In August 1629, the judicial machinery of early modern Scotland turned toward the parish of Craikffurde in Berwick, focusing its attention on a woman named Helen Luddes. Recorded in the legal documentation under the case reference C/EGD/681, Helen was formally identified as the subject of an investigation that would eventually lead to a trial, registered under the reference T/LA/718. At this time, the proceedings concerning witchcraft in Berwick were governed by the stringent statutes established in the wake of the 1563 Act, which placed such accusations firmly within the jurisdiction of the criminal courts.
The historical record provides sparse but definitive evidence of the procedural path Helen followed during the late summer of 1629. While the specific nature of the allegations brought against her remains unstated in the extant archive, the entry of her case into the legal system indicates that she was subjected to the formal process of inquiry and subsequent trial. Through these surviving references, the name of Helen serves as a window into the lived experience of those caught within the complex social and legal anxieties of seventeenth-century Scotland, marking her place in the exhaustive efforts of the state to catalogue and adjudicate suspected witchcraft.