In December 1679, the legal records of Scotland formally noted the case of William Craw, an indweller of the port town of Bo’ness in the county of Linlithgow. Occupying a middling socioeconomic status, William was not a peripheral figure, but rather a recognized member of his local community. His entanglement with the mechanisms of the Scottish judicial system began shortly before his appearance in the records, when he was officially denounced on November 24, 1679. This denouncement served as the precursor to his involvement in the criminal proceedings that followed.
The documentation surrounding the subsequent trial, filed under reference numbers T/JO/606 and T/LA/1467, remains notably sparse regarding the specific testimony or judicial outcomes of the case. While the records confirm that William was subjected to the formal processes of the court, the details of the evidence presented against him—or the verdict reached—are not preserved in the extant archives. Consequently, his case remains a quiet entry in the broader narrative of the seventeenth-century witch trials, illustrating the procedural administrative reach of the period’s legal authorities in the coastal parishes of the Firth of Forth.