In the spring of 1671, the legal machinery of Moray turned toward a woman identified as Margaret Jonking. A resident of Elgin and a married woman, Margaret found herself ensnared in the judicial processes of the period, which saw a surge of scrutiny regarding witchcraft throughout the region. While the surviving records are sparse, they provide a firm temporal and geographic anchor for her experience, placing her trial within the established patterns of seventeenth-century Scottish justice.
On the 6th of April 1671, Margaret appeared before the authorities in Moray to face the allegations brought against her. Despite the brevity of the extant documentation, the archival trail—indexed as case C/EGD/803 and trial T/LA/1159—confirms that she was formally processed by the local court on that spring day. Although the identity of her husband remains obscured by the passage of time and the illegibility of the original manuscripts, the record serves as a testament to the brief intersection of Margaret’s life with the formal institutions that governed social and spiritual order in Elgin.