Jean Nicole's escape from Castle Cornet

Jean Nicole lived at La Sablonnerie on Little Sark with his wife, Rachel Alexandre.

We do not know his age or occupation, and we do not know who first accused him.

The surviving reconstruction places him under suspicion of sorcery from around 1612. Some of Sark’s court records from the following years have been lost.

By around 1619, Jean had been arrested and taken to Guernsey. He was imprisoned in Castle Cornet and questioned three times about sorcery.

He denied the accusation each time.

The surviving judgement records that he had not been plainly and convincingly proved guilty of sorcery.

Then he escaped.

He left Castle Cornet with another prisoner

Jean broke out of Castle Cornet at night with a Norman man who was being held for murder.

The surviving judgement records the escape but does not explain how the two men got out.

Castle Cornet was a working military fortress as well as a prison. Its staff included a Lieutenant, Marshal, Porter, Victualler, master gunner, smith, carpenter and boatmen, with soldiers and a night watch.

The castle then stood apart from St Peter Port on its tidal island. Access depended on the sea.

A few years later, Sark’s minister Elie Brévint recorded that men from Guernsey’s Castel parish reinforced the night watch there and travelled according to the tide and the boat.

Jean and the other prisoner nevertheless escaped at night.

Another escape shows what was possible

About twenty-four years later, around January 1644, three Guernsey Parliamentarian prisoners escaped Castle Cornet.

Le Grange, Carey and Haverly made ropes from gun-match found in a room, tied one end to a cannon on the battlements and waded across at low tide.

A porter named Medcalf raised the alarm. The castle guns fired at the men but missed, and all three reached the town.

That later escape does not tell us how Jean got out.

It shows only that the tide, and materials available inside the castle, could make an escape possible.

The court punished the escape

When Jean was sentenced, the court still did not find him plainly and convincingly guilty of sorcery.

Instead, his escape from Castle Cornet, and the fact that he had taken the Norman prisoner with him, became principal grounds for punishment.

Jean was ordered to be whipped until he bled at every crossroads in St Peter Port.

One ear was to be nailed to the pillory and cut off.

He was banished from the Bailiwick for life. His goods and hereditary land were forfeited. If he returned, the sentence threatened hanging and strangling.

The exact year is disputed

The sources disagree over the precise year of Jean’s sentence.

The Guernsey Royal Court record as transcribed by John Linwood Pitts in 1886 places it in 1618. A later family reconstruction places it in 1620.

What is clear is that Jean had already been exiled by June 1620. When his youngest daughter was baptised on 21 June, Sark’s minister recorded that she had been born after her father’s exile.

Rachel Alexandre stayed at La Sablonnerie and ran the farm with the children.

Seven years later, Rachel was taken to Guernsey and convicted of sorcery. Her sentence ordered torture before execution in an attempt to make her name supposed accomplices.

Jean’s case and Rachel’s case ended very differently, but neither surviving record establishes that either of them practised sorcery.

The later case is covered in Sark’s Witch Trials. Put to the question explains the Guernsey torture and accomplice-naming procedure that Rachel’s sentence invoked.