In July 1683, Marion Hislop, a married woman residing in the parish of Crichton, appeared within the legal records of the Edinburgh circuit court. Her case was bound to a wider investigation involving G. Penman and two other individuals from the same locale. Together, they were formally indicted on charges of witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy. These allegations carried the gravity of the period’s standard legal framework, which further accused those named of renouncing their Christian baptism and pledging their bodies and souls to the Devil.
The administrative trail of Marion’s legal ordeal began earlier, as she was initially listed on an Edinburgh Porteous roll of delinquent dittays dated September 8, 1679. Despite the severity of the charges, the documentation suggests a protracted and perhaps elusive legal process. When the case was revisited in the 1683 bundle, the official records noted that Marion and her co-accused were absent from the proceedings, marked as "resited." This detail marks the final archival trace of her encounter with the Scottish justice system during a period when such indictments were a frequent, if fraught, feature of the judicial landscape.