From Mr Sebastian Robinson Sir: While I very much enjoyed
Samuel Brit- tan's anti-religious set-piece, he should be aware that the figure he quotes of 4,500 Scot- tish women having been executed for witchcraft over a 100-year period in the 17th and 18th centuries is of doubtful reliability. The late Christina Lamer, who researched the subject very thoroughly, concluded that the estimates made by previous historians, ranging from 3,000 to 4,400 for the period 1590 to 1662, were much overstated, and that the likely total was something over 1,000 (see her Enemies of God: The Witch Hunt in Scot- land, 1983); though even this reduced total is about twice the number of those executed in England over the same period.
One thing does support Brittan's thesis that all religions tend to be similarly danger- ous: the Scottish witchfinders, while firm in their Protestant faith, used the nastily Catholic Malleus Maleficarum as their oper- ating manual. From this one might conclude
that (to paraphrase the cynical French jibe at politicians) two bigots, one of whom is a Catholic, have much more in common than two Catholics, one of whom is a bigot.
Sebastian Robinson
7 Kirklee Gardens, Glasgow
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