

In others, you'd have a much better chance of proving your case, perhaps by showing that your neighbours weren't all against you in this way and by trying to show that you didn't have any devil's mark on your body and so on.

So some people did escape execution as we saw from the numbers before.

So let's do our first task of this lesson.

I need you to imagine that you're alive during the Early Modern Period and you are accused of witchcraft.

I'm going to show you some arguments that you might use at your trial and I want you to put the arguments in order from the most persuasive to the least persuasive as you try to defend yourself.

And remember, some of these arguments might seem very persuasive to us now, but they might seem much less persuasive in the Early Modern Period, so I want you to imagine which ones would you use if you were in the Early Modern Period thinking about people's beliefs at that time.

So here are the arguments.

Witchcraft isn't real, I was just pretending to curse them.

The neighbour who accused me is known to be a liar.

There's no devil's mark on my body, you can check.

And the devil doesn't even exist.

So put those in order from the most persuasive to the least persuasive in the Early Modern Period at the time when the witch trials occurred.

Pause the video and have a go.

Well done, good job.

Now, we could disagree on this.

So let's see what Izzy thought.

She thought these two arguments were the most persuasive.

First of all, the neighbour who accused me is known to be a liar.

Izzy's put that one on top and she says, "I think this is the best argument, because if you can show that they lie a lot, the court might doubt their evidence and maybe you could get other neighbours to help you and say that you haven't done any bad things." Izzy chose this as another persuasive one.

There's no devil's mark on my body, you can check.

Now she says, "This would be a really good argument if it worked, but the trouble with this argument is that everyone is going to have some kind of blemish or birth mark somewhere in their body, aren't they? So it might be considered a bit too risky." So that's why Izzy's put that one second.

And then she said that these two were the least persuasive.

Witchcraft isn't real, I was just pretending to curse them.

So Izzy says, "The trouble with this is that people were very religious in the Early Modern Period and of course, the church had told them that witchcraft was real.

So just some random person standing up and saying witchcraft isn't real against what the church had told everyone was true, might not be believable." And that's why Izzy's put this one third.

And last of all she put, the devil doesn't even exist.

Now, to some of us today, that might be a persuasive argument, but remember in this time, everyone would've believed in the devil and the idea that he could affect their daily lives.

So if she said this, she'd be going against everything the church said, which would've been heretical as we said, it would've been very dangerous even if she had managed to survive the trial for witchcraft.

So we can see that people would've been hard-pressed to come up with really good arguments at that time, because of the strong grip that the beliefs of the church had on the community at that time.

And remember, the beliefs of the church now are very different to the ones it had in those days.

So we've talked about the context of the Scottish witch trials, now let's move on to debating how we could memorialise the victims of these witch trials in the modern day.

So we probably all agree that the Scottish witch trials and the executions that resulted from them were wrong.

So the reason we might give for this might vary depending on our own beliefs and on our experiences.

So if you believe in God or in the devil, you might have a slightly different explanation for why it is wrong than someone who doesn't.

And if you believe that witchcraft is real, you might have again, a different explanation to someone who doesn't believe that.

And finally, if you know someone or you are someone who might have been vulnerable to being accused of witchcraft in those days, again you might have a slightly different explanation for why they were wrong than someone who doesn't.

So using your experiences and your beliefs, what reasons would you give for why the execution of witches in Scotland in the Early Modern Period was wrong? Pause the video and think about what your beliefs tell you about why they were wrong.

Well done, good ideas.

Now all of our answers will vary as I said, depending on our personal beliefs, but maybe you said something like this, "Witchcraft isn't real.

People were just using vulnerable people as a scapegoat.

It's like bullying and they used religion to justify something which was terrible." Maybe you said this, "I believe in a God, but God is loving and he wants us to treat people well, this is the opposite of that and this isn't the kind of religion that I believe in." Or maybe you said this, "The methods they used were just unfair.

It was rigged against them and it's horrible to think of people being tortured and having no way of arguing back." And that would've been, as we said, really difficult to challenge these beliefs.

Really well done if your answer is there.

Now, we often look back at things that happened in the past and we try to learn lessons from them and change things in the present, change things that we do and change things that we believe.

Now, here's an event that happened in the past.

In the period before the Second World War, before 1939, Britain tried to make peace with Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, instead of fighting him straight away there.

Now, some people now consider that to have been a mistake.

Some people would still say that was the right thing to do, but what lessons could we learn from it and what changes could we make based on what we know happened afterwards and what we know happened next? Pause the video and have a chat to the person next to you about the lessons we might choose to learn from that event.

Now again, we could all have different views on this.

Alex said this, "I think that this teaches us that sometimes we have to do the right thing and confront people who are dangerous to the world even though we know it'll have terrible consequences and we can try to make sure our politicians keep doing this today as well." So that's the lesson Alex thinks we could learn from what happened before World War II, but obviously we could all have different views on that question as well.

Really well done for your thoughts.

So what lessons do you think we can learn from the Scottish witch trials in the same way? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done, good ideas.

Maybe came up with one like Aisha, she said, "I think it shows us that we need to question everything and explore lots of different viewpoints.

People had to believe what the church told them, because it was dangerous to believe in anything else." So Aisha's kind of saying, we need to be willing to listen to other viewpoints and not just say there's only one way of thinking and only one thing you can believe.

Or maybe you agree with Jun.

Jun said, "I think they teach us a lesson about how vulnerable people can be used as scapegoats when things go wrong and we need to try and look for the real problem instead of just blaming an easy target.

So again, a lesson you might choose to take from the Scottish witch trials.

Good thinking, well done.

So one way of learning lessons from the past is to build memorials to people or to events.

So you might have seen this memorial, which is in Berlin, the capital of Germany, and it's a Holocaust memorial.

