In December 1636, the judicial machinery of the Scottish kirk and state turned its attention toward the parish of Glencairn in Dumfries, where Jonet McCubine was formally identified as a subject for legal proceedings regarding witchcraft. Recorded under case reference C/LA/3339, the investigation reached a pivotal moment on the 8th of December, 1636, when her situation transitioned from a preliminary inquiry into the formal sphere of the court. Little remains in the archival record to illuminate the specific grievances or accusations brought against her by her neighbors, yet the documentation confirms that her case moved steadily through the prescribed seventeenth-century legal apparatus.
Following the initial entry of her case, Jonet was processed through the trial system under the designation T/LA/2129. Within the context of early modern Scottish jurisprudence, this progression indicates that the local authorities deemed the suspicions surrounding her conduct sufficiently grave to warrant a structured examination. As with many women of her era caught in the confluence of ecclesiastical discipline and criminal law, the records of her trial serve as a stark marker of the period’s prevailing anxieties and the rigid legal framework employed to address them in rural Dumfriesshire.