In the autumn of 1649, the judicial machinery of the Scottish witch-hunts reached the parish of Pencaitland, Haddington, where Janet Cockburn was formally identified as a subject of legal proceedings. Recorded in the archives under the reference C/EGD/1658, Janet was brought before the authorities on the 27th of September to face grave allegations of witchcraft. This period was marked by an intensified scrutiny of suspected maleficium, and the administrative record confirms that her case moved swiftly through the local judicial process toward a full trial, identified in later records as T/LA/1990.
The documentation corroborates that the proceedings against Janet culminated in a formal confession. While the specific nature of her admissions remains encapsulated within the surviving legal registers, the existence of this confession confirms that she acknowledged the charges leveled against her during the course of her examination. By documenting her testimony in this manner, the authorities of Pencaitland concluded the procedural requirements of the trial, grounding the outcome of her case in the intersection of her own recorded words and the prevailing legal statutes of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland.