On February 20, 1662, the legal machinery of seventeenth-century Scotland turned its focus toward John Purdie, a resident of the village of Lamberton in the parish of Mordington, Berwickshire. Amidst a period of intense judicial scrutiny regarding the supernatural, John was formally brought before the authorities to face an accusation of witchcraft. This proceeding was recorded under the case file C/JO/2891, documenting the escalation of his encounter with the local legal and ecclesiastical systems during a time when such charges carried the gravest of implications.
While the primary record confirms John’s identification and the specific date of his case, the subsequent trial notes (T/JO/881) remain silent, offering no further details regarding the specific allegations, the nature of the evidence presented against him, or the eventual outcome of the proceedings. In the landscape of early modern Scottish history, such lacunae are common; the absence of additional documentation leaves John’s ultimate fate to the shadows of the historical record, marking him as one of the many individuals whose lives were momentarily intersected by the mechanisms of the witch trials.