In the autumn of 1629, the legal records of Edinburgh mark the appearance of Anne Pursell, a resident of the parish of Penicuik. On the 15th of October, her name was formally entered into the judicial register under case reference C/JO/2790. Beyond the identification of her residence and the singular date of her recorded appearance, the surviving documentation offers little regarding the specific circumstances that led to her summons or the nature of the accusations brought against her. It has been suggested by scholars that Anne may potentially be the same individual recorded elsewhere as Anne Purdie, though the brevity of the extant archives precludes a definitive confirmation of this identity.
The trail of evidence concludes with a singular reference to a trial, indexed as T/JO/328. Despite the administrative existence of this proceeding, there are no remaining notes detailing the testimony, the arguments of the prosecution, or the eventual outcome of the case. As a result, the life and final experiences of Anne remain obscured by the passage of time, leaving only the sparse, functional entries of the early seventeenth-century Scottish legal system to testify to her presence within the historical record.