In June 1629, Marion Croser, a resident of Slipperfield in the parish of West Linton, Peebles, became caught within the machinery of the Scottish legal system regarding the crime of witchcraft. Her name appears in the judicial records (C/EGD/649) alongside a significant group of twenty-six other individuals, suggesting a collective judicial scrutiny typical of the period’s localized outbreaks. This mass identification points to a period of intense administrative activity in the region, where the legal apparatus of the early modern state sought to formalize accusations against a wide swathe of the local populace.
While the specific charges brought against Marion remain absent from the surviving documentation, her involvement in this larger cohort indicates that her case was part of a broader investigative effort. The subsequent trial records (T/JO/562) lack detailed transcripts or summaries of proceedings, leaving the narrative of her final legal experience to the silence of the archives. Despite the brevity of the evidence, the records serve as a testament to the structured, if austere, manner in which Marion and her peers were processed through the Peebles justice system during that summer of 1629.