Scotland in the early modern period other towns above 10,000 by the end of the period were Glasgow with 32,000, Aberdeen with around 16,000 and Dundee with 12,000. In late medieval Scotland there is evidence of occasional prosecutions of individuals for causing harm through witchcraft, but these may have been declining in the first half of the sixteenth century. In the aftermath of the initial Reformation settlement, Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act 1563, similar to that passed in England one year earlier, which made witchcraft a capital crime. Despite the fact that Scotland probably had about one quarter of the population of England, it would have
Demography of Scotland It has been suggested that they would have had a mean population of about 2,000, but many would be much smaller than 1,000 and the largest, Edinburgh, probably had a population of over 10,000 by the end of the era. Calculations based on Hearth Tax returns for 1691 indicate a population of 1,234,575, but this figure may have been seriously affected by the famines of the 1690s. The first reliable information is a census conducted by the Reverend Alexander Webster in 1755, which shows the inhabitants of Scotland as 1,265,380. By the time of the first decadal census in 1801,