In the spring of 1662, the legal machinery of the Scottish witch trials turned toward Auldearn, Nairn, where Archibald Man, a married man of the parish, found himself drawn into the judicial process. On April 14, 1662, his case was formally registered under the reference C/EGD/442. The proceedings against Archibald unfolded amidst a period of intense scrutiny regarding diabolical activity in the region, marking him as one of the individuals caught within the expansive net of the mid-seventeenth-century prosecutions.
Following the initial record of his case, the matter moved toward a formal adjudication, documented under trial reference T/LA/1831. While the brevity of the surviving archive leaves the specific accusations against Archibald obscured, the existence of both a case file and a subsequent trial record signifies a structured legal engagement. This administrative paper trail documents the transition of Archibald from a local resident to a subject of the high court, reflecting the rigorous, and often fatal, procedural requirements of the era’s criminal justice system.