In the closing months of 1649, Margaret Fodringhame, a resident of Keith Marischall in Haddington, found herself drawn into the judicial machinery of the Scottish witch trials. On November 28, she provided a formal confession to the authorities, a deposition that served as the primary instrument in the legal proceedings against her. The nature of this confession—the specific admissions she made—remains unrecorded in the surviving archives, leaving only the stark fact of her testimony as a marker of her ordeal.
By December 4, 1649, Margaret’s case was formally processed alongside four other individuals under case reference C/EGD/2065. Despite her inclusion in these communal legal records, the documentation provides remarkably few details regarding the specific allegations leveled against her. Her experience remains preserved in the dry, bureaucratic shorthand of the Justiciary Court records (T/JO/139), capturing a moment of profound crisis in the life of a Haddington woman whose historical narrative is defined by this single, documented encounter with the early modern legal system.