According to John Quick, the woman was "above four-score years of age", had been found guilty "upon full evidence", and insisted she would not die. As she was taken from prison to the place of execution, "a great Black Raven was seen hovering, and heard croaking after a dolefull manner over her head, till she came to ye stake." While the chain was being fastened she asked a bystander for a ball of thread. She tied one end to her girdle and threw the other into the air. The raven caught it in its beak and rose, carrying her "from ye bottom of ye vale up into ye air."
A young man standing on the hill above threw his halberd "so exactly betwixt her and ye raven" that it cut the thread. She fell, cursing him, was taken back to the stake, and was burned to ashes. The young man, named Gosselin, soon afterwards "grew sick of an incurable disease" and died after years of suffering, which Quick took as proof that witches under the light of the Gospel very rarely repent.
The geography fits St Peter Port. The Bordage runs along the foot of Tower Hill, where, by MacCulloch's account, tradition placed the burning of heretics and witches, below the old Tour Beauregard. Edith Carey also printed a different 1594 sentence from an eighteenth-century manuscript, in which Marie Martin, alias Salmon, was condemned to be burned "until her body be reduced to ashes" for killing several people and animals by sorcery. Real women died in this street. The raven belongs to the storytelling that grew up around their deaths. Today the Bordage is an ordinary town street with shops and houses.
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