In October 1678, Margaret Liddell, a resident of the parish of Lasswade in Edinburgh, became the subject of legal proceedings under the charge of witchcraft. Her case, documented in the records as C/EGD/1766, commenced on the 9th of that month. At this juncture in late seventeenth-century Scotland, the mechanisms of the criminal justice system were being brought to bear upon Margaret, situating her within a period when such accusations remained a formal concern of the judiciary.
The subsequent judicial trajectory of Margaret is marked by brevity in the historical archive. While her name appears in trial records T/JO/601 and T/LA/1436, these documents offer no elaboration regarding the specific testimony, the nature of the alleged maleficium, or the ultimate verdict rendered by the court. Margaret remains a figure whose interaction with the legal authorities of Lasswade is preserved only through these sparse administrative entries, leaving the precise outcome of her trial lost to the silence of the intervening centuries.