We Eat People Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Hello, it’s Michael. I just want to say thanks for all of your lovely words about episode one. Putting out a new show is absolutely terrifying and having people be so kind about it is a fantastic feeling.
Shows like this rely on listeners like you to help spread the word, and I’d be really chuffed if you would tell a friend, a colleague, hell, even an enemy about Scotland and get them to listen along. And, of course, please do leave us a rating and review on your podcast catcher of choice. It really, truly, does help.
This episode - as you might have guessed from the title - contains things which might not be suitable for young children. They get Christmas after all, so you can have this.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 2 - We Eat People
When you’re young, and foolish, you think you can do anything. You burst into the world with a fresh-faced, wide-eyed optimism. Even 16th Century you. Even the you who was beaten mercilessly by your parents for never being quite good enough, even though your father was a ditch-digger who thought you should go into the family business.
16th Century you might try to find honest work but you’re reckless, impulsive, quick to anger. You’re not cut out for the ditch-diggin’ life.
Then you meet someone, this 16th Century you, meets someone else whose impulsive, reckless nature puts them on the fringes of society. So on the fringes in fact, that they’ve just been accused of witchcraft. And let’s not forget - this you in the 16th Century. Witches are real.
So you’ve met the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with and you want to get married and have babies. But how are you going to provide for your new family? We know jobs aren’t for you, but your family have to eat.
You’ve just run away from home, moved to the other side of the country and you’re taking shelter in caves and makeshift camps. Things could be going better, but wouldn’t it be marvellous to only have to work when you’d run out of money? Maybe only for a couple of hours at a time?
But then, if you have to spend that money just on food to allow you and your new brood to live day to day, isn’t that self-defeating? What if you could provide a source of income and a source of food?
What if the way you’ve chosen to support your family, growing by the year, is to rob travellers of their belongings and murder them to make sure no-one can ever bear witness to your crimes? Surely there’s no way that could possibly provide a source of food.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland, a show about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
This 17th Century you might have been a Mister Bean who jumped around from cave to camp with his wife, Black Agnes, that same person who had been accused of witchcraft back in East Lothian.
This isn’t the loveable fool Mister Bean of your childhood. Alexander Bean - or Sawney Bean as the stories call him - was all of the things we said earlier. Reckless, impulsive, violent… but he was also resourceful.
If you’ve spent your time marauding around the countryside lifting the purses of anyone who crosses your path and then sending them off to meet their maker, then there’s a very good chance that rocking up in the local village trying to pay for a gigot chop with their wedding ring would get you a one way trip to the gallows.
So before they found their forever home, the couple started to cook their victims to keep themselves alive. They’d then dispose of the bodies so it looked like they’d been taken by wild animals. They say it was Agnes’ idea - she was a witch after all - apparently she wasn’t averse to dining out on human flesh before she met her ol’ Sawney himself.
Once you have a home, once you’ve put down roots and begun to feel comfortable… you can begin expand your horizons. It was the same for the Beans. They say they discovered it at low tide.
On the south west coast, just past Girvan and before you get to Ballantrae, there’s a little cove, and in that cove, there’s a little cave.
By the time the tide came in, they realised that the cave was completely obscured from view. It was perfect.
It allowed them to up the ante - to go from only eating when they needed to, to stocking up.
They would stop people on a regular basis, but only people travelling alone. They would rob and murder them before dragging the body back to the cave to be pickled and preserved. Since no-one knew they were there, the random bandit attacks from the surrounding area having trailed off some, they could get their essentials from the town using the money they stole while anything that could be identified was kept in the cave.
And so it went on. The robbings, the killings… the… breeding. All in all the Beans had fourteen children and the kids, unlike their father, went straight into the family business. Unfortunately that wasn’t the only thing they kept in the family. It’s said that they had 18 grandsons and 14 granddaughters and the only way you went back to Sawney Bean’s cave - if you weren’t in the family - was if you were dinner. So I think you can get my jist from that.
Some say this was all encouraged by the patriarch, whose madness had become so all-encompassing he had decided he wanted to - literally - raise an army.
After more than 25 years of murdering passers-by on the road, the Bean clan finally ran into a problem. You can have as many little inbred ankle-biters as you like but that doesn’t mean they’re going to do a good job. With the body count said to be near to a thousand, the Bean family went out on the night of the local fair - a bumper evening for pickings - to partake in their favourite pastime - murder.
They didn’t reckon against their evening’s victim.
That’s after this…
MID ROLL
If you’re listening to this, I’d love to hear your feedback and any ideas you have for the show. If you have a special area of interest you’d like to talk about - get in touch. We’re on Twitter: @BeQuietMedia, you can find us on Facebook, or you can email scotland@bequiet.media.
When there’s forty-eight of you, you no longer need to worry about killing lone wanderers out on the path, so one Bean hunting party was quite happy to attack a couple coming home on horseback from the fair. They took the wife easily, but the husband was a skilled swordsman and, despite being dragged from his horse, was able to keep the cannibals at bay. As the fight continued, another group of revellers from the fair interrupted the attack and the vicious band of brigands retreated into the dark night.
