On the 31st of July 1633, the legal machinery of the early seventeenth century turned toward Alaster Smith, a resident of Wick in the county of Caithness. Within the surviving judicial documentation, recorded under case reference C/LA/3310, Alaster is identified as a man caught within the administrative scrutiny that characterized the Scottish witch trials of this era. While the sparse archival entries do not disclose the specific nature of the accusations brought against him, his inclusion in the court records marks him as a subject of formal legal proceedings during a period when the Scottish state and kirk were increasingly focused on the identification and prosecution of perceived supernatural transgressions.
Following the initial registration of his case, Alaster was brought to trial under reference T/LA/2099. In the context of 1633, such a trial represented a significant escalation in his experience with the criminal justice system of the period. For an individual in a remote coastal settlement like Wick, the transition from an accused person to a defendant in a formal trial necessitated an encounter with the local or regional authorities tasked with implementing the statutes governing witchcraft. Though the specific testimony and the ultimate resolution of his trial remain obscured by the passage of time, the record of Alaster remains a definitive historical marker of the legal processes that shaped life and death in early modern Caithness.