In November 1597, Meriorie Mutche, a thirty-five-year-old married woman from Corstane in Aberdeen, faced serious allegations of witchcraft before the court. Her life, shared with her husband, William Ross, had been shadowed by suspicion for a full decade, with the formal proceedings against her building upon accusations that dated back to when she was roughly twenty-five years old. The charges brought against Meriorie were extensive, centering on the destruction of property; she was specifically accused of causing damage to a plough, harming animals, and inflicting ruin upon an entire estate.
The judicial resolution of her case occurred on November 21, 1597. In the formal *dittay*—the document outlining the specific charges brought by the prosecution—the record indicates that the court reached a verdict of "clengis," the Scots legal term for an acquittal or a finding of not guilty. Following this declaration, the proceedings suggest that Meriorie was released from the charges that had loomed over her for the previous ten years, effectively closing a case that had long connected her identity to the volatile atmosphere of late sixteenth-century Aberdeen.