The husband was taken back to the town by his saviours.
Then things started to move very quickly indeed. The King, James VI, was so incensed that this group of merry murderers had been offing his subjects for so many years that he sent four hundred of his best men, along with some particularly hungry dogs, to Galloway to hunt them down. Some stories say he went along himself.
The dogs didn’t need a scrap of clothing to track. After a couple of hours of combing the beach the tide began to go out and suddenly they were greeted by the opening of a cave from which the smell of eviscerated human flesh was enough to turn the strongest stomach.
They found the Bean clan inside, huddled against the invasion of civilisation, surrounded by discarded valuables from their victims - useless to them due to inscriptions or identifiable designs - and carcasses lining the walls, along with blood-soaked tables where the bodies had been butchered.
Forty six members of the Bean clan gave up without a fight - what happened to the other two, no-one knows - and they were taken all the way to Edinburgh to face royal punishment.
The women and children were lashed to stakes, left alive long enough to watch the men be killed - dismembered and allowed to bleed to death. The women and children were then set on fire. Right up until the end, old Sawney himself was spitting at his executioners, shouting
SAWNEY BEAN: IT ISN’T OVER, IT WILL NEVER BE OVER!
The life of Sawney Bean was over, but the story lived on and has inspired hundreds of tales. If you’ve ever seen Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, or the remake, you’ll be familiar with the story. But the story of Sawney Bean doesn’t appear until the 17th Century, in English pamphlets around the time of the Jacobite uprising and the cave itself doesn’t appear until 1896.
Of course, history is not always what it seems. Maybe the story is like the boogeyman - made up to scare children off misbehaviour, or since ‘Sawney’ is a word that was often given to Scots by those with a poor opinion of us - a bit like Jocks today - maybe it was just some propaganda, invented by our neighbours to the South to show the Scots as bloodthirsty.
Of course, there’s no documentary evidence to back the stories up. Alexander Bean might have existed, he might even have been a criminal. He might even have murdered someone… or multiple someones. Did he live in a cave with an inbred cannibal clan?
Maybe, but I doubt it.
But the best myths have their roots in the truth.
MID ROLL
There are going to be two episodes of Scotland in January, one you’ll recognise and something a wee bit different in time for Burns night. Keep an eye on your feed. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, RadioPublic, PocketCasts, Overcast, aCast, iHeart Radio, Castbox… basically anywhere you get podcasts. If you can’t find the show anywhere, get in touch with me and we’ll put that right.
Now back to the show…
Cleek is a Scots word that means grab, or grasp… or seize. It was also the name given to a large hook. Usually used to hang meat. So when I tell you that the best stories have their roots in fact and then introduce you to someone who went by the name Christie Cleek, I think you can probably tell where this is going.
Cleek - according to the scant records of the time - was a butcher in Perth. Because of course he was. At the time Andrew Christie was a respected member of society but this was the middle of the fourteenth century and decades of war between Scotland and England, had devastated the country.
Food-stocks were at an all-time low as whole herds of cattle were slaughtered to feed travelling armies, and land became overgrown as men, who had once worked the fields, departed to fight their enemy. Many poor people began trying to survive on what they could hunt or forage. But desperate times, call for desperate measures.
Christie lead a group who had resolved to split what they found between the group in the hope that they might have more, but things weren’t going according to plan. Initially they had managed to catch a few wild animals in the woods surrounding the cave in which they’d taken shelter but the animals were beginning to stay away. Rooting around for nuts and berries wasn’t really working out either which left the little band of survivors right on the edge of starvation.
Until one day, when one of the starving passed away.
Then Andrew Christie, the butcher from Perth, had an idea.
The poor woman wasn’t enough to feed the group and Christie told them that another would have to die - chosen by short straw - before they could build up enough strength to go out and find victims from elsewhere.
They chose at random, unless there was a choice between someone travelling on foot or someone on horseback. The horse provided another excellent source of meat - and variety is the spice of life - so they would drag the traveller to the ground using a huge iron hook fixed to the end of a pole. This cleek is what gave the butcher, whose life had gone wildly off the rails by this point, his nightmarish moniker.
It started as desperation but it soon became something else, something much worse. Before too long an armed force was sent to track them down. Some say Christie himself escaped justice and lived out his days as David Maxwell - a wealthy merchant in Dumfries, but court records from the time, scant as they are, tell us that a man and woman were tried and executed for cannibalism around the time of Cleek’s activities most believe they were one and the same.
But for generations, the name Christiecleek was enough to silence even the loudest child. The boogeyman was real, and he lived in a cave in the hills.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park. The voice of Sawney Bean was Mitch Bain. You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co, and get in touch with any feedback you have for us on Twitter - BeQuietMedia or we’re on Facebook if you search for Scotland - Scottish History Podcast