In August 1629, the judicial machinery of Lanark turned its attention toward Margaret Strudgeoun, a landless woman whose itinerant lifestyle had led her to be classified in official records as a vagabond. During a period defined by intensifying scrutiny of those existing on the margins of society, Margaret found herself subject to the legal proceedings of case C/EGD/1121. Her status as a person without fixed residence or property often left such individuals particularly vulnerable to the communal suspicions and local pressures that frequently precipitated accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland.
The formal trial, indexed under reference T/LA/705, situated Margaret within a rigorous legal framework designed to address charges of diabolical association. While the surviving documentation provides only the barest outline of her encounter with the authorities of Lanark, the process reflects the broader patterns of the era's inquisitorial practices. Captured by the record on the first of August, Margaret became one of the thousands of souls drawn into the Scottish witch trials between 1563 and 1736, a system that frequently conflated the perceived social instability of vagrancy with the theological anxieties of the age.