On September 8, 1679, Katharin Smith, a resident of Mortonhall near Edinburgh, was formally entered into the legal records of the Scottish judicial system. Her name appears on the Edinburgh Porteous roll of delinquent dittays, a document that served as a formal list of charges prepared for the circuit courts of the time. Like many other individuals caught within the machinery of the Scottish justice system during this era, Katharin faced a triad of serious accusations: witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy.
The legal language preserved in the record reflects the standard, grave allegations characteristic of seventeenth-century Scottish witch trials. Alongside the charges of supernatural practice, the indictment against Katharin included the assertion of a renunciation of her baptism and the claim that she had surrendered herself, both body and soul, to the Devil. These entries in the Porteous roll serve as the final surviving documentation of the legal proceedings initiated against her in Edinburgh on that late summer day in 1679.