In the autumn of 1629, Barbara Wod, a married woman of middling socioeconomic status residing in the burgh of Lauder, Berwickshire, found herself drawn into the judicial machinery of the Scottish witch trials. On 6 November, formal proceedings were initiated against her under the reference case C/EGD/1145. At this time, Lauder was a site of significant legal activity, and Barbara’s transition from a member of the town’s respectable middling class to a defendant marked a profound disruption in her life and standing within the community.
The subsequent legal process moved from the initial registration of her case to the formal trial documented in the archives as T/LA/742. While the specific nature of the accusations brought against Barbara remains sequestered within the austere legal shorthand of the period, her journey through the court system highlights the gravity with which the authorities in Berwick viewed such allegations. Following the established protocols of the era, the prosecution of Barbara was carried out with the bureaucratic precision characteristic of early seventeenth-century Scottish justice, placing her squarely within the historical record of the 1563–1736 witch hunts.