In June 1629, the life of Agnes Thomesoun, a resident of West Linton in Peebles, became irrevocably entangled in the legal proceedings of the Scottish witch trials. On the eleventh day of that month, Agnes was formally named in a significant collective case, C/JO/2855, which implicated her alongside twenty-six other individuals. The sheer scale of this group accusation suggests a period of heightened communal scrutiny in West Linton, as local authorities and ecclesiastical figures moved to address perceived spiritual and social transgressions within the parish.
Following the initial identification of these twenty-seven individuals, Agnes was subsequently listed in trial record T/JO/560. While the surviving documentation preserves her name and confirms her inclusion in this extensive legal action, the historical record remains silent regarding the specific evidence presented against her or the final verdict of the court. As a result, the circumstances surrounding Agnes’s experience during these proceedings are captured only in the stark, administrative language of seventeenth-century justice, marking her place in a broader pattern of judicial intervention in the Scottish Lowlands.