In 1618, Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, made an accusation that would end two women's lives and leave a permanent mark carved into stone. He accused Joan Flower and her daughters Margaret and Philippa, all former servants at nearby Belvoir Castle who had been dismissed from the household back in 1613, of murdering his two young sons, Henry and Francis, through witchcraft. Joan Flower herself died on the way to trial around Christmas 1618, reportedly after demanding, in a moment of striking bravado or genuine desperation, that a piece of bread and butter choke her on the spot if she were guilty. Whether by coincidence or something else, that is essentially what happened. Her daughters Philippa and Margaret were tried, convicted, and hanged at Lincoln on 11 March 1619.
What sets the Belvoir case apart from nearly every other English witchcraft trial recorded in this collection is that the accusation itself survives, not in some fading court document or secondhand chronicle, but in permanent, official, physical form. The Earl and Countess of Rutland were sufficiently convinced their sons had died through sorcery that they had the claim inscribed directly onto their own family monument inside St Mary's Church, Bottesford, recording for all time that the boys "died in their infancy by wicked practise and sorcerye."
That inscription is thought to be the only reference to witchcraft found on any English church monument anywhere in the country, a genuinely unique piece of physical evidence for how seriously an accusation of this kind could be taken by even the highest levels of the aristocracy. It makes the Belvoir case unusually well documented for its period, its central claim carved in marble and still readable today, even though the underlying deaths of the two boys were almost certainly due to entirely natural causes rather than any curse at all.
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