In the summer of 1661, Agnes Thomson, a sixty-three-year-old widow residing in Newton, Edinburgh, found herself at the centre of a formal legal inquiry regarding allegations of witchcraft. Following the death of her husband, John Wood—who had been identified as her spouse in 1659 but had passed away by 1661—Agnes faced the machinery of the Scottish justice system. On the 9th of July, she provided an initial confession to the authorities, which was followed by a subsequent appearance in the Edinburgh Tolbooth on the 29th of July. Within these records, she admitted to having maintained a relationship with the Devil for a period of eighteen years.
However, the legal process surrounding Agnes was marked by inconsistency, as her testimony did not remain static. While she provided the initial accounts of her association with the Devil, she later formally retracted the confession she had given at the Tolbooth. Despite this retraction, her case remained a matter of documented trial proceedings, as evidenced by the archival records T/LA/1706 and T/LA/378. These documents trace the progression of a legal narrative that began with her self-incrimination in the mid-summer of 1661 and concluded through the established protocols of the seventeenth-century Scottish courts.