In the late summer of 1666, the life of Cristian May, a resident of the Fife village of Torryburn, intersected with the formal machinery of the Scottish legal system. On the 8th of September, documentation was filed under case reference C/EGD/1722, marking the beginning of a process that would ultimately bring her before the Court of Justiciary. The village of Torryburn, situated along the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, was a setting where local anxieties often manifested in the rigorous scrutiny of neighbours’ behaviours, leading to the initiation of legal proceedings that would culminate in her formal trial.
The record of this trial, catalogued as T/JO/776, represents the final phase of the legal encounter for Cristian. As the machinery of the seventeenth-century Scottish courts moved to address the charges brought against her, she became a subject of the extensive judicial apparatus that governed the period’s approach to witchcraft. These records, while sparse in their narrative detail, stand as the remaining testament to her experience within a society where accusations of this nature were processed through the high courts of the realm.