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Doug Winnie

Essential Java for AP CompSci

From Programming to Computer Science
1st ed.
Doug Winnie
Mission Hills, KS, USA

ISBN 978-1-4842-6182-8 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-6183-5

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6183-5

© Doug Winnie 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the

Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned,
specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other
physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.

Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. Rather
than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked
name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and images only in an
editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no
intention of infringement of the trademark. The use in this publication
of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if
they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of
opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.

While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true
and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the
editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any
errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no
warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein.
This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress
Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY
10004, U.S.A.
For Mike, and all of the great decisions we have made together.
Table of Contents
Sprint 1:​Introduction
What You Need
Sprint 2:​Setting Up the Java JDK and IntelliJ
Coding Tools and IDEs
Installation and Setup
Install the JDK
Install IntelliJ
Sprint 3:​Setting Up GitHub
GitHub
How GitHub Works
Lifecycle of a Repository
Sprint 4:​Programming Languages
Origin of Programming
Forms of Programming
Machine Language
Interpreted
Compiled
Object-Oriented
Data
Functional
Scripting
Sprint 5:​History and Uses of Java
Java Beginnings
Java’s Primary Goals
Uses of Java
Sprint 6:​How Java Works
The Problem with Compiled Languages
The JVM and JRE
Compiling Java Bytecode
Precompiled Files
OpenJRE
Sprint 7:​Flowcharting
Flowcharting Tools
Paper
Tablet and Stylus
Apps
Flowcharting Basics
Terminus
Process/​Action
Input and Output
Decisions
Annotations
Other Shapes
Take Out the Trash
But Is It Really That Simple?​
Sprint 8:​Hello, World
Create Your IntelliJ Java Project
IntelliJ IDEA
First Time Only:​Configure the JDK
Create Project
About Your Project
 Coding Your Project
Writing Your First Program
Create Your Repo in GitHub
Upload Your Code to GitHub
Sharing Program Output
Sprint 9:​Simple Java Program Structure
Sprint 10:​Text Literals and Output
Text Output
Escape Sequences
Sprint 11:​Value Literals
Literal Formatting
Sprint 12:​Output Formatting
Decimal Formatters
Thousands Formatters
Currency Formatters
Spacing and Alignment Formatters
Multiple Items in Formatters
Sprint 13:​Comments and Whitespace
Sprint 14:​Abstraction of Numbers
Sprint 15:​Binary
Binary Numbers
Bit Size and Values
Overflow
Sprint 16:​Unicode
Text Encoding
ASCII + Unicode
 Emoji
Sprint 17:​Variables
Essentials of Variables
Code Examples
Sprint 18:​Math!
Basic Operators
Order of Operations
String Concatenation
Code Examples
Sprint 19:​Math Methods
Working with Simple Methods
Multiparameter Methods
Illegal Value Types in Methods
Math Constants
Code Examples
Sprint 20:​Managing Type
Mixing Types in Evaluations
Numbers to Strings
Strings to Numbers
Casts
Cast Errors
Code Examples
Sprint 21:​Random Numbers
Create a Random Number Generator
Random Integers
Random Decimals
 Code Examples
Sprint 22:​Capture Input
Hello, Scanner
Capturing Strings
Capturing Integers
Capturing Decimals
Code Examples
Sprint 23:​Creating Trace Tables
It’s a Spreadsheet
Um.​Why?​
Sprint 24:​Methods
Method Basics
Writing a Method
Call a Method
Method Flow
Code Guide
Code Examples
Sprint 25:​Calling Methods Within Methods
Methods Within Methods
Infinite Methods
Code Examples
Sprint 26:​Methods and Values
Accepting Values in Methods
Returning a Value
Overloading a Method
Code Guides
 Code Examples
Sprint 27:​Methods and Scope
Variable Scope Errors
Defining Class-Scoped Variables
Class Conflicts
Code Examples
Sprint 28:​Boolean Values and Equality
Creating a Boolean Variable
Boolean Logic Operators
Altering a Boolean Value
Combining Logic with Evaluations
Compound Logic Operators
Code Examples
Sprint 29:​Simple Conditional Statements
The if Statement
The else Statement
The else if Statement
Understanding Conditional Flow
Code Examples
Sprint 30:​Matching Conditions with the switch Statement
Creating a switch Statement Code Block
Things to Look Out for with the switch Statement
Code Examples
Sprint 31:​The Ternary Operator
The if-else Statement Equivalent
Converting to a Ternary Operator
 Using the Ternary Operator Inline with Code
Code Examples
Sprint 32:​The Stack and the Heap
Understanding the Stack
Understanding the Heap
Why This All Matters
Sprint 33:​Testing Equality with Strings
When the Heap Throws Equality
How to Better Compare String Values
Code Examples
Sprint 34:​Dealing with Errors
Coding to Catch Errors
“Catching” Specific Errors
Code Examples
Sprint 35:​Documenting with JavaDoc
Using JavaDoc Syntax
Generating Documentation
Code Examples
Sprint 36:​Formatted Strings
Creating a Formatted String Literal
Code Examples
Sprint 37:​The while Loop
Create a while Loop
Code Examples
Sprint 38:​Automatic Program Loops
Creating a Program Loop
 Code Examples
Sprint 39:​The do/​while Loop
Creating a do…while Loop
Run at Least Once
Sprint 40:​Simplified Assignment Operators
Combined Assignment
Increment and Decrement
Placement and Program Flow
Code Examples
Sprint 41:​The for Loop
Creating a for Loop
Changing the Step
Code Examples
Sprint 42:​Nesting Loops
Creating Nested Loops
Displaying as a Grid
Code Examples
Sprint 43:​Strings as Collections
Creating Strings Using the String Class
Getting a String Length
Getting a Specific Character from a String
Finding a Character in a String
Extracting a Substring
Comparing Strings
Code Examples
Sprint 44:​Make Collections Using Arrays
 Creating an Array with Values
Getting a Value from an Array
Creating an Array by Size
Things to Avoid with Arrays
Getting the Number of Values in an Array
Looping Through an Array
Code Examples
Sprint 45:​Creating Arrays from Strings
Delimited Strings
Splitting It Up
What About Numbers?​
Code Examples
Sprint 46:​Multidimensional​Arrays
Define a Multidimensional​Array
Assign Values to Multidimensional​Arrays
Access Values in Multidimensional​Arrays
Rectangular and Irregular Arrays
Code Examples
Sprint 47:​Looping Through Multidimensional​Arrays
Creating Nested Loops for Arrays
Code Examples
Sprint 48:​Beyond Arrays with ArrayLists
Create an ArrayList
Add Items to ArrayLists
Get Elements in ArrayLists
Remove Elements from ArrayLists
 Find Items in ArrayLists
Replace Items in ArrayLists
Get the Size of an ArrayList
Copy Elements to a New ArrayList
Clear an ArrayList
Code Examples
Sprint 49:​Introducing Generics
Create an ArrayList with Generics
Typing Using Generics
Code Examples
Sprint 50:​Looping with ArrayLists
Working with size( ) and get( ) Methods
Code Examples
Sprint 51:​Using for…each Loops
Mechanics of a for…each Loop
This Is the Mechanics of the for…each Loop
ArrayLists Without Generics
Yep, Arrays Work Too
Code Examples
Sprint 52:​The Role-Playing Game Character
What Is a Role-Playing Game Character?​
Filling Out Our Character Sheet with Data
Classes, Instantiation, and Construction
Player Character Sheets
Fighter
Mage
Other documents randomly have
different content
lack of proof. Two legal questions arose in connection with this case.
The first was: If a woman be convicted and punished for such an
offence, ought her husband to be liable to make good the fine, or
should she alone be punished by imprisonment? Obviously, if the
husband be made liable, ‘many wives, to affront their husbands, or
otherwise be avenged on them, would break the law of purpose.’
The second point was: How shall the offence, in most instances, be
proved, if the evidence of women be rejected—as it seems to have
then been in all except certain special cases—for it must often be
that none but women have an opportunity of observing the offence?
—Foun.

