In February 1650, Margaret Tasker, a resident of Kirkliston in the county of Linlithgow, found herself formally entangled in the legal processes concerning witchcraft. The judicial records from this period—catalogued under case file C/EGD/219—document the initiation of proceedings against her. While the surviving documentation is sparse, the gravity of her situation is evidenced by the subsequent trials (T/JO/414 and T/JO/534) that addressed the accusations brought against her during this volatile era of Scottish legal history.
The shadow cast by these events proved remarkably enduring. More than a decade later, in 1661, Margaret remained associated with the pervasive anxieties of the time, as her name resurfaced during the trial of Janet Miller. In this later proceeding, Margaret was explicitly named as a witch, illustrating how accusations within these close-knit communities often linked individuals through shared reputations or communal testimony. These records reflect the administrative machinery of the period, marking the points at which her life intersected with the authorities during one of the most intense phases of witch-hunting in early modern Scotland.