In the spring of 1680, Margaret Whytt, a married woman residing in the port town of Bo'ness in Linlithgow, found herself at the centre of a formal legal proceeding under reference C/EGD/701. The accusations brought against her culminated in a trial (T/LA/850) that unfolded against the backdrop of a legal and ecclesiastical climate increasingly preoccupied with the identification of malevolent supernatural influence. While the specific nature of the allegations remains obscured by the passage of time, the historical record notes that Margaret was subjected to an unrecorded form of physical duress, categorized within the documentation simply as torture.
Following the application of this duress, a confession was formally entered into the court record, providing the state with the testimony required to pursue the case further. However, the integrity of this admission was short-lived, as Margaret subsequently retracted her statement, denying the validity of the testimony previously extracted. Despite this retraction, the legal machinery of the late seventeenth-century Scottish judiciary continued to process her case, leaving behind a stark documentary trace of a woman caught within the rigid and unforgiving protocols of the period’s criminal justice system.