The summer of this year was exceedingly wet, and the harvest
thereby much endangered.—Law.

Most probably, the carriages proposed to be set up

in 1610 by Henry Anderson the Pomeranian, to run 1673. Aug. 20.
between Edinburgh and Leith with a charge of two
shillings Scots for each person,233 were either not realised or quickly
withdrawn, for nothing more is heard of them, and we find in 1702
one Robert Miller getting an exclusive privilege of putting coaches on
that brief but important route, implying of course that no other such
conveyances then existed. Street-carriages, which had been set up
in London in the reign of Charles I., did not come into use in
Scotland till after the Restoration. On the occasion of the
unfortunate duel in 1667 between William Douglas of Whittingham
and Sir John Home of Eccles,234 we hear of the parties going to the
ground in a hackney-coach. Six years later, regular arrangements
were made by the Edinburgh magistrates for a system of street-
carriages, and the number then in service appears to have been
twenty. It was ordered that they should be numbered 1, 2, 3, &c.,
with a view to ready reference in case of any complaint from a
passenger, and that they should have a fixed place on the High
Street between the heads of Niddry’s and Blackfriars’ Wynds. The
fare to Leith for two or three persons in summer was to be 1s.
sterling, or for four persons, 1s. 4d.; the fare to the Abbey, 9d., and
as much back again.235
It is pretty certain that this system of street-carriages maintained its
ground, as in A Short Account of Scotland, written by an Englishman
in 1688, the author tells us that, while there were no stage-coaches
in Scotland, ‘there are a few hackneys at Edinburgh, which they may
hire into the country on urgent occasions.’ It is to be remarked,
however, that Edinburgh, being all packed within a space of a mile in
length by half a mile in breadth, upon irregular ground, and with
very few streets fit for the passage of wheeled vehicles, was a
discouraging field for this kind of conveyance. Sedans maintained a
preference over coaches till the extension of the city in the reign of
George III. Arnot tells us that while there were, in 1778, only nine
hackney-carriages in our city, there were a hundred and eighty-eight
public chairs, besides about fifty kept by private families.236

During several by-past years, licences had been

given in frequent succession to vessels, to carry off Sep. 5.
idle, vagrant, and criminal people to the
plantations in Virginia and elsewhere. One ship engaged in this
kidnapping service, and which bore the hypocritical appellative of
The Ewe and Lamb, seems to have been particularly active. We now
find complaints made that ‘the master and merchants of the ship
called the Hercules, bound for the plantations, have apprehended
some free persons and put them aboard the said ship, upon pretext
that they are vagabonds, or given their consent thereto.’ The Lords
therefore commissioned two of their number to go aboard and
inquire, and to liberate any persons improperly detained.—P. C. R.

That indispensable conveniency of modern times,

the coffee-house—which had taken its rise in Oct. 11.
London during the Commonwealth237 —made its
way into Scotland during the ensuing reign. The 1673.
first time we hear of it north of the Tweed is when
Colonel Walter Whiteford—are we to suppose some reduced soldier
of the Scottish army of 1651?—was, on application, allowed by the
magistrates of Glasgow to set up a house in that city ‘for making,
selling, and topping of coffee.’—M. of G.
Under the date noted, the Privy Council Record tells us a note-
worthy tale of an Edinburgh coffee-house.
‘In Thomas Robertson his new land238 near to the Parliament
House,’ one James Row kept a coffee-house, probably the first such
establishment known in Edinburgh. On Sunday the 28th of October
1677, he so far risked the wrath of his neighbours the Privy
Councillors, as to have an unlawful preacher holding forth in his
house during the time of ordinary service in the churches. Robert
Johnston, town-major, who had authority from the Privy Council to
see after such matters, came to the place with some of his
myrmidons, and found the ‘turnpike’ or common stair filled with
people, the overflowing of the congregation. Making his way to the
ordinary door of Row’s house, and demanding admission, he was
kept there for some time, during which he heard a great noise of
furniture and of people within. On being admitted, he found that the
minister and his auditors had been smuggled out by ‘a laigh or privat
entry.’ Johnston then returned to the street, and was walking quietly
at the Cross, when Row came up and ‘did upbraid, threaten, and
abuse him for coming to his house, and told him that he durst not
for his hanging come to his house again and do the like, or, if he
came that gait, he should not win so weel away.’ Thus he railed at
the town-major all the way ‘from the Cross Well to the Stane Shop,
shouting and crying so loud as the people gathered in multitudes,’
though, seeing what sort of affair it was, they soon dispersed.
Afterwards, Row went to the magistrates and told them ‘he could
not get God worshipped in his own house for that officious fellow the
town-major, thereby insinuating that the due execution of his
majesty’s laws did prejudge the worship of God.’
Row was fined in five hundred merks, and obliged to ask Johnston’s
pardon; and immediately after, his coffee-house was ordered to be
shut up.—P. C. R.
People were already accustomed to go to coffee-
houses in order to learn the news of the day. In 1673.
1680, there was an order of the Privy Council, that
‘the gazettes and news-letters read in coffee-houses, be first
presented to the Bishop of Edinburgh, or any other privy councillor,
that they may consider them, and thereby false and seditious news
and slanders may be prevented.’—Foun. And not long after—namely,
in January 1681—by order of the Privy Council, the magistrates of
Edinburgh called all the masters of coffee-houses before them, and
obliged them to come under a bond for five thousand merks to
suffer no newspapers to be read in their houses but such as were
approved of by the officers of state.239

