On December 13, 1632, the judicial machinery of early modern Scotland turned its attention toward an individual known as John Mcinkaird. In an era when the Scottish Parliament’s 1563 Witchcraft Act served as the legal cornerstone for the prosecution of maleficium, John was formally brought before the authorities under the registered case reference C/LA/3298. As a man, he occupied a minority demographic within the broader history of Scottish witch trials, where the vast majority of the accused were women; however, the legal proceedings against him followed the standard administrative rigor of the period.
The subsequent trial, recorded under the reference T/LA/2087, marked the culmination of the legal process for John. While the surviving records are sparse, providing only the barest framework of his encounter with the court, they serve as a testament to the structured, bureaucratic nature of seventeenth-century Scottish justice. For John, the proceedings represented a singular, documented moment of confrontation with a legal system deeply preoccupied with the perceived intersections between human agency and the supernatural.