WITCH: Woman in Total Command of Herself?

For the people brought before the Channel Islands’ early modern courts, “witch” was an accusation made by somebody else. The accused did not need to accept the name. An accusation could lead to imprisonment or execution. In the Guernsey jurisdiction, it could also lead to torture.

Jersey’s witchcraft trials

Jersey’s court records name 65 witchcraft trials between the 1560s and 1660s. Thirty-three ended in execution, from an island population of about 10,000. About one in five of the accused were men.

Linda Romeril, collections director at the Jersey Archive, works with the surviving records. She warns against replacing the court’s accusations with a simpler modern story: “They’re all innocent of witchcraft, but they might not be innocent of other crimes. It’s just not black and white.”

The trials return to public view

Carolyn Rose Ramsay founded Ballet d’Jèrri, Jersey’s contemporary ballet company, in 2022 after learning about the trials while working as a tour guide. In 2025 the company staged Witch Trials, an outdoor triple bill at La Hougue Bie, with work by three female choreographers.

Katya Bourvis called her contribution Flux. She described the witch as an archetype of “everything that’s not allowed”, including “messiness and sexuality and desire, but also intuition and wisdom and sisterhood”.

A memorial to the trials stands at Mont Orgueil Castle. Accused witches were once held at the castle for as long as a year and a day while awaiting trial. The memorial contains a small mechanical witch on a broomstick. When a visitor winds the handle, it turns in circles.

What modern practice can mean

Anthropologist Sabina Magliocco describes modern witchcraft as a living, non-dogmatic identity rather than a fixed doctrine.

Isabella Ferrari, known as Penny the Witch, runs the Green Veil retreat in Ireland. It is independent of Sark Soul Island Retreats. She tells participants: “We are so used to not trusting ourselves, to second-guessing our intuition, especially women who have been taught to disconnect from their inner wisdom.”

Magliocco places the revival in its political setting. “If you look at the larger social gestalt right now, in which power is being systematically taken away from women and queer people, the traditional witch is the opposite of ‘right’ society,” she says.

Two different records

The Nicole family of Little Sark belongs to a separate historical record. Sark’s Witch Trials follows the surviving account of accusation, imprisonment, torture and execution.

Sark Soul Island Retreats is considering a separate retreat idea around this modern interest, described in the witchcraft retreat proposal. No programme has been built yet.

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