Mr Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, petitioned

the Privy Council for liberty to print a translation, Dec. 11.
executed by himself, of the last hundred of the
Psalms into the Irish tongue. The matter was referred to the
approbation of the Earl of Argyle, and conferences were appointed
about it, to take place at Inverary.
Mr Kirk’s translation of the Psalms into Gaelic was an important
contribution to the means for establishing Protestant Christian
worship in the Highlands. On account of the proficiency which he
thus shewed himself to possess in the Gaelic language, he was sent
for to London, to superintend the printing of the Irish translation of
the Bible, prepared under the direction of Bishop Bedel, and
published in 1685. He died in 1692, and was buried in the church-
yard of Aberfoyle, under a stone bearing this inscription: ‘Robertus
Kirk, A.M. Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen.’
‘To suppress the impudent and growing atheism of
this age,’ Mr Kirk printed in 1691 a small treatise, 1673.
‘An Essay on the Nature and Actions of the
Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People, heretofoir
going under the Name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies ... as they are
described by those having the Second Sight, &c.,’ which certainly
forms a curious illustration of the quasi orthodox beliefs of a
Highland minister of the seventeenth century. He describes the
fairies as possessed of ‘light and changeable bodies of the nature of
a condensed cloud,’ and living in little hillocks, where they are
‘sometimes heard to bake bread, strike hammers, and do such like
services.’ Forced to shift their residences once a quarter, they are
liable to be seen by second-sighted men on their travels at four
seasons of the year; but are also often ‘seen to eat at funerals and
banquets.’ At such festive meetings, each mortal guest is sometimes
observed to have a double of himself ‘perfectly resembling him in all
points,’ being one of these subterranean spirits. The ‘reflex-man’ or
‘co-walker’ haunts the original as his shadow, ‘whether to guard him
from the secret assaults of some of its own folks, or only as ane
apertful ape to counterfeit all his actions.’ ‘Being invited and
earnestly required, these companions make themselves known and
familiar to men; otherwise, being in a different state and element,
they neither can nor will easily converse with them.’
Mr Kirk informs us that these spiritual people live in fair well-lighted
houses, where all the usual affairs of human life go on in an
immaterial fashion. ‘Women are yet alive who tell that they were
taken away to nurse fairy children,’ an image of themselves being
left in their place. ‘When the child is weaned, the nurse dies, or is
conveyed back, or gets it to her choice to stay there.’ One woman
thus carried away returned after two years, was taken in by her
husband, and had some children afterwards. In speech and apparel,
the fairy folk resemble those under whose country they live; they
‘wear plaids and variegated garments in the Highlands, and
suanochs in Ireland.’ Second-sighted men can invoke them at
pleasure, but in general do not relish the sight of them, on account
of the hideous spectacles they present, and their sullen and dismal
looks. ‘They [the spirits] are said to have many pleasant toyish
books,’ producing in them fits of corybantic jollity, ‘as if ravished by a
new spirit entering them.’ Other books they have of abstruse
science, but no Bibles.
Men of the second-sight do not necessarily discover strange things
when requested; only by fits and starts, ‘as if inspired with some
genius at that instant, which before did lurk in or about them.’ Mr
Kirk knew one whose neighbours often observed him disappear at a
certain place, and some time after reappear at another, a hostile
encounter with the spiritual people being the cause of his
disappearance. These seers know what will happen to their friends,
by means of the spirits with whom they have intercourse.
The people are said by Mr Kirk to believe that the
souls of their ancestors dwell in the fairy hills, of 1673.
which one was placed conveniently to each
church-yard. He relates that, about the year 1676, ‘when there was
some scarcity of grain, two women living at a distance from each
other dreamed about a treasure hid in a certain fairy hillock. ‘The
appearance of a treasure was first represented to the fancy, and
then an audible voice named the place where it was to their waking
senses. Whereupon both rose, and meeting accidentally at the place,
discovered their design; and jointly digging, found a vessel as large
as a Scottish peck, full of small pieces of good money, of ancient
coin; which halving between them, they sold for dish-fulls of meal to
the country people.’
Dr Grahame, the modern pastor of Aberfoyle, gives us240 the
traditionary account of the cessation of Mr Kirk’s life, in high keeping
with the style of the mystic world which he endeavoured to
expound. It is stated that, as Mr Kirk was one evening walking in his
night-gown upon one of the fairy mounts above described in the
vicinity of his manse, he sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of
apoplexy, which the unenlightened took for death, while the more
understanding knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural
influence of the people whose precincts he had violated. After the
ceremony of a seeming funeral, the form of Mr Kirk appeared to a
relation, and commanded him to go to Graham of Duchray, who was
the cousin of both, and tell him: ‘I am not dead, but a captive in
Fairyland, and only one chance remains for my liberation. At the
baptism of my posthumous child, I will appear in the room, when, if
Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or durk which he holds
in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this opportunity is
neglected, I am lost for ever.’ Duchray was apprised of what was to
be done. The ceremony took place, and the apparition of Mr Kirk
was seen while they were seated at table; but Duchray, in his
astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined;
consequently, Mr Kirk was left to ‘drie his weird’ in Fairyland.

The death of the Rev. John Burnet, minister of

Kilbride, is noted as arising from an extraordinary Dec. 22.
cause, though the immediate disease was
jaundice. He ‘had a son lately dead before him, and seeing his son
dissected, and the physicians finding fault with his noble [vital]
parts, [the father] presently apprehends a faultiness in his own,
which apprehension stuck with him even to his death, which
physicians took to be the cause of his sickness; so strong is the
power of apprehension.’—Law.
Died this year, by a fall from a horse, at Tangier in
Morocco, John Earl of Middleton, governor of that 1673.
establishment. Of a family of the minor gentry in
Kincardineshire, he had entered life as a pikeman in Hepburn’s
regiment in France, but soon was called to take part in the civil wars
of his own country, serving first the English parliament and Scottish
Estates, and afterwards proving an active and vigorous partisan of
the king. His preferment after the Restoration as commissioner to
the Scottish parliament, and his magnificent but drunken
administration, with all the ills that flowed from it, are part of our
national history. He is said by a contemporary to have been a man of
‘heroic aspect,’ of ‘manly eloquence,’ ‘happier in his wit than in his
friends;’ of ‘natural courage and generosity;’ ‘more pitied in his fall
than envied in his prosperity.’241 Though disgraced, the king could
not entirely desert one who had risked and done so much for him in
his worst days; so he appointed him governor of Tangier—a civil kind
of banishment, in which, we see, he died.
It is scarcely wonderful that a man who went
through such changes of fortune and so many 1673.
strange adventures—taken prisoner at both
Preston and Worcester, and escaping on both occasions from
captivity—should have been the subject of some of the mystical
speculations of his age. Aubrey relates: ‘Sir William Dugdale
informed me that Major-general Middleton (since Lord) went into the
Highlands of Scotland, to endeavour to make a party for King
Charles the First. An old gentleman that was second-sighted, came
and told him that his endeavour was good, but he would be
unsuccessful, and, moreover, that they would put the king to death,
and that several other attempts would be made, but all in vain: his
son would come in, but not reign, but at last be restored.’ A second
tale is told by Law and Wodrow,242 and repeated by Aubrey, with
slight variations, but to the following general purport: Being in the
army of the Duke of Hamilton in 1648, he had for his comrade there
a certain Laird of Balbegno, who seems to have been the neighbour
of his family in Kincardineshire.243 A few days before an expected
battle, Middleton and Balbegno had a conversation about the risks
they should run in fight, and agreed that, if one should die, leaving
the other in life, he should return, if possible, and give the survivor
some account of the other world. Balbegno fell in the battle.
Middleton thought no more of the promise of his deceased friend, till
some time after, when a prisoner in the Tower of London, and in
some fear for his life, he one night was sitting alone in a room,
‘under three locks,’ and with two sentinels outside the door.
Chancing to read a little in the Bible, he had no sooner closed the
volume than, looking towards the door, he saw a human figure
standing there in the shadow of his bed. ‘He called out: “Who is
there?” The apparition answered: “Balbegno.” “That cannot be,” said
Middleton, “for I saw him buried after he was slain in battle!” “Oh,
Middleton,” said Balbegno, “do you not mind the promise I made to
you when at such a place, such a night, on the Border?” and with
that came forward and took him by the hand.’ Middleton, in
narrating the circumstances, declared that Balbegno’s hand ‘was hot
and soft, just as it used to be, and he in his ordinary likeness.’
Instead of giving him any intelligence regarding the dead, the spirit
told him he should make his escape in three days—he should in time
be a great man—but let him beware of his end! When Balbegno had
delivered this message, he, according to Aubrey, gave a frisk, and
said:

