On 16 July 1661, Cristine Bell, a resident of the village of Gilmerton in the parish of Liberton, near Edinburgh, was brought before judicial authorities to answer to accusations of witchcraft. The records indicate that the legal proceedings moved with considerable haste; on that same day, Cristine provided a formal confession to the charges laid against her. While the specific nature of the allegations remains obscured by the brevity of the surviving documentation, the act of confession was a critical component of the judicial process in mid-seventeenth-century Scotland, often serving as the primary evidence upon which local courts and commissions predicated their verdicts.
The conclusion of the legal proceedings against Cristine was absolute. Following the recording of her confession, she was condemned for the crimes to which she had submitted. On the same date, 16 July 1661, the sentence was carried out in her home community of Gilmerton. In accordance with the statutes and customs governing such trials during this period, Cristine was executed by burning. The rapid sequence of events—from the initial charge to the final execution within a single day—reflects the intensity of the localized judicial response during the significant escalation of witch-hunting activity that characterized Scotland in the summer of 1661.