On 4 March 1583, Thomas Boynde of Weltoun, in the parish of Mauchline, Ayrshire, was brought before the authorities to answer to charges of witchcraft. The legal documentation of his case, preserved under reference C/LA/3170, marks him as a subject of the early modern Scottish judicial system, which was then beginning to formalise its response to the perceived threat of maleficent magic. As a male resident of a rural farming community, Thomas occupied a specific space in the landscape of 16th-century superstition, where the boundaries between natural misfortune and supernatural interference were often precariously thin.
The records for Thomas remain brief, categorised under trial reference T/LA/1736. While the specific nature of the grievances brought against him—whether involving the casting of charms, the infliction of illness upon neighbours or livestock, or the consultation of forbidden knowledge—is not elaborated in this fragment, his appearance before the court serves as a window into the heightened anxieties of the era. By participating in this legal process, Thomas was caught within a wider machinery of justice that sought to interpret local disruptions through the framework of the state and the kirk, leaving behind only the cold administrative trace of a name, a residence, and a date.