Margerat Bane, also known as Margaret Clerk, was a midwife residing in the parish of Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire. By the time she faced legal scrutiny in the spring of 1597, she had already been a figure of interest to the justice courts for three decades, having repeatedly failed to appear when summoned over the course of thirty years. Given this extensive history, Margerat was at least fifty-five years old at the time of her trial. Her familial ties were deeply enmeshed in the legal proceedings of the era; she was the mother of a woman named Rogie, who was also condemned, and by this stage in her life, Margerat had lived to see the rise of a third generation in the form of a granddaughter-in-law.
The formal proceedings against Margerat reached a conclusion in March 1597 in Aberdeen, where she was tried and found guilty of *maleficium*, or the practice of harmful magic. Her reputation within the community had been firmly established by the testimonies of others embroiled in the regional witch trials, as she was denounced by Jonat Lucas and identified as an accomplice by Jonet Spaldarge. Following the verdict of guilty, the legal process reached its finality with her execution in March 1597.