In September 1636, the records of the Scottish judicial system turned their attention to Magdalen Horn, a married woman residing in the northern burgh of Thurso, Caithness. At the time of her legal entanglement, Magdalen was known in the community as the wife of a local indweller, a designation indicating that her husband held legal residency within the town. Her case, documented under the reference C/LA/3338, formalised the transition from local suspicion to the state’s rigorous mechanisms of inquiry during a period when the Scottish legal framework was intensifying its response to accusations of maleficium.
The subsequent proceedings against Magdalen are noted in the trial records under the reference T/LA/2128. As an indweller’s wife, Magdalen existed within the social fabric of Thurso, yet the judicial process drew her out of this domestic context and into the formal arena of the witch trials that permeated seventeenth-century Scotland. While the surviving archives provide the dates and administrative identifiers of her case, they serve as a stark marker of the intersection between Magdalen’s life in the far north of Scotland and the broader, systematic prosecution of witchcraft that characterised the era between 1563 and 1736.