In the coastal burgh of Culross, Fife, the legal machinery of early seventeenth-century Scotland turned toward Mayse Umphra on 19 February 1624. Recorded under case file C/EGD/945, Mayse was brought before the authorities to answer to the charge of witchcraft, a process that reflected the intensive judicial scrutiny applied to women in the region during this period. The documentation of her arrest marks the intersection of local community tension and the formal mechanisms of the Scottish state, which sought to address suspicions of maleficium through established legal procedure.
Following the initial registration of her case, Mayse was processed through the High Court of Justiciary, as indicated by trial record T/LA/417. While the specific testimony and the final verdict remain obscured by the passage of time, the existence of these records confirms that she was subjected to the full weight of the judicial system. For Mayse, the transition from a resident of Culross to a defendant in a witchcraft trial underscores the gravity with which the court handled such accusations, leaving behind a concise but definitive administrative trace of her ordeal in the history of Fife.