In 1655, the woman identified in court records simply as the wife of William Barton was drawn into the legal machinery of the Scottish witch trials. A resident of Kirkliston in the county of Linlithgow, she was brought before the authorities during a period when the judicial system in Scotland was increasingly preoccupied with the prosecution of alleged maleficium. Her identity, as recorded in the legal registers of the time, remains tethered to her marriage, reflecting the social structures through which women were typically identified and processed within the seventeenth-century kirk sessions and civil courts.
The proceedings against the wife of William Barton were not an isolated event within her household. The archival record notes that her husband, William, was also subject to accusations of witchcraft under the case reference C/EGD/1871. While the specific nature of the charges brought against the couple remains obscured by the limitations of the extant documentation, their simultaneous entanglement in the legal system points to the interconnected nature of these trials, where accusations often rippled through families and local communities. Together, the Bartons became part of the broader administrative history of the period, as their case was formally registered alongside thousands of others that defined the era of the Great Scottish Witch Hunt.