‘Givanni, Givanni, ’tis very strange

In the world to see so sudden a change!‘244

and then vanished. In three days, accordingly, Middleton escaped in

his wife’s clothes. He did afterwards become a great man, and his
end was tragical, for, ‘upon a certain time, he proving a young horse,
was cast off by him, and in the fall hurt himself exceedingly, so that
he sickens and dies of it.’245—Law.
At this time commenced a stormy period which
was long memorable in Scotland. It opened with a 1674. Jan.
tempest of east wind, which strewed the coasts of
Northumberland and Berwickshire with wrecks. 1674.
During February, the rough weather continued;
and at length, on the 20th of the month, a heavy fall of snow,
accompanied by vehement frost, set in, which lasted for thirteen
days. This was afterwards remembered by the name of the Thirteen
Drifty Days. There was no decided improvement of the weather till
the 29th of March. ‘All fresh waters was frozen as if in the midst of
winter; all ploughing and delving of the ground was marred till the
aforesaid day; much loss of sheep by the snow, and of whole
families in the moor country and highlands; much loss of cows
everywhere, also of wild beasts, as doe and roe.’—Law. This storm
seems to have fallen with greatest severity upon the Southern
Highlands. It is stated in the council books of Peebles, that ‘the most
part of the country lost the most part of their sheep and many of
their nolt, and many all their sheep. It was universal, and many
people were almost starved for want of fuel for fire.’
James Hogg has given a traditionary account of the calamity.246 ‘It is
said that for thirteen days and nights, the snow-drift never once
abated: the ground was covered with frozen snow when it
commenced, and during all that time the sheep never broke their
fast. The cold was intense to a degree never before remembered;
and about the fifth and sixth days of the storm, the young sheep
began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and all that were
affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of the frost
wind often cut them off when in that state quite instantaneously.
About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to build up
huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some shelter
for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little, for about
the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one another’s
wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth day
from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not
a living sheep to be seen. Large mis-shapen walls of dead,
surrounding a small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff
in their lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and
his master; and though on low-lying farms, where the snow was not
so hard before, numbers of sheep weathered the storm, yet their
constitutions received such a shock that the greater part of them
perished afterwards, and the final consequence was, that about
nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland were destroyed.
‘In the extensive pastoral district of Eskdale Moor,
which maintains upwards of 20,000 sheep, it is 1674.
said none were left alive but forty young wedders
on one farm, and five old ewes on another. The farm of Phaup
remained without a stock and without a tenant for twenty years
subsequent to the storm. At length, one very honest and liberal-
minded man ventured to take a lease of it, at the annual rent of a
gray coat and a pair of hose. It is now rented at £500. An extensive
glen in Tweedsmuir, belonging to Sir James Montgomery, became a
common at that time to which any man drove his flocks that
pleased, and it continued so for nearly a century. On one of Sir
Patrick Scott of Thirlestane’s farms, that keeps upwards of 900
sheep, they all died save one black ewe, from which the farmer had
high hopes of preserving a breed; but some unlucky dogs, that were
all laid idle for want of sheep to run at, fell upon this poor solitary
remnant of a good stock, and chased her into the lake, where she
was drowned.’
The Thirteen Drifty Days are the means of bringing the ill-fated Duke
of Monmouth before us in an extraordinary relation of
circumstances. He and his duchess, in December 1675, obtained a
licence to import 4800 nolt of a year old, and 200 horses, ‘to be
employed in stocking their waste lands in the south part of this
kingdom,’ the bringing in of live-stock from Ireland being then
forbidden by act of parliament. Walter Scott of Minto, sheriff-depute
of Roxburghshire, became caution that the licence should not be
exceeded. But 120 of the oxen were proved to have been above a
year old; and the Council, accordingly (August 3, 1676), fined Scott
in £200 sterling.—P. C. R.
Agnes Johnston, of Airth in Stirlingshire, an
unmarried woman about fifty years of age, was Feb. 19.
tried in Edinburgh for the murder of an infant
named Lamb, her own grand-niece. Living with the 1674.
parents of the deceased, she took an opportunity,
when there was nobody in the house but herself and the child, to
take the infant out of its cradle, lay it in a bed, and cut its throat.
The confession of the wretched woman bore that, for some time
before she committed the deed, she felt a spirit within her that did
draw her neck together, and which frequently tempted her to make
away with herself. Once she actually did attempt to drown herself in
a well at Clackmannan; but she cried to a woman near by, who
helped her out. She had never told any one of her temptations, nor
had she power to tell; but, her fits being thought fictitious by her
relatives, and they having consequently threatened to turn her out
of their house, she had in revenge resolved to destroy their child.
Agnes, who would now be regarded as a person under
hallucinations, expiated her sad act two days after in the
Grassmarket.247

Law, in noting the death of an eminent physician

at this time, mentions the death, some time Feb.
before, of another, Dr Purves, from an extreme
cold, and because he ‘could not be kept in heat,’ ‘God letting us see
that all means applied for our health without his blessing them, are
ineffectual.’ Another writer of this age adverts to a Mr Dalgliesh,
‘curate’ of Parton, who ‘was so chilly, that he wore twenty fold of
cloth on him all the year, and furs on his head day and night.’248
An act of grace towards the Presbyterians, passed
at this time with the hope of conciliating them, had Mar. 4.
the effect of encouraging that disposition to private
religious meetings, or conventicles, which for some years had given
the government so much trouble. ‘From that day Scotland broke
loose with conventicles of all sorts, in houses, fields, and vacant
churches.... In Merse, Teviotdale, the Borders, Annandale, Nithsdale,
Clydesdale, Lothian, Stirlingshire, Perthshire, Lennox, Fife, they fixed
so many posts in the fields, mosses, muirs, and mountains, where
multitudes gathered almost every Sabbath,’ until the time of
Bothwell Bridge. ‘At these meetings, many a soul was converted to
Christ, but far more turned from the bishops to profess themselves
Presbyterians. The parish churches of the curates [that is, the
regular parish clergy] came to be like pest-houses; few went to any
of them, none to some, so the doors were kept locked. The
discourse up and down Scotland was the quality and success of last
Sabbath’s conventicle, who the preachers were, what the number of
the people was, what the affections of the people; how sometimes
the soldiers assaulted them, and sometimes killed some of them;
sometimes the soldiers were beaten, and some of them killed.’
There appears to have been a band of about forty
ministers who set the government at defiance in 1674.
this manner, most of them young and active men.
In the large towns, house conventicles prevailed; but in the country,
‘the people had a sort of affectation to the fields above houses.’
There came to be a regularity in these affairs; when the people in a
rural district wished to have a conventicle minister, they sent to town
to engage one. Danger made the congregations come armed. ‘Not
many gentlemen of estates durst come, but many ladies,
gentlewomen and commons, came in good multitudes. Wonderful
conversions followed upon the sermons. People discovered their own
secret scandals. Sometimes people of age bemoaned their want of
baptism, and received it at these occasions. Sometimes a curate
would come, and after the first sermon, stand up and profess his
repentance, and afterwards would consecrate himself to that work
by a solemn field-preaching. So the work of the gospel advanced in
Scotland for several years.’—Kir.

