In the coastal burgh of Prestonpans, located within the sheriffdom of Haddington, the life of Margaret Mathesoun ended in the most final of ways: by fire. Though the precise details of the legal proceedings against her remain sparse within the surviving records, the documentation confirms that she was subjected to a formal trial and subsequently executed by burning. The grim classification of her case suggests that she became a casualty of the sustained campaign against witchcraft that characterized this period of early modern Scottish history.
The memory of Margaret persisted long after her death, lingering in the local consciousness of the community. In 1649, two decades after the initial entry of her case into the legal archives in August 1629, her name was invoked by the daughter of a man named Wallace. While the record does not elaborate on the substance of this later mention, its inclusion highlights how individuals accused of such crimes remained fixed points of reference in the social fabric of Prestonpans, their fates serving as enduring markers in the troubled judicial landscape of the seventeenth century.