In the late summer of 1679, Jannet Hill, a forty-five-year-old widow residing in North Leith, found her life brought to a sudden halt by the mechanisms of the Scottish legal system. On September 8, 1679, she appeared on the Edinburgh *porteous roll*—a document used to list those summoned to answer for crimes before the circuit courts. By this date, Jannet had already lived for twenty years under a local reputation that rendered her susceptible to the gravest of suspicions in a society deeply attuned to the perceived dangers of the supernatural.
The accusations leveled against Jannet were severe and formal, categorized under the overarching charges of witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy. These allegations carried the traditional, rigid legal language of the era, further asserting that she had renounced her baptism and surrendered herself to the Devil, body and soul. Following her inclusion on the *porteous roll*, she faced the proceedings of the Edinburgh court. As a widow navigating the precarious landscape of seventeenth-century Leith, Jannet remains preserved in the historical record as one of the many individuals caught within the rigid judicial framework of the late-seventeenth-century witch trials.