The Royal Square in St Helier is a pleasant place now, with its chestnut trees, the gilded statue of George II and the States Chamber and Royal Court along one side. In the seventeenth century it was the Market Place, and it was where Jersey hanged its witches.
Marie Esnouf was born in the parish of St John in 1604. Wikipedia's summary of the Channel Island trials notes that she was a granddaughter of the Rector of St John, so she was not a poor outsider of the kind often accused elsewhere. By 1648 she was in her mid-forties, and she was arrested on a charge of witchcraft.
Jersey Heritage, working from the island's court records, gives the outline of her case. She was held in Mont Orgueil Castle, the island's prison, and refused to confess. The prosecution gathered more than 60 witnesses, who between them accused her of what the record calls 'villainous and detestable things'. She was searched for the Devil's mark, her head shaved in the process according to Wikipedia, and a black mark was found on her palate. In the logic of the time that was damning. Jersey tried serious cases before a jury of 24, and 20 of them found her guilty.
She was hanged in the Market Place, and, as was the custom in Jersey, her body was then burned. Jersey Heritage's figures put the island's toll at at least 65 witch trials between the 1560s and the 1660s, with 33 executions, and about nine in ten of the accused were women. Marie Esnouf's case, late in that period, with its crowd of witnesses and its search for a mark, shows the whole machinery at work.
Nothing marks the spot. The square is the site; the pin is placed there.
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