In 1662, John Homme, a miller of middling status residing in the burgh of Haddington, found himself at the center of a judicial inquiry into witchcraft. This was not his first encounter with the mechanisms of the law, as he had been previously denounced as early as 1649, though the eventual resolution of that initial accusation remains absent from the historical record. His case resurfaced thirteen years later during a period of intense legal scrutiny, as he became one of many individuals swept up in a series of denunciations instigated by an individual named James Welch.
While Welch’s own involvement in the proceedings was complicated by his youth—leading authorities to deem him too young to stand trial and subsequently commit him to prison—his testimonies were nonetheless treated with institutional gravity. The authorities formally recorded both the confessions and the accusations provided by Welch, which directly implicated John. Throughout these proceedings, the legal records note that John was a married man, and he faced the scrutiny of the courts alongside his wife, who was also named as an accused party in the witchcraft trials of the period.