We Eat People (Redux) Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 62 - We Eat People (Redux)
16th Century you is a sensitive soul. Not least because your parents quickly took to knocking seven bells out of you when it became obvious that you weren’t cut out to follow in the family business.
The family business was ditch digging. It was an honest living. Your father knew that he could provide for his family by digging. People always need ditches, he’d tell you.
Dinner conversation was never very exciting. But then neither was dinner.
You did try to start with - to find honest work that is. You tried that ditch diggin’ life but you were always impulsive, quick to become frustrated, quick to become furiously angry.
So you give up the honest life just as the love of your life walks into it. She was an outcast. Impulsive, easily angered, frustrated by the restraints of living as a god-fearing member of society. So frustrated in fact that she’d been accused of being a witch!
And let’s not forget, that to this 16th Century you, witches are real.
Suddenly, life begins for you. The sun is that bit brighter, the days are that bit warmer… suddenly that flutter in your heart becomes less a worrying symptom of some unknown killer disease and more a frisson of excitement at every stolen glance.
You want to marry her, this witch, you want to have a family. But you’re not gonna be caught dead digging ditches for the man now, are you? So how are you going to provide? If you take only one lesson away from this, it’s that little kids have to eat.
You’ve run away from home, moved to the other side of the country and you’re spending your nights in caves and ramshackle little camps that are barely fit to keep the Ayrshire wind off you.
Sure things could be going better but you were free and robbing unsuspecting travellers on the road was brilliant, since they were so unsuspecting and you only had to work when you needed the money.
But if you need to spend your hard-plundered loot on food to make sure that you and your new brood can live day to day - isn’t that a bit self-defeating?
What if you could provide a source of income and a source of food? Your mind might leap to farming and in a way… it does.
Because if you rob unsuspecting travellers, kill them and spirit their bodies away to cover your crimes…
....what’s to stop you taking the next logical step?
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This is Scotland, a podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
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Let’s say that this 16th century you isn’t you at all but that your name is Mr Bean, and the woman who stole your heart either by ritual or by being a total charmer is called Black Agnes. The witch. You know, the one from East Lothian.
You’re not the Mr Bean we all know and love. Oh no. You’re Alexander Bean.
The storybooks have a different name for you: Sawney Bean.
You’re no lovable fool. You’re reckless, impulsive, violent, but most importantly, you’re resourceful
After all, you know that if you’ve spent your time marauding around the countryside lifting the valuables of anyone who crosses your path and then packing 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 you apply the farming principle to things. You’re butchering livestock for their valuable parts anyway… so why let any of their value go to waste?
You’d flay the corpses of your victims, gut them and cook their meat. You’d have more than enough to feed a growing family and you’d have corpses that were mutilated enough for the locals to believe they were torn apart by wolves.
Were any of you in the least bit freaked out by the thought of eating your fellow man? Nah… Agnes was already into it before she even met you.
[[[10 seconds]]]
<<SFX - Quiet Sea>>
So what’s next, now that you can provide for your family? Someone born in the 50s once told me that it’s property, so let’s go with that.
After all, you can put down roots, you can expand your horizons. And for the Bean family it was all about Location, Location, Location.
And there it was… on the Ayrshire coast, just past Girvan and before you get to Ballantrae, there’s a little cove, and in that cove, there’s a little cave.
<<SFX - High Tide>>
By the time the tide came in, they realised that the cave was completely obscured from view. It was perfect.
The location meant that not only were they obscured from their comings and goings, but they were able to use new tactics and ideas to claim their victims, since it was easy to set up ambushes on the road which ran above their new forever home.
They would stop people on a regular basis, but only people travelling alone. They would rob them, and murder them before dragging the body back to the cave to be pickled and preserved. They could stock up on food for the lean winter months.
And since no-one knew they were there, the rumoured random bandit attacks from the surrounding area having trailed off some, and the incredibly hungry and thorough wolves having apparently moved on, they could get their essentials from the town using the money that they stole. Anything that could be identified though - any kind of finery - was kept in the cave in an ever-expanding treasure horde.
