On 30 July 1602, in the remote setting of Skeldevo, Shetland, the woman identified in the court records as the wife of Poil Watson faced formal accusations of witchcraft. While the surviving documentation preserves neither her given name nor the specific nature of her alleged sorcery, the case was linked directly to claims of property damage, specifically involving the disruption of dairy production. Within the early modern judicial framework of Shetland, such accusations often intersected with local disputes over communal resources and agrarian life, placing her at the center of a legal process intended to resolve tensions within the parish of Waiss.
To clear herself of these charges, she was ordered by the sheriff court to undergo the process of "purging" herself through a *saxter aith*. This legal requirement necessitated that she secure six of her neighbours to swear collectively to her innocence—a testament to the reliance on communal reputation within Shetland’s seventeenth-century judicial system. In addition to providing these oaths, the wife of Poil was required to pay a fine of six merk silver. This sequence of events, preserved in case C/LA/3043, illustrates the procedural mechanisms of the era, wherein legal culpability was balanced against the social testimony of one's peers and the payment of court-mandated penalties.