In the summer of 1649, the judicial machinery of Fife descended upon the town of Inverkeithing to address the case of Margaret Greve. On July 11th, local authorities formally initiated proceedings against her, marking the beginning of a process that would see her name entered into the official registers of the Scottish witch trials under the reference C/EGD/199. At this time, the legal climate in Scotland was particularly fraught, as the General Assembly and local kirk sessions aggressively pursued those suspected of maleficium or demonic compacts, leading to a surge in accusations across the kingdom.
The path from this initial entry to the subsequent legal proceedings is documented in the archival record T/LA/1560, which details the trajectory of Margaret’s trial. Throughout these months, she remained the focus of intense scrutiny by the legal officials of Inverkeithing. While the specific nature of the testimony brought against her remains confined to the terse annotations of the period’s court records, the case of Margaret stands as a distinct testament to the administrative rigor with which early modern Scottish society managed allegations of witchcraft during the seventeenth century.