In the summer of 1662, the legal machinery of the Scottish state focused its attention on Agnes Gibson, a resident of the parish of Inverkip in Renfrew. On the first of August, Agnes was formally brought into the jurisdiction of the judicial system under the designation of case C/EGD/1686. This period represented a volatile climate in the Lowlands, where local suspicion and communal anxieties frequently intersected with the rigorous administrative processes of the seventeenth-century kirk and state.
While the specific circumstances surrounding her arrest remain obscured by the passage of time, the subsequent entry in the High Court of Justiciary records, T/JO/1010, confirms that Agnes underwent a formal trial. Though the surviving documentation does not preserve the testimony, the nature of the accusations, or the specific narrative presented against her, the existence of these records confirms her placement within the broader context of the Scottish witch trials that intensified during the mid-1600s. Agnes remains a figure defined by these terse bureaucratic entries, which mark her passage through a legal process that left little room for the voices of those it sought to judge.