In March 1650, William Knox of Kirkliston, Linlithgow, became the subject of formal legal proceedings regarding allegations of witchcraft. Following his arrest and detention, William provided a recorded confession on the 13th of March. While the precise nature of the charges brought against him remain obscured by the brevity of the surviving judicial documentation, this confession marked the beginning of a legal process that would see him appear in multiple trials, specifically documented in the records T/JO/411 and T/JO/535.
The shadow of these legal proceedings persisted long after William’s own case concluded. His name resurfaced in the judicial record over a decade later, during the 1661 trial of Janet Miller. The inclusion of William in the subsequent testimony against Miller suggests that his reputation remained tethered to the witchcraft accusations of his past. Through these sparse entries—from his initial 1650 confession to his late association with the trial of another—the historical record preserves the trajectory of a man caught within the mechanisms of seventeenth-century Scottish justice.