In August 1677, the legal machinery of seventeenth-century Scotland turned its attention toward Marion Phin, an eighty-year-old woman residing in the burgh of Haddington. Recorded as a person of middling socioeconomic status and an indweller within the town, Marion was brought before the authorities at an age when most of her contemporaries had long since passed from the historical record. Despite her advanced years, she found herself swept into the formal judicial process, with her case—catalogued as C/EGD/1760—officially initiated on the 10th of August.
Little remains of the specific allegations or the eventual outcome of her ordeal, as the surviving documentation for trial T/JO/630 contains no further details regarding the testimony brought against her or the deliberations of the court. The records offer only a stark administrative trace of an elderly woman caught within the wider landscape of the Scottish witch trials. Marion stands as a singular, fragile point of data in the archives, illustrating the vulnerability of those in late seventeenth-century Haddington who became subjects of formal state inquiry.