In the autumn of 1649, the presbytery records of Edinburgh brought formal attention to the case of Sara Leonard, a forty-five-year-old resident of the parish of Borthwick. While the extant documentation surrounding her life remains sparse, the archival entry dated October 11, 1649, highlights a grave ecclesiastical assessment: the local authorities had concluded that Sara had been a practitioner of witchcraft for at least two decades. This assertion implies that Sara had been living under the shadow of suspicion within her community since her mid-twenties, marking her as a long-standing subject of scrutiny by the religious establishment of the mid-seventeenth century.
The surviving papers, preserved under case reference C/JO/2809 and trial index T/JO/365, provide little insight into the eventual trajectory of her ordeal. Unlike many cases where extensive depositions or sentencing records survive to detail the specific mechanics of an accusation, the documentation for Sara concludes abruptly with the presbytery’s finding. There is no historical evidence within these records to confirm whether Sara was formally apprehended by civil or church authorities, nor is there any indication that she was ever brought to trial for the activities alleged against her. Consequently, her name remains in the record as a testament to the persistent climate of suspicion that defined this period in Scottish history, even where the formal judicial process appears to have stalled or remained unrecorded.