In the autumn of 1628, the judicial machinery of the Scottish kirk and state turned toward the village of Langniddry in Haddington. It was here that Elspitt Hislop, a married woman residing within the parish, found herself caught in the rigorous legal processes of the era. On September 27, 1628, her case—formally archived under the identifier C/EGD/1038—was initiated, marking the beginning of a process that would draw her into the jurisdiction of the criminal courts.
The subsequent proceedings against Elspitt are documented under the trial reference T/LA/506. As the matter moved from the initial registration of her case to the formal trial, she was subjected to the established legal protocols governing accusations of witchcraft in early modern Scotland. The surviving records provide the skeletal framework of this legal encounter, capturing a moment in which Elspitt’s life was irrevocably altered by the intersection of local suspicion and the formalized scrutiny of the Haddington authorities.