On July 11, 1649, the legal records of the time formally identified Rossina Oswald, a resident of the Fife burgh of Inverkeithing, as the subject of a judicial inquiry into the crime of witchcraft. Her case is preserved in the High Court of Justiciary records under the reference C/EGD/188, marking a period of intense scrutiny within the Scottish kirk and state. Though the historical scholar Christina Larner occasionally noted her in archival indices under the variant name "Osit," the primary record maintains the consistency of her designation as Rossina.
The documentation of her trial, catalogued as T/LA/1540, situates Rossina within the turbulent religious and judicial landscape of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland. In Inverkeithing, as in many other Scottish parishes during this era, the mechanisms of the law were systematically applied to those brought before the authorities on such grave charges. While the surviving files provide the skeletal administrative details of her encounter with the legal system—marking the dates and formal status of the proceedings—they remain a stark testament to the structured, bureaucratic process that defined the experiences of the accused during this volatile chapter of early modern history.