Jerry Brannigan

"the mid- to late-1700s, when Burns lived and wrote his poetry was a time of great fear of the supernatural and as Brannigan shares in his biography of Burns, people were regularly accused of practicing witchcraft. Across Europe, records of the time indicate some 60,000 people were accused of being witches and subsequently killed; however, Brannigan suggests that the number of people accused of witchcraft and killed may in fact been in the millions, as frightened mobs often took matters into their own hands."