In the winter of 1629, the legal records of Peebles document the case of Isobel Rutherfurde, a woman whose precarious existence as a landless vagabond placed her at the margins of early modern Scottish society. On February 3, 1629, Isobel was brought before the authorities under the official case designation C/EGD/1084. As an individual without property or a fixed residence, her circumstances rendered her particularly vulnerable to the scrutiny of local officials during a period when the legal framework regarding witchcraft was rigorously enforced across the Scottish Lowlands.
The proceedings against Isobel culminated in trial T/LA/672, marking a definitive intersection between her itinerant life and the judicial mechanisms of the seventeenth century. While the surviving documentation provides only the skeletal framework of her arrest and subsequent trial, it captures the stark reality of how those defined as vagrants were processed through the court system. For Isobel, this process solidified her place within the historical record, framing her life’s final documented chapter within the rigorous, and often fatal, landscape of the Scottish witch trials.