A strange scene was presented in the Parliament

Close in Edinburgh. As the members of the Council June 4.
approached their house of meeting, they found
fifteen ladies prepared to present a petition, 1674.
‘desiring that a gospel ministry might be presented
for the starving congregations of Scotland.’ There were present
amongst them the widows of Mr Robert Blair and Mr John Neave,
noted as entirely ‘faithful’ clergymen during the troubles; Lady
Crimond, a daughter of Johnston of Warriston; a sister-in-law of the
Laird of Dundas and a sister of the Earl of Melville; the rest being
generally the wives of Edinburgh citizens. Seeing it was dangerous
for men to appear in the form of remonstrants, these ladies had
volunteered to undertake the duty. The singularity of the occasion
had brought together a crowd, which filled the close, and which is
said to have comprised a large proportion of the fair sex. The press
was so great and so tumultuous around the councillors, that they
could scarcely make their way to the council-house. As the
chancellor descended from his coach, Archbishop Sharpe went close
behind him, fearing bodily harm. It is alleged by Sir George
Mackenzie that a design for doing some serious injury to the primate
was entered into on this occasion, and that the ladies were to ‘set
upon him’ when a certain member of the corps should raise her
hand as a signal; but this would need confirmation. He was saluted
with reproaches and cries of Judas! and Traitor! but the only
approach to personal violence was a slap on the neck from one of
the sisterhood, who at the same time took leave to tell him that that
(meaning the neck) should yet pay for it ere all was done! One of
the ladies, presenting her petition to the chancellor, he received it
with a courteous salute, and listened to her with an inclined head till
he got to the door of the council-chamber. Lord Stair tossed his copy
to the ground, whereupon the fair petitioner reminded him he had
not acted in that manner with the famous Remonstrance of 1651,
which he helped to pen.
The Council took this matter in high dudgeon. They resented the
personal disrespect of the scene in the Parliament Close, and they
denounced the matter of the petition as tending to stir up hatred
against his majesty’s government. For one thing, it ‘most falsely and
scandalously bears that they [the supplicants] had long been
deprived of the inestimable blessing of the public worship and
ordinances of God, whereas it is notour that his majesty’s subjects
do enjoy [those blessings] in great purity and peace, [there being]
ane orderly ministry authorised and countenanced and established
by law.’ In short, it was a seditious libel, calling for sharp
punishment. Two of the ladies being brought before the Council,
refused to take an oath or give evidence; the rest failed to appear on
citation. The whole were put to the horn as rebels, and three
suffered a short confinement.—Kir. P. C. R.

The Macleans had been a loyal clan, fighting with

Montrose for the king, and suffering not a little in 1674.
the royal cause. What the Campbells had been
during the same period need not be particularised. Yet, when the
clemency of the government had restored the Argyle estates to the
earl, he was not the less disposed on that account to urge certain
claims of his family upon its more loyal neighbours. Fountainhall
speaks of them as ‘patched-up claims and decreets of his own courts
for contumacy;’ while the fact was that the Macleans durst not make
appearance in the grounds of their enemy, ‘and pretended casualties
of superiority, as escheats, wards, non-entries, reliefs, &c.,’ a
particularly hard case, as these arose in many instances from the
deaths of Macleans in the king’s service, while their superior, the late
Marquis of Argyle, had been ‘the great transgressor.’ Argyle,
however, according to the alleged genius of his family in that age,
‘walked warily in all he did,’ and, the Macleans imprudently despising
his efforts, and neglecting legal measures of resistance, he
succeeded ultimately in obtaining a letter of fire and sword against
them.249 Behold, then, in the summer of this year, a clan muster of
the Campbells and their connections, to the amount of 2000 men,
designed to enforce certain payments from the Tutor of Maclean in
Mull—the Maclean of the day being a minor under the care of an
uncle so called. The Tutor, on his part, has seven or eight hundred
kilted followers to make resistance; but either his means were
inadequate, or his measures had been ill concerted. The earl
‘besetting the isle with ships and boats, enters at three several
places; at one place, Lord Niel, the earl’s brother, lights upon the
cows which the Highlanders had driven to that place for safety, and
caused cut down and hough [hamstring] a considerable number of
them; which occasioned a great cry by the women and children
keeping them, and running to their husbands and friends to acquaint
them how it stood; whereupon the islanders, being amazed, fainted
and came to a composition of the matter. The earl gets the castle of
Duart into his own hand, and mans it for himself. They all yield and
submit, and promise payment and subjection to the said earl.’—Law.
See further transactions next year.

There was no shearing this year till October, and

much of the corn green when cut even then. Oct.
Consequently, meal, though of bad quality, went to
a pound sterling the boll. ‘Yet there was not any time cows found
fatter than in this harvest, and no scarcity either of cows or sheep
for slaughter. Thus the Lord, who casts down with one hand, lifts up
with the other.’—Law.
It is rather surprising that sheep and cattle should
so quickly have become plentiful after the great 1674.
destruction of such stock from the storms of the
preceding January. But in as far as the fact was true, the good
condition of the animals might be readily accounted for by the very
humidity of the summer and autumn, producing an abundance of
herbage, while destructive to cereal crops.

The winter of 1674-5 is stated to have been

singularly mild and free of rain in Ireland, and 1675.
probably it was of the same character in Scotland.
In our country, as in Ireland, there was a good harvest; yet victual
continued to be dear by reason of the stock of the preceding scanty
season being so thoroughly exhausted. Another winter of
extraordinary mildness followed. The weather, at the end of
November and beginning of December, is described as very warm.
Many people fell sick, and died. A feverish cold—what might now be
called influenza—was epidemic in town and country, ‘whereof moe
die than was observed in other years before.’—Law.
Patrick Walker tells us that one night in August of this year, but more
probably the fact occurred in 1674, Mr Donald Cargill, being at
Cowhill in Livingstone parish, saw a great mist come on, and told the
family to be careful of it, keeping close within their houses. He also
desired them to mark where it stood thickest, ‘for there they would
see the effects saddest.’ There was a small place called Craigs,
where they observed the mist unusually thick, and, within four
months after, thirty persons died there. It is probable that Mr
Donald’s predictions in this case were founded upon simple
observation of natural facts.

