Jane Weir (died 1670) was a Scottish woman born near Carluke in Lanarkshire, recognized historically not as a poet but as one of the most dramatic figures in Scotland's witch-trial records. Her brother was Major Thomas Weir, a Calvinist, occultist, and former soldier whose late-life mental collapse drew both siblings into a catastrophic legal process that culminated in their executions.
The sequence of events began when Thomas, then in his seventies and recently retired, fell ill and suffered what appears to have been a severe mental break. He began confessing voluntarily to a secret life of crime and vice. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh initially dismissed the confession as implausible and took no action. Eventually, however, both Jane and Thomas were taken to the Edinburgh Tolbooth for formal interrogation. While Thomas expanded his confession in detail, Jane went further still, offering what contemporaries took as corroboration and what later observers have described as a shared paranoia between the siblings.
“At the trial, which opened on 9 April 1670, Jane confessed that their mother had been a witch who taught her craft to her children.”
She told the court that Thomas bore the mark of the Beast on his body and that the two regularly traveled the countryside together in a fiery coach. These confessions, vivid and elaborately constructed, sealed the case against both of them.
Both siblings were executed in 1670. In keeping with the custom of the time for those condemned of such crimes, they were buried together at the base of the gallows at Shrub Hill, denied the ordinary rites of Christian burial. Jane Weir's story has since attracted attention from writers and historians interested in the psychology of confession, the machinery of witch persecution in early modern Scotland, and the strange intimate dynamic between two people who, in effect, destroyed each other.