In the opening days of the year 1700, Mary Glass, a resident of Newton, found herself at the centre of a formal legal proceeding. The records place her home within the settlement of Newton, an area associated with the parish of Wick in Caithness, a region where the judicial apparatus of the early modern Scottish state continued to address allegations of diabolism and maleficium. On 2 January 1700, the documentation identifies both the culmination of the case against her and the finality of her trial.
The extant records for Mary, indexed under case reference C/EGD/1788 and trial reference T/LA/1809, capture the specific legal milestones of her experience. With the resolution of her trial recorded on the very same day that her case was processed, the trajectory of the proceedings reflects the swift movement of the local courts during this period. For Mary, this date marked the conclusion of an encounter with the machinery of justice that had sought to evaluate the charges brought against her within the framework of seventeenth-century Scottish law.