So it went on. The robbings, the killings… the… breeding. All in all the Beans had fourteen children and the kids, unlike their father’s truncated career in ditch-digging, went straight into the family business.
Unfortunately that wasn’t the only thing they kept in the family. They say they had 18 grandsons and 14 granddaughters.... And since the only way you went back to Sawney Bean’s cave - if you weren’t in the family - was if you were dinner.
I think you can get the jist.
Some say this was all encouraged by the patriarch, whose madness had become so all-encompassing he had decided to - quite literally - raise an army.
After more than 25 years of murdering passers-by on the road, the Bean clan finally ran headlong into a problem.
You can have as many inbred little ankle-biters as you like but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be competent. In fact with each passing generation their capacity to do much of anything would diminish a fair bit.
And so… 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.
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When there’s nearly fifty of you, you don’t really need to worry as much 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 decent swordsman and, despite being dragged from his horse, was able to keep the cannibalistic clan at bay. With every minute that the fight dragged on, more and more groups of revellers from the fair happened upon the attack and the vicious band of brigands retreated into the night.
The man was taken back to the town by his saviours.
From there, 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 - but stories say a lot of things.
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 - the smell of eviscerated human flesh was enough to turn even the strongest stomach.
They found the Bean clan inside, huddled up against the invasion of civilisation, surrounded by piles of valuables raided from their victims - useless to them due to inscriptions or identifiable designs - and carcasses lining the walls, along with blood-soaked tables and tools 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 dismembered and allowed to bleed to death. Those that remained were then set on fire. Right up until the end, old Sawney himself was spitting at his executioners, shouting
<<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 of murder, intrigue and gross incest. If you’ve ever seen Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, or the remake, you’ll be familiar with the general story.
But this tale of the vicious Scottish cannibal 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 in the stories until 1896 - more than 300 years after the whole thing supposedly happened.
So maybe the story is just that. A story, like the boogeyman - made up to scare children off misbehaviour, or since ‘Sawney’ is an old derogatory term for Scots, maybe it was just some propaganda, invented to scare the English public from sympathy for their teeth-bearing, people eating, family loving Scottish neighbours.
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 come on… you’ve got to doubt it right? But the best myths have their roots in the truth.
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15 seconds
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Cleek is a Scots word that means to grab, or to grasp… or to seize.
It was also a name given to a large hook that was usually used to hang meat. So when you meet a man who went by the name “Christie Cleek” in the next ten seconds, I assume you already know where this is heading.
Andrew Christie lived in Perth, and according to the few records of the time he was a butcher. Because of course he was. Christie was a respectable 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. Whole herds of cattle were regularly slaughtered to feed travelling armies, and land became overgrown as men, who had once worked the fields, departed to fight their enemies from the south. The poor people left behind had to try and survive on what they could hunt or forage. There wasn’t much available for either.
So desperate times, call for desperate measures.
Christie led a group who had resolved to split what they found between them in the hope that they might all have just enough to survive, 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, wary of the human hunters hiding in the dark.
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 group passed away.
And 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 - to let them 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. The Cleek was suddenly seared into the imagination of every traveller.
It started as desperation but it soon became something else, something much worse, something primal and terrifying, driven more by greed and bloodlust than the need to survive. 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 make even the rowdiest child sit quietly in their seats as their head filled with visions of a wide-eyed cannibal, blood dripping from his teeth and the giant hook that he carried in his hand to rip wee kids away from their families.
The bogeyman was real… he lived in a cave in the hills.
And if you didn’t eat all of your peas… Christiecleek was gonna get ye!
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by our very own fine young cannibal, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work at mitchbain.bequiet.media.
Jamie Mowat does amazing illustrations for us which you can see in our episode art. See more and buy prints at tidlin.com.
Scotland is supported by Chris Lingwood and listeners like you on Patreon. You can get loads more from us for as little as three dollars a month at: patreon.com/bequietmedia
You can find out more about the show and read transcripts on our website, scotlandpodcast.net and we’re on twitter, facebook and instagram too. Find us by searching Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening. Look after each other, wear a mask, get vaccinated if you can… don’t eat anyone… we’ll see you next time.