In the summer of 1683, John Hislop, a weaver from the village of Crichton near Edinburgh, found himself enveloped in the dark shadow of Scotland's witch trials. Accused alongside two women presumed to be his sisters, John's name was inscribed on the Edinburgh Porteous Roll, a record of serious criminal indictments. Though hailing from a middling socioeconomic background that might have afforded some comfort, John, like many of the time, was vulnerable to the pervasive fears of witchcraft. The charges laid against him followed those typical of the period, echoing a script of dread: witchcraft, sorcery, necromancy, and the renunciation of baptism to pledge one's self to the Devil.
The initial case against John dates back to a trial in August of 1679, yet it remains unclear why, four years later, his name again surfaced in the troubling list of alleged practitioners of forbidden arts. The records, terse and devoid of conclusive outcomes, provide only a marginal note indicating that John, along with his co-accused, was absent from proceedings in 1683. This absence, marked tersely as 'all absent and resited,' suggests that they may have evaded the harsh justice of the burgeoning witch trials, but the circumstances of their evasion or the subsequent turn of their fates linger shrouded in historical obscurity. John’s story, committed to ink in the portents of the Porteous Roll, offers a glimpse into the period’s tumultuous intersection of superstition, fear, and the burdens borne by ordinary individuals caught in the maelstrom of the witch hunts.