In the summer of 1644, the legal machinery of the Scottish kirk turned its attention toward the parish of Haddington, initiating a process that would soon implicate Catharine Fleck. On the 11th of July, a formal presbytery request was disseminated to ministers across the region, a standard procedural step designed to solicit local testimony and gather accusations of maleficium or demonic covenant from the congregants. This administrative directive acted as the catalyst for the investigations that would eventually draw Catharine into the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical and civil courts.
Following this call for local input, the legal proceedings against Catharine progressed to the trial phase under the registration reference T/LA/1203. As ministers fulfilled their duty to collect and deliver reports from their respective parishes, the case against her was formally entered into the judicial record. These records serve as the definitive account of the sequence of events that brought Catharine before the authorities, marking a specific moment in the broader context of the mid-17th-century Scottish witch trials.