The Nicolles and Alexandres of Little Sark were small farming people at the far end of an island that had only been resettled in 1565. The accusations that reached the Guernsey court were the usual kind: sour milk, sick animals, a cat that followed Rachel about. Her husband Jean Nicole came under suspicion of sorcery around 1612. When he was finally arrested, around 1619, he was taken to Castle Cornet and examined three times, denying everything. The sentence was harsh even by the court's standards: whipping until he bled at every crossroads in St Peter Port, one ear nailed to the pillory and cut off, and banishment for ever from the Bailiwick. Sources disagree on whether this was in 1618 or 1620.
Philipine le Parmentier, widow of another Nicolle, had already been hanged and burned in October 1617, at the height of the Guernsey trials, on the same day as Marie de Callais of St Martin's. In early 1627 Rachel's sister Judith Alexandre and her stepson Job Nicole were charged. Both were banished "by la mare", a formal expulsion carried out between the tides. Then Rachel herself was convicted on 25 August 1627. She was to be "tortured first, by the strappado, to try to make her name others, then hanged and strangled to death". A Jehan Nicolle was released in 1631.
The Sark Journal notes that the records disagree in places and that historians still argue over identities and numbers. The Isle of Sark's own history pages put it more simply: no fewer than five members of the Nicole family from Little Sark were sent to the stake in Guernsey. That figure is higher than the individual cases listed here support, and it is flagged rather than repeated as fact. The map point is La Sablonnerie, named as Rachel Alexandre's home, and is approximate.
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