The historical record concerning Agnes Smelie is confined to a brief, frustrating lacuna within the administrative landscape of late sixteenth-century Aberdeen. Agnes appears in the legal documentation dated 6 April 1597, a year defined by a particularly intense period of judicial scrutiny regarding witchcraft in the region. Despite her inclusion in the editor’s preface to the archival collection, the subsequent trial records for her case (C/EGD/2132) are missing, leaving no surviving testimony or formal indictment to illuminate the specific nature of the accusations brought against her.
Because Agnes is absent from the printed primary materials, the details of her life and the circumstances of her legal involvement remain obscured by the passage of time. The lack of a trial allocation suggests that if proceedings were initiated, they did not reach a formal conclusion recorded within the extant archive, or were perhaps abandoned before evidence could be heard. Consequently, Agnes remains a silent figure in the history of the Aberdeen witch hunts, her story preserved only as a fragmented entry in a catalogue of incomplete legal accounts.