Witches of Belvoir

Joan Flower and her daughters Margaret and Philippa lived in Bottesford near Belvoir Castle, the seat of Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland. Joan and at least one daughter had worked at the castle and been dismissed, apparently for pilfering. When two of the earl's young sons — Henry Lord Roos, who died in 1613, and his brother Francis, who died in 1620 — fell into mysterious fatal illness, suspicion turned to the Flowers. They were accused of working a wasting curse using stolen graveyard soil and a glove belonging to one of the boys, buried and left to rot as the child sickened alongside it.

Joan Flower was arrested around Christmas 1618. She died before reaching Lincoln, allegedly in the act of calling a curse on herself: demanding that a piece of bread and butter stick in her throat if she were guilty of witchcraft, whereupon she choked and died. Margaret and Philippa were tried at Lincoln assizes and hanged on 11 March 1619. The only surviving record of the trial is the pamphlet published that same year — The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillippa Flower — since the Lincoln assize records have been lost. A broadside ballad, Damnable Practises of Three Lincolnshire Witches, spread the story further.

The two dead Manners boys are commemorated by alabaster effigies in St Mary the Virgin church at Bottesford, laid alongside their parents' monument. The inscription carved into the tomb openly references 'wicked practise and sorcerye' — the only monument in an English parish church known to record a witchcraft accusation explicitly. The case circulated widely in a period when James I, author of Daemonologie before his accession, took a close personal interest in witchcraft prosecutions.