So it's a memorial to the many millions of people who were killed by Nazi Germany as part of the Holocaust.

And this is such a big memorial that you can walk in between all these massive stone blocks as you think about the events of the Holocaust.

Here's one from London.

This is a memorial to Mary Seacole, who many of you remember was a hero in the Crimean War.

So we've got a memorial which is to an event, the Holocaust, and a memorial to a person, Mary Seacole.

So how might having memorials like this help people to learn lessons from the past and how might it not help? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done, good thinking.

So maybe you said something like Laura, she said, "In our daily lives, we're busy and we're not always able to put aside time to stop and think about the past.

So having memorials gives us a special place where we can think about things that happened and try to learn from them." So you can imagine someone might choose to spend some time in that Holocaust memorial, taking some quiet time away from their daily life to think about the horrible things that happened there and try to make sure in their life they're trying to fight against things like that happening again.

But you might say this, "That's true, but they don't always do a good job of making us think about the right things.

Also, you can just walk past and not think about it and people who do that might be the people who need to learn the lesson from them." So that's the downside of memorials.

They don't force us, if you like, to think about the things they're trying to make us remember.

So some really interesting ideas there, well done.

Now, there's been lots of action already in Scotland recently in relation to remembering the Scottish witch trials and trying to learn lessons from it and make amends for what happened.

So for instance, in 2022, the Scottish government made a formal apology to the thousands of people who were accused and executed in the Scottish witch trials.

Now, obviously all of these people are long dead, but they were making an apology in order to show that there's regret for what happened.

And campaigners are also seeking, looking, to get all those convicted of witchcraft pardoned.

And that means their convictions, the fact that they were guilty of witchcraft is removed and they're no longer considered criminals, but instead they're victims, aren't they? Victims of something which was unfair which happened to them.

So they didn't cause it, they didn't commit a crime.

If you are pardoned, that's removed and you become in this case a victim of a big injustice.

And some campaigners are also seeking a national memorial to the victims and they've located some sites in Scotland where they'd like to do that.

And these campaigners aren't just ingested in the past.

They see this campaign to memorialise the victims of the witch trials as highlighting the violence and abuse that women can still experience in society in the present day.

So they're seeing a connection between those two things, the way the women were victimised back in hundreds of years ago in the witch trials and how women can be victims of violence today in our society as well.

And they're trying to connect those two ideas to campaign on both those points.

So true or false, receiving an apology is the same as being pardoned.

Pause the video and have a think.

Well done, you're right, that is false.

Can you explain why, which is the best justification? Pause the video and have a look.

Well done, good job, it's B.

Being pardoned wipes clear your criminal record even if you died a long time ago.

An apology doesn't change the status that you were found guilty and convicted of the crime of witchcraft, being pardoned would do that.

Now, of course, in both cases, for the apology and the pardon, the victims are in fact long dead, but it's a symbolic way of trying to show that we want to make amends for the past.

So that's why campaigners are pushing for it.

Really well done.

So let's do our final task of this lesson and we're going to have a debate.

I want you to think which of the following I'm going to show you is the best way of remembering the Scottish witch trials or maybe you have your own preferred way of memorialising the victims and helping us to remember what happened.

So we could do the following.

We could have the apology to the victims, a pardon for the victims, a national memorial to the victims, and I want you to have a debate in your class about this.

And remember to try and build on other people's contributions.

You might want to say, "I believe this is the best way of remembering the witch trials, because of this." You might want to say, "I agree that this because of this," or, "I disagree with this person because of this," or, "I love the point this person made, but I think this." And remember, it'd be really good if you can try and think of your own better ways of memorialising the Scottish witch trials over and above the three I've got.

But if you can't think of one, can you explain which of those three is the best way of remembering them and why? Pause the video and have a go at your debate.

Well done, really good ideas.

Maybe in your debate you heard some arguments like these ones.

Maybe you said, "I think a memorial is the best idea, because it would be a great reminder to people that they need to think for themselves and treat people fairly." Maybe you said this, "The trouble is a memorial is only in one place and of course it Scotland is a big country." So this person said, "I think that a formal apology is a great solution," which has already happened, "Because not everyone was convicted of a crime, so they don't need a pardon." And that's true, isn't it? We know 5,000 people were put on trial, 2,500 were executed.

So there will have been some who weren't actually convicted of the crime, but they might deserve an apology too.

You might say this, "Well, why not do all three? I think a pardon would be particularly good, because it sends a message that we care about all kinds of injustice, even ones from a long time ago." But maybe you came up with some ideas of your own in the debate.

Maybe you said this, "I think the best way of remembering the witch trials is to change the way we treat people who are a bit different or who are vulnerable.

Changing our behaviour is much more meaningful than just building another statue for people to ignore." Or maybe you said this, "I think a great way to remember the witches would be for all children to learn about them in school," just like we're doing.

"And this would help them to grow up knowing how important it is to think for ourselves and not make scapegoats of people who are easy targets." So loads of different ideas there for how we could memorialise these witch trials and I bet you thought of some really imaginative ones as well, good job.

So to summarise our learning in this lesson.

We've said that the Scottish witch trials took place during the Early Modern Period in history.

And we said that the trials were motivated by a belief that the devil could act through witches causing real harm to people.

And the trials were encouraged by the church and the king in Scotland.

We said that around 2,500 people were executed for witchcraft, often following torture or unfair trials.

And we've seen the efforts have been made to remember these events in Scotland and to learn lessons from them.

Really well done for your effort in this lesson.

You might want now to go away and do some research of your own into the Scottish witch trials to find out more, and we're going to use all of this knowledge to build into our writing in this unit.

I'd love to see you again in a future lesson.

Goodbye.