In May 1661, Margaret Hall, a married woman residing in the coastal town of Prestonpans in Haddington, became a focal point of the local legal proceedings concerning witchcraft. The archival record (C/EGD/333) situates her within a wider familial context of accusation, noting that both her mother and her daughter were similarly charged. This generational implication was not uncommon in seventeenth-century Scottish trials, where communal anxieties often ensnared entire kinship groups within the net of the judiciary.
Margaret’s legal journey is marked by two distinct procedural references: an initial entry under the trial reference T/JO/1804 and a subsequent reference recorded as T/LA/1707. These records underscore a lengthy administrative process that spanned decades, tracing the persistence of the legal apparatus as it engaged with her case. Through these fragments, we see the trajectory of a woman whose life became inextricably bound to the formal inquisitions that defined the era of the Scottish witch trials.