In November 1661, the judicial machinery of seventeenth-century Fife turned its focus toward Margret Liddell, an indweller of the burgh of Newburgh. As a woman of middling socioeconomic status, Margret occupied a position of relative stability within her community, yet she found herself drawn into the intense wave of witch-hunting that permeated the region during this period. The documentation surviving in the case records, identified as C/EGD/1410, marks the beginning of her formal legal entanglement on the 19th of November, 1661.
The administrative trail left by her proceedings is sparse but significant. Following her initial appearance, the records confirm that a confession was obtained from Margret during that same month. While the specific content of her statements and the subsequent details of her trial—indexed under T/JO/803—do not survive in the extant files, the existence of a recorded confession serves as a pivotal point in her legal encounter. This brief archival trace encapsulates the culmination of the ecclesiastical and civil pressures that characterized the trials of 1661, leaving Margret as a documented figure within the complex landscape of early modern Scottish judicial history.