In April 1568, Henrye Stevin, a resident of Auchmithie—a coastal fishing village within the parish of St Vigeans, Forfar—became the subject of legal proceedings concerning the crime of witchcraft. At this stage in the Scottish legislative calendar, such cases were increasingly coming under the scrutiny of the central courts, and Henrye was caught in the administrative machinery of the period as the kirk and civil authorities sought to assert order following the Reformation. His case, identified in the records as C/LA/3384, marks a notable instance of an individual man being targeted during a period when the vast majority of those accused of diabolical pacts or malefice were women.
The historical documentation regarding Henrye is brief but significant, linking him to the trial proceedings recorded as T/LA/2252. By the late 1560s, the legal apparatus governing these accusations was beginning to formalize, and the fact that his case reached the stage of a trial indicates that he was subjected to the full weight of the judicial system of the time. While the specific nature of the evidence brought against Henrye remains lost to the gaps in the surviving archives, his appearance in the records serves as a window into the local anxieties and religious tensions of 16th-century Forfarshire, illustrating how the early modern legal process functioned when an inhabitant of a small, tight-knit fishing community was called to answer for the grave charge of witchcraft.