In the summer of 1650, the parish of Pencaitland in Haddington became the site of a notable legal proceeding that saw eight individuals swept into the machinery of the Scottish witch trials. Among this group was Margarett Broun, whose path through the judicial system is preserved in the sparse entries of the surviving court records. On June 19, 1650, she was formally identified as one of those accused of witchcraft, an event that marked the beginning of a process involving both communal suspicion and formal state inquiry.
While the historical record for this case is intentionally brief, it notes that Margarett underwent the process of examination common to the era. On that same day in June, she provided a confession, a document that served as the primary instrument for her judicial trajectory. Though the specific content of her testimony remains lost to history, the record confirms her inclusion in a trial process that was part of a larger, intensive wave of such investigations across the region. Margarett remains a figure defined by these few documented moments of interaction with the seventeenth-century Scottish legal system.