The women killed as witches centuries ago are starting to receive justice. But let\u2019s not glamorise the murder of innocents<\/p>\n
Lilias Addie\u2019s body was piled into a wooden box and buried beneath a half-tonne sandstone slab on the foreshore where a dark North Sea laps the Fife coast. More than a hundred years later, she was exhumed by opportunistic Victorian gravediggers and her bones \u2013 unusually large for a woman living in the early 18th century \u2013 were later put on show at the Empire exhibition in Glasgow. Her simple coffin was carved into a wooden walking stick \u2013 engraved \u201cLilias Addie, 1704\u201d \u2013 which ended up in the collection of Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world.<\/p>\n
It was no sort of burial, but from the perspective of the thousands of women accused of, and executed for, witchcraft in early modern Britain, Lilias\u2019s fate had a degree of dignity.<\/p>\n