The Macleans having failed in their agreement with

the Earl of Argyle, and set his claims at nought, his Sep.
lordship now prepared a second expedition against
Mull, and this time he added to his own forces some regular soldiers
and militia. The Macleans, on the other hand, had obtained
assistance to a considerable amount from Macdonnell of Glengarry,
Cameron of Locheil, and Maclean of Lochbuy. There were probably
not less than fifteen hundred armed Highlanders on each side.
The Campbells, proceeding in a great fleet of ships
and birlins, under the command of the earl’s 1675.
brother, Lord Niel, encountered a severe storm on
the 21st and 22d of September, by which they were damaged and
driven back, though fortunately no lives were lost. ‘This storm was
so great, that ... great oaks were blown up by the roots ... old trees
of two hundred years standing broken in the midst ... and the corns
so shaken, that the people got little more than straw to cut down. A
rumour went that there was a witch-wife, named Muddock, had
promised to the Macleans that, so long as she lived, the Earl of
Argyle should not enter Mull; and indeed many of the people
imputed the rise of that great storm unto her paction with the devil,
how true I cannot assert.’—Law. Might not the autumnal equinox
somewhat better account for the fact?
The Earl of Argyle was so far baffled by this storm, that he had to
give up for the meantime the design of vindicating his rights by
force.
We find next year the cause of the Macleans taken up by the Earl of
Seaforth, the Marquis of Athole, and some other chiefs, by whose
means a suspension of Argyle’s powers was obtained, and his
account subjected to a severe reckoning, ‘which he was most averse
to.’ They also hounded out a creditor of his own upon him, and he
was obliged to make a precipitate retreat from Edinburgh to escape
caption, and to carry off the furniture of his Stirling mansion to a
secure place in the Highlands, lest it should be seized for the debt.
The earl and the Macleans are found next year again at legal tilt, but
with no particular result that appears. His own forfeiture for treason,
which soon after occurred, probably saved them from further
annoyance.
The winter of 1675-6 being singularly mild, was
followed by a favourable spring, and there 1676.
consequently was an abundant harvest. The
characteristic mutability of our climate was, however, shewn
immediately after. There was a drought in latter autumn, and about
the 18th of December the temperature fell to an extraordinary
degree, ‘the most aged never remembered the like. The birds fell
down frae the air dead; the rats in numbers found dead; all liquors
froze, even the strongest ale; and the distilled waters of
apothecaries in warm rooms froze in whole, and the glasses
broke.’—Law.

Two boys, named Clark and Ramsay, the one

seventeen, and the other fifteen years of age, Jan.
suffered in Edinburgh for an offence which had
perhaps been suggested by the rumours attending 1676.
the celebrated case of the Marchioness de
Brinvilliers. John Anderson, a merchant, the master of Ramsay, had
long been pining under an enfeebling malady, which was likely to
have in time brought him to the grave. During his sickness, Ramsay,
in conjunction with his companion Clark, purloined several articles of
value belonging to his master, trusting that he would die, and that
consequently no discovery would take place. Finding Anderson’s
disease taking a turn, the young thieves became alarmed; and took
into counsel another boy named Kennedy, an apothecary’s
apprentice, who supplied them with a drug calculated to keep up the
malady under which Anderson had suffered. The man receiving this
in small doses, grew ill again, and in time died. No suspicion of foul
play was entertained, and apparently the two lads would have been
allowed to remain unnoticed, if they had not offered for sale a gold
chain which formed part of their plunder. Being detained and
questioned, they fell into such terror, that an ingenuous confession
of their guilt was easily obtained from them, accompanied with
many expressions of sorrow. They were hanged, ‘both in regard to
the theft clearly proven, and for terror that the Italian trick of
sending men to the other world in figs and possets might not come
over seas to our island.’ Kennedy, ‘an outed minister’s son,’ was
detained for want of proof, and ultimately banished.—Foun.
Wodrow adds a tale of wonder, as told him by his mother-in-law, Mrs
Warner, who had visited the two boys in prison. After the burial of
Anderson, his nephew, Sir John Clerk of Pennycuick, ‘was one night
lying in his own house, in a room with some others, sleeping. In his
sleep he imagined he heard a voice calling to him: “Avenge the
blood of your uncle!” and wakened, and asked if any of them had
been speaking to him. They declared not. He composed himself to
sleep, and had it repeated; and he asked the former question the
second time, and those in the room denied, as above. He slept
again, and had the same repeated the third time; on which he got
up, and went immediately to Edinburgh and made a particular
inquiry into the circumstances of his uncle’s death, at the two
apprentices, but found nothing to fix on at this time. In a little, Sir
John met with a medal in a goldsmith’s shop which he knew to
belong to his uncle. This he traced up till he landed it on the
apprentices, who, upon this, confessed they had opened their
master’s cabinet and taken out money, &c.’

Mr James Mitchell, who made an attempt on

Archbishop Sharpe’s life in 1668, and wounded the 1676.
Bishop of Orkney, was taken prisoner in February
1674, and being subjected to examination, and promised his life if
he would confess, did make a confession—which, however, he
afterwards retracted before the Court of Justiciary, having in the
interval been told that nothing could be proved against him, and
warned that perhaps the promise made to him might not be
respected. This conduct put the government to a difficulty, and
irritated them the more against him. At length, after keeping him in
a very hard confinement for two years, they resolved to subject him
to the torture, as the only means left to bring him back to his
confession.
It is not proposed here to detail the sufferings of the wretched
Mitchell; but those who know the courts of law, as they now exist,
will probably view with some interest the arrangements that were
made beforehand for that kind of procedure.
The resolution having been formed to put Mitchell
to the torture of the boot, the Council ‘do hereby Jan. 6.
nominate the Earls of Linlithgow, Wigton, Seaforth,
the Lords Ross and Treasurer Depute as a committee of Council to
meet on the 24th day of January next, at nine o’clock in the
forenoon in the Parliament House, where the justices do ordinarily
hold their courts, and to cause put the said Mr James Mitchell to the
question and torture concerning his being in the rebellion in the year
1666, and appoints the commissioners of justiciary in a fenced court
to be present then and assistant, in their robes, with their clerks and
other officers of court; and recommends to the said committee, or
any three of them with the commissioners of justiciary, to meet
before that time and consider of the way and manner of the said
torture,’ &c.
The Council afterwards ordered that a bailie of Edinburgh should be
present, ‘to receive and put in execution such orders as the lords
shall think fit to give.’—P. C. R.
The unfortunate Mitchell sustained the torture with surprising
firmness, and without making any admission criminative of himself. A
proposal being afterwards made to torture him in the other leg, one
of his friends (so the report went) dropped an anonymous hint to
Archbishop Sharpe, that if he persisted in the resolution, he should
have a shot from a steadier hand; ‘whereupon he was let alone, but
still kept in prison.’—Law. At length the unhappy man was brought to
a regular trial, when the state-officers all denied in the witness-box
that fact of the promise of life upon confession, which their own
record bore, and which Mitchell alleged had taken place. It is just
possible that the record misrepresented what took place; but it is
very difficult to make so largely charitable an allowance. Mitchell
suffered in the Grassmarket (January 1678).
‘A star was seen at twelve hours of the day by a
great company of people met for sermon on 1676. July 9.
Gargunnock Hills, and that when the sun was
shining.’—Law.

One John Scott, a Quaker in Leith, was fined by

Bailie Carmichael there, in a hundred dollars, and Sep.
banished from the town, for brewing upon the
Sunday, and answering, when challenged for it by the bailie and Mr
Hamilton the minister, that ‘he might as weel brew on the Sunday as
Mr Hamilton might take money for going up to a desk, and talking
and throwing water upon a bairn’s face.’ He appealed to the Privy
Council against the sentence as over-severe and beyond the power
of the magistrate; but ‘he was ill set, for he had both the magistracy
and the clergy—who solicited strongly—against him, for both of
them would be baffled if the sentence were found unjust. The
Council ratified the bailie’s sentence ... whereupon Bailie Carmichael
arrested and seized eighty bolls of malt, the said Scott had paid ten
or eleven pound the boll for, when victual was dear, and caused
apprise and judge it to him, for his hundred dollars.’—Foun.

