In 1662, the judicial records of Perthshire mark the arrest of Christian Young, a woman residing in the parish of Crook of Devon, located within the lands of Fossoway and Tullibole. Her case, documented under the reference C/EGD/1702, emerges from a period of intense legal scrutiny regarding charges of witchcraft within this specific region. While the surviving archive provides a concise entry point into her experience, it underscores the administrative reality of a judicial process that sought to bring those accused of maleficium before the formal authorities of the seventeenth-century Scottish legal system.
The records for Christian offer little beyond these structural details, yet they serve as an essential testament to the local legal history of the area. By 1662, the transition of such cases from local ecclesiastical courts to the central justice system in Edinburgh was a defining feature of these proceedings. As a resident of the Crook of Devon, Christian lived in a community where the interplay between community suspicion and formal interrogation was deeply ingrained in the social fabric, leaving behind this administrative trace of her involvement in the complex judicial landscape of early modern Scotland.