Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 08 February 2025

Bocher, Joanfree

(d. 1550)

Bocher, Joanfree

(d. 1550)
  • Andrew Hope

Bocher, Joan (d. 1550), religious radical, also known as Joan Knell and Joan of Kent, is of unknown origins, but Bocher and Knell families are found either side of the rim of Romney Marsh. Her religious history is also obscure. The earliest that is known for certain is that she was much in favour in