For several years there had been a remarkable lull

in the spiritual world, and, whether from the Dec.
judicious mildness of the government in ordering
that no women should be condemned for witchcraft except upon
voluntary confession, or any other cause, witch cases had wholly
ceased. All at once, the devil’s work recommenced, and a series of
dismal tragedies ensued. It seems to have been primarily owing to a
vagrant girl named Janet Douglas, who appeared deaf and dumb,
and who may be reasonably set down as one of those singular
young persons who, acting under a morbid love of mischief, have at
the same time marvellous powers of deception. Whether she was
the same person who figures in the anecdote below,250 we have no
means of ascertaining.
Sir George Maxwell of Pollock had for some weeks
been very unwell, with a pain in his side and one 1676.
in his shoulder. The illness had first come upon him
suddenly in the night, when at Glasgow, in the form of a violent
heat, attended with pain. At the time noted in the margin, Janet
Douglas came to the neighbouring village, and began to frequent
Pollock House. Attracting the attention of Sir George’s sister and
daughter, she endeavoured to apprise them by signs that, at a
certain cottage not far off, there was a picture of wax turning at a
fire; and she expressed in her imperfect way a wish that a couple of
men should go with her thither. Lady Maxwell, not being inclined to
superstition, would have denied the girl’s request; but the two other
gentlewomen consented. So Janet went away with two men-
servants, and straight conducted them to the cottage of an old
woman of evil fame, named Janet Mathie, whose son the laird had
some time before imprisoned for stealing his fruit. ‘She going in with
the men, the woman on some occasion stepping to the door, the
dumb lass instantly put her hand behind the chimney, and takes out
a picture of wax wrapped in a linen cloth, gives it to the men; away
they all come with it, and let the gentlewomen see it. They find two
pins stuck in the right side of it, and a pin on the shoulder
downward, which they take out, and keeps quiet; and that night the
laird had good rest, and mended afterward, though slowly, for he
was sore brought down in his body: and in two or three days they
made him understand the matter. The woman is apprehended, and
laid up in prison in Paisley.’ On being searched, several witch-marks
—that is, spots insensible to pain—were found upon her.
On the 4th of January, Sir George’s illness recurred
with the same violence as before, and his face 1677.
assumed the leaden hue of death. Amidst the
anxieties which this occasioned, the dumb girl sent to inform the
family that John Stewart, Mathie’s son, had made a new image of
clay, for the purpose of taking away Sir George’s life. Two gentlemen
went next day with the girl to Mathie’s cottage, and keeping her at a
distance, but acting under her directions, found such an image
under the bolster of a bed, with three pins sticking in it. The young
man and his sister Annaple were immediately apprehended. From
that day, it was said that Sir George began to recover his health.
Stewart at first denied all concern in the images,
but, on witch-marks being found on his person, he 1677.
was ‘confounded,’ and joined his sister in a
confession, which described witch-conventions in their mother’s
house, along with ‘a man dressed in black, with a blue band and
white hand-cuffs, with hoggars over his bare feet, which were
cloven!’ Three women of the neighbourhood, Bessie Weir, Margaret
Jackson, and Marjory Craig, were accordingly apprehended and
examined, when the second gave a confession to much the same
effect, but the other two proved ‘obdurate.’
In the subsequent judicial proceedings, Annaple Stewart gave a clear
statement regarding the making of the first wax image in October
last in the presence of the Black Man, her mother, and the other
three women. They bound it on a spit, and turned it round before
the fire, saying: ‘Sir George Pollock! Sir George Pollock!’ The young
man, who was not then at home, had returned and been present at
the making of the second image in January. ‘After he had gone to
bed, the Black Man came in, and called him quietly by his name,
upon which he arose from the bed and put on his clothes. Margaret
Jackson, Bessie Weir, and Marjory Craig did enter in at the window in
the gable.... The first thing that the Black Man required was that he
should renounce his baptism and deliver up himself wholly unto him,
putting one of his hands on the crown of his head, and the other to
the sole of his foot ... promising he should not want any pleasure,
and that he should get his heart sythe on all that should do him
wrong. [All having given their consent to the making of the clay
image, which was meant as a revenge for Sir George Maxwell taking
away his mother], they wrought the clay, and the Black Man did
make the head and face, and the two arms. The devil set three pins
in the same, one in each side, and one in the breast; and John did
hold the candle all the time the picture was making.... The picture
was placed by Bessie Weir in his bed-straw.’ On this occasion, they
had all had nicknames given them by the devil, who himself bore the
name of Ejool.251
It is noted that when the girl, after confession in bed in Pollock
House, was asked what the devil’s name had been to her, ‘she, being
about to tell, was stopped, the bed being made to shake, and her
clothes under her blown up with a wind.’
When the two young people had been committed
to Paisley prison, Janet, their mother, desired to 1677.
see her son, and the request being granted, ‘they
make a third and new picture of clay, which the dumb lass again
discovers.’ It was supposed that this was intended for Sir George’s
daughter-in-law, who had taken an active interest in detecting the
diabolic conspiracy, and who fell ill about this time.
In consideration of her nonage and penitency, Annaple Stewart was
not brought to trial, though retained in prison. On the 15th of
February, the rest of the party were tried and condemned, Janet
Mathie, Bessie Weir, and Marjory Craig continuing to deny their guilt
to the last. The obduracy of Mathie was considered the more
horrible, as her two children seriously exhorted her to confession,
Annaple with tears reminding her of her many meetings with the
devil, but all in vain. The four women and the boy actually suffered
in Paisley (20th February). Mathie was first hanged, and then
burned, along with the wax and clay effigies. When Weir, the last of
the four, was turned off the gallows, ‘there appears a raven, and
approaches the hangman within an ell of him, and flies away
again.’—Law.
It is perhaps the most singular fact regarding this
case, that the particulars of it are narrated with all 1677.
seriousness by Sir George’s son and successor, Sir
John Maxwell, who was subsequently Lord Justice-clerk—that is,
supreme criminal judge in Scotland. He intimates not the least doubt
of any of the facts, neither of any of the popular inferences from
them. Other intelligent men in that age were struck by the manner
in which the doings of the witches were detected, and Janet Douglas
was for some time the subject of general attention. In the same
month which saw the witches done to death on Paisley green, she
detected a similar conspiracy against Mr Hugh Smith, the minister of
Eastwood, who ‘was much afflicted with pain and sweating, to the
changing of half-a-dozen shirts some days, and was brought very
low, but after the discovery, and the effigy gotten, and the prins
taken out, grew well again.’ It was given out regarding the girl, that
she understood any language in which she was addressed. When
she had somewhat recovered the use of her own tongue, which was
about two months after these events, she told that three years
before, she had had ‘an impression on her spirit’ to come to Pollock.
‘Being asked how she had knowledge of detecting witches and other
secrets, she declared that she knew not from what spirit; only things
were suggested to her; but denied that she had any correspondence
with Satan.’—Law. According to Sir John Lauder, she stated that ‘she
had all things revealed to her in her sleep by vision.’ This learned
gentleman adds: ‘What made her very suspect to be haunted only
by a familiar, was her dissolute idle life, having ... not so much as a
show or semblance of piety in it, but much lightness and vanity.’252
The Privy Council, hearing much rumour of these things from the
west, sent orders to search for and apprehend Janet Douglas, and
she was brought to Edinburgh in May, and lodged in the Canongate
Tolbooth. People flocked to see her, and she began to exercise her
art of witch-finding amongst them, but with no particular effect. In
June, nevertheless, five or six women of the west, whom she had
detected in killing Hamilton of Barns by a wax image, were burned
for their imaginary crime at Dumbarton. Next month we find a
reference to her in another case.
Two sons of Douglas of Barloch having been
drowned in crossing a river at one time, the father 1677.
was induced by Janet Douglas to believe that the
calamity was an effect of witchcraft. Barloch consequently caused
John Gray, Janet M‘Nair, Thomas and Mary Mitchell, to be
apprehended and carried to Stirling Tolbooth. There, ‘their bodies
being searched by the ordinar pricker, there were witch-marks found
upon each of them, and Janet M‘Nair confessed that she got these
marks from the grip of a grim black man, and had a great pain for a
time thereafter.’ After keeping these four persons in jail on his own
charges for fourteen weeks, Barloch found the expense more than
he was able to undergo, ‘being but a gentleman of a mean fortune;’
and on his petition, the Council ordered (July 5, 1677) that the
magistrates of Stirling should in the meantime ‘entertein the
prisoners.’ Against this ordinance, the magistrates immediately
reclaimed, ‘seeing it is a great burden to the town, who have so
many other contingencies to undergo;’ and the lords, reconsidering
the matter, commissioned the Lairds of Kier, Touch, and
Herbertshire, to examine the prisoners, and ‘try what they find anent
these persons’ guilt of the crime of witchcraft, and report.’
What was ultimately done with the four Stirling prisoners, we do not
learn. As to Janet Douglas, the Council began to feel that she was
something of an inconvenience in the country; so they determined to
banish her beyond seas. At first, no skipper could be found who was
willing to take her in his vessel; some were disposed to set sail
without a pass, to avoid being compelled to take such a dangerous
commodity on board. But Janet was ultimately banished and heard
of no more.
Lord Fountainhall notes a remarkable homicide as
taking place this winter, at the village of Abernethy 1676-7.
in Fife. A butcher and another man, sitting in an
ale-house together, quarrelled, and in a sudden fit of passion, the
butcher inflicted a mortal stab upon his companion. Some gentlemen
sitting in a neighbouring room heard the fray, and, rushing in, found
the butcher with the bloody knife in his hand. Excited by the atrocity
of the deed, they hurried off the murderer to the regality gallows,
and instantly hanged him, though they had no sort of authority to
act in that manner. They probably acted upon a popular notion, that
a murderer taken red-hand, or fresh from the act, may be instantly
done to death by the bystanders; which appears, however, to be a
mistake.

The celebrated Beau Fielding is supposed to have

at this time paid a visit to Edinburgh, while in 1677. Jan.
difficulties on account of his suspected share in the
murder of Robert Perceval—a young libertine found dead one
morning near the Maypole in the Strand. He and two Scotch
gentlemen of his own sort, being met one evening at their cups in a
house in Edinburgh, were reputed to have drunk three toasts, ‘horrid
to think on’—namely, the Trinity, their own confusion, and the devil.
—Law. The allegation is but too credible, for about this time there
begins to appear an extreme form of profligacy and impiety—
confined, indeed, to a few of the upper classes—such as had never
before been known in Scotland.

The system formerly adopted for keeping peace

and maintaining law in the Highlands—namely, the Jan. 18.
making heads of clans answerable for their
dependents and inferiors—was now declared to have been found not
to answer, ‘in respect the said duty doth lie upon
many persons in general, and no person doth 1677.
make it his work.’ Consequently, ‘the insolency and
villainy of thieves, sorners, and other wicked and lawless persons do
abound and increase, to the affront of our authority and oppression
of the lieges.’ The government therefore deemed it necessary to try
the effect of a different plan, and granted a commission to Sir James
Campbell of Lawers to use means for apprehending thieves and
broken men in the Highlands, in order that they might be brought to
justice. It was also arranged that when any cattle or other property
was stolen, Sir James should make restitution to the owners, only
taking them bound to support him in the legal processes by which
he should endeavour to rescue the goods from the thieves, and get
due punishment inflicted. All sheriffs, chiefs, landlords, and others
were enjoined to assist and countenance Sir James in this thief-
taking commission.
Eneas Lord Macdonald was afterwards conjoined with Sir James
Campbell; and for his service during the year ending the 1st of
September 1677, Sir James was ordered the sum of one hundred
and fifty pounds! But this seems to have been regarded as rather
scanty remuneration, and it was (September 8, 1677) decreed that
for the fture there should be a salary of two hundred pounds to ‘ilk
ane of the said two persons.’
As necessary to support the two gentlemen in their task, a garrison
of a hundred soldiers was sent to Inverlochy, care being previously
taken to have dwellings built for them, ‘as the house there is
altogether out of repair and unlodgeable.’ The Marquis of Huntly and
the Laird of Grant were called upon to exert themselves to convince
the minor chiefs in their several districts that the government was
now determined to put down the lawless system in the Highlands. It
was intimated by other means that letters of fire and sword would
be granted against any district in which gentler means had been
found unavailing.
In February 1680, James M‘Nab in Achessan
represented to the Privy Council that, being 1677.
engaged by Sir James Campbell of Lawers to assist
in apprehending Highland robbers, he had, at the hazard of his life,
taken John, Callum, and Duncan M‘Gibbons, and delivered them to
the governor of the garrison at Finlarig—an unusually perilous piece
of duty, for which he had been promised the sum of eight hundred
merks, now refused by Sir James. As a plea at law ‘against a person
of such dexterity’ would have exhausted the reward, he had had no
alternative but to apply to the Council. Sir James was ordered to pay
the reward as claimed.—P. C. R.
A very compendious view of some of the customs of the Highlanders
in the seventeenth century was given by Mr John Fraser, an
Episcopal minister, author of a Treatise on Second-Sight: ‘In general
they were litigious, ready to take arms upon a small occasion, very
predatory, much given to tables, carding, and dicing. Their games
was military exercise, and such as rendered them fittest for war, as
arching, running, jumping, with and without race, swimming,
continual hunting and fowling, feasting, especially upon their
holidays, the which they had enough, borrowed from popery. Their
marriage and funeral solemnities were much like [those of] their
neighbours in the low country; only at their funerals, there was
fearful howling, screeching, and crying, with very bitter lamentation,
and a complete narration of the descent of the dead person, the
valorous acts of himself and his predecessors, sung with tune in
measure, continual piping, if the person was of any quality or
professing arms. Their chiliarchy had their ushers that gaed out and
came in before them, in full arms. I cannot pass by a cruel custom
that’s hardly yet extinct. They played at cards or tables (to pass the
time in the winter nights) in parties, perhaps four on a side; the
party that lost, was obliged to make his man sit down on the midst
of the floor; then there was a single-soled shoe, well plated,
wherewith his antagonist was to give him [the man] six strokes on
end, upon his bare loof [palm], and the doing of that with strength
and art was thought gallantry.’253