In the summer of 1662, the legal machinery of the Scottish witch trials turned toward Jedburgh, Roxburgh, focusing its scrutiny upon Isobel Boill. A woman of middling socioeconomic status, Isobel was firmly established within the local community through her marriage to a cordiner burgess, a position that placed her husband among the ranks of the town’s guild-privileged tradesmen. Her case, documented under the identifier C/JO/2897, was formally recorded on June 5, 1662, marking the beginning of a process that would subject her to the gravity of a judicial examination.
While the administrative archives confirm that Isobel proceeded to a trial designated as T/JO/958, the extant historical records remain silent regarding the specific testimonies, the nature of the allegations brought against her, or the final verdict rendered by the court. Consequently, the narrative of her experience is defined by the bureaucratic markers of the seventeenth-century legal system rather than the details of the proceedings themselves. Isobel thus remains a figure preserved in the records of the Scottish judiciary, a woman whose life and ordeal were captured by the formal apparatus of the state during a period of intense religious and social upheaval.