In the spring of 1662, the town of Haddington became the site of a legal inquiry involving David Meikle, a married resident whose life was abruptly entangled in the mechanisms of the Scottish judicial system. His involvement in these proceedings stemmed from a series of mass denunciations made by a local youth named James Welch. Although Welch was considered too young to face trial himself and was consequently held in imprisonment, his testimony carried significant weight with the authorities of the time. The confession provided by the youth served as the catalyst for the legal scrutiny that followed, leading officials to take his accusations against others—including David—with grave seriousness.
Following these denunciations, David was formally implicated in the charge of witchcraft, a process that also saw his wife brought under suspicion. The subsequent trial, indexed as T/LA/1327, brought the couple before the court as part of a larger wave of litigation occurring in the region. The legal records document their entanglement in this unfolding crisis, marking a moment where private life in Haddington was suddenly subjected to the rigorous and often fatal scrutiny of seventeenth-century ecclesiastical and civil law.