"Bad Lord Soules" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Scottish Witchcraft: A Complete Guide to Authentic Folklore, Spells, and Magickal Tools"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 4
Bad Lord Soules
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On
the morning of August 4th, 1320, a Scottish nobleman named William II de Soules
stood before a specially convened session of parliament at Scone and confessed
to plotting the murder of his own king. Contemporary records call it the Black
Parliament, and the name fits: this was no ordinary session of governance but a
tribunal assembled specifically to try treason against Robert the Bruce
himself, fresh off the triumph of Bannockburn and newly signed onto the
Declaration of Arbroath. Soules lost his title, his lands, and his freedom that
day. What Scottish folklore would eventually do to him is a great deal more
colorful, and a great deal less true.
Within
a few centuries, the real William de Soules, a border lord convicted of a
fairly mundane act of thirteenth-century political treachery, had been almost
entirely replaced in the popular imagination by “Bad Lord Soules”: a necromancer schooled by a real wizard,
protected by a demonic servant, and eventually boiled alive in molten lead by
his own furious tenants. The transformation from traitor to sorcerer, and the
eventual unraveling of the legend's own “physical evidence,” makes for one of
the Scottish Borders' most instructive ghost stories…
The Noble Necromancer
The
documented facts are, by the standards of medieval Scottish nobility, almost
restrained. William was the elder son of Nicholas II de Soules, Lord of
Liddesdale and Butler of Scotland, and spent his early career shuttling between
English and Scottish loyalties as the Wars of Scottish Independence demanded.
He fought for Edward I's cause as a young man, then switched to Robert the
Bruce's side after Bannockburn in 1314, rising by 1318 to the office of Butler
of Scotland and signing the Declaration of Arbroath under that title in 1320.
That same year, Soules was drawn into a conspiracy against Robert the Bruce alongside Sir David de Brechin, its aims disputed to this day: some accounts hold that Soules wanted the Scottish crown for himself, others that the plot intended to install Edward Balliol instead. The scheme collapsed before it could gather real momentum. Soules was arrested at Berwick, brought before the Black Parliament, and confessed. His co-conspirators paid the full medieval price, drawn behind horses, hanged, and beheaded. Soules, comparatively, got off easy: forfeiture of his title and lands, and imprisonment at Dumbarton Castle, where he died in genuinely unremarkable, if unrecorded, circumstances sometime before April of 1321.
That
should have been the end of William de Soules's story. It was, instead, only
the beginning of Bad Lord Soules's…
Scottish
Borders folklore transformed Soules into something closer to a folk-tale
villain: a practitioner of black magic said to have studied under Michael Scot, the real thirteenth-century
philosopher and mathematician whose genuine reputation as a scholar-astrologer
at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II curdled, over succeeding
centuries, into a full-blown wizard legend of his own. Soules, the story goes,
sealed a pact with the Devil, murdered locals to fuel his rituals at Hermitage
Castle, and kept a demonic familiar named Robin Redcap, a particularly nasty
variety of the malevolent goblin known across Scottish folklore for dyeing its
cap in the blood of its victims.
The
most vivid version of the legend, immortalized in poet John Leyden's
18th-century ballad Lord Soulis, adds an escalating series of
embellishments straight out of a fairy tale: Soules's magic rendered him immune
to rope and steel alike, so ordinary execution simply wouldn't work. According
to one popular telling, the exasperated King finally snapped, “Boil him if you
must, but let me hear no more of him,” and the locals, taking him rather too
literally, wrapped Soules in a sheet of lead and dropped him into a cauldron at
the nearby stone circle of Ninestane Rig,
where the fire beneath melted the lead around him. Leyden's own ballad claimed
locals of his era could still point to the actual cauldron used.
That
cauldron turned out to be the legend's undoing. Sir Walter Scott, who collected
and helped popularize the ballad himself, eventually noted that the “relic”
locals displayed at Skelf-hill wasn't a fourteenth-century execution device at
all: it was a leftover cooking pot from the Jacobite army's 1715 rebellion,
four hundred years too late to have anything to do with William de Soules. The
Occult Encyclopedia's own entry on Soules suggests the boiling story may in
fact be a case of mistaken identity entirely, more plausibly describing the
fate of an earlier Soules, Sir Ranulf de Soules of Liddel, who really was
murdered by his own servants around 1207 or 1208, over a century before William
was even born.
What's left, once the cauldron is debunked and the centuries untangled, is a folk memory doing exactly what folk memory tends to do with an unpopular landlord: taking a genuinely unglamorous treason conviction and reforging it, generation by generation, into something monstrous enough to deserve a monstrous end.
Hermitage Castle itself, brooding and half-ruined in the Scottish Borders near Newcastleton, has never quite shaken its association with Bad Lord Soules, real ownership records or no. Paranormal investigators filming the 1998 documentary Adventures Beyond: Witches, Ghosts and...Phantoms reported capturing evidence they interpreted as Soules's ghost still haunting the grounds, and speculated that a carved stone face on the castle might be a likeness of the man himself. Whether any of that holds up to scrutiny is, at this point, almost beside the point. William de Soules spent less than a year as a convicted traitor before dying quietly in a prison cell. Four centuries of border storytelling have kept him boiling in that cauldron ever since, and by the look of things, they're not finished yet.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY
OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the Borders folklore that turned a convicted traitor into a necromancer, we're recommending a guide to the genuine magical traditions of the land that raised the legend.
By
Barbara Meiklejohn-Free | Llewellyn Worldwide
Barbara
Meiklejohn-Free writes from a position few authors in this particular genre can
claim: she is a hereditary Scottish witch, born and raised in the Highlands and
trained directly under Swein Macdonald, the celebrated Highland Seer, before he
passed the tradition on to her. Scottish Witchcraft is her attempt to set that
inherited practice down on the page, and the result reads less like a
general-audience introduction to Wicca with a tartan draped over it than like a
genuinely regional grimoire, rooted in specific Highland folk traditions that
predate the twentieth-century occult revival by a considerable margin. A
foreword by Ronald Hutton, the Bristol historian whose scholarship on British
paganism and witchcraft remains the field's gold standard, lends the book real
academic ballast without draining any of its personal, lived-in warmth.
The
book moves fluidly between memoir, folklore, and practical instruction.
Meiklejohn-Free walks readers through the specific tools, seasonal observances,
and second-sight traditions of Highland practice, weaving in her own spiritual
awakening alongside the older stories she grew up hearing, the same kind of
oral tradition, in fact, that spent four centuries slowly turning a convicted
fourteenth-century traitor into a boiling-cauldron sorcerer. Readers hoping for
a dry academic survey of Scottish folk belief will find something considerably
warmer and more participatory instead; this is a working book, full of rituals
and exercises meant to be used, not simply read about.
Readers entirely new to witchcraft as a practice may want a general primer first before diving into a tradition this regionally specific, and those hoping for extensive discussion of the darker Borders legends, Soules and his kind, won't find much of that here; Meiklejohn-Free's focus stays firmly on living Highland Craft rather than on the ghost-story tradition of the Lowlands and Borders. But for readers of this magazine curious what a genuine, unbroken thread of Scottish magical practice actually looks like, once you clear away four hundred years of cauldrons and demonic familiars, Scottish Witchcraft is as authentic a guide as currently exists on shelves.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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