In June 1628, the legal machinery of the Scottish judiciary focused its attention upon Mawsie Stowane, a married woman residing in the Brigend area of Dumfries. Her case, documented under reference C/EGD/1007, formalised the transition from local suspicion to official inquiry. As a resident of a community peripheral to the main burgh of Dumfries, Mawsie became the subject of a specific investigative process that reflected the broader climate of early seventeenth-century judicial anxiety regarding perceived supernatural intervention in the lives of the populace.
Following the initiation of her case on the 5th of June, Mawsie was brought to trial at the seat of regional authority in Dumfries, recorded under reference T/LA/481. The transition from her domestic life in Brigend to the formal setting of the court underscores the gravity with which the local magistracy approached such allegations during this period. The trial of Mawsie serves as a precise archival marker of the legal mechanisms active in the Dumfries region, illustrating how individual lives were increasingly drawn into the structured and often relentless apparatus of the Scottish witch trials.