In 1591, the legal records of the Scottish courts identified a woman known simply as the wife of George Mot. Her appearance in the judicial system is marked by the formal designation of case C/LA/3143, an administrative entry that categorized her among those caught within the mechanisms of the early modern witch trials. At this time, the state and the kirk were intensifying their scrutiny of social and spiritual deviations, and for Mot, this process culminated in a recorded trial, indexed under T/LA/1650.
Little remains in the archival trail to illuminate the specific accusations leveled against her or the eventual outcome of the proceedings. As a married woman, her identity within the court record was tethered to her husband, reflecting the patriarchal structures that defined the era’s legal framework. While the sparse entries of the 1591 records preserve the fact of her trial, they leave the lived reality of Mot and the nature of the allegations brought before the court to the silence of the intervening centuries.