In October 1637, the records of the Elgin kirk session brought attention to the case of Donald McAndro Moir, a man of middling socioeconomic status who earned his living as a weaver. Situated within the wider climate of early modern Scottish judicial scrutiny, Donald was formally accused of witchcraft under the reference case C/LA/3343. His arrest on the 20th of October marked the beginning of a legal process that would see him pass from the oversight of local church authorities to the formal proceedings of a trial, cataloged as T/LA/2134.
The documentation surrounding Donald provides a stark glimpse into the administrative mechanisms of the period, though it leaves the specific nature of the allegations against him unrecorded. As a weaver in Elgin, Donald occupied a recognizable place in the town’s social hierarchy, yet this did not insulate him from the intense anxieties regarding supernatural influence that permeated seventeenth-century life. Following his initial appearance before the ecclesiastical authorities, his case transitioned into the courtroom, where the mechanisms of the Scottish justice system—governed by the Witchcraft Act of 1563—would determine his fate based on the testimonies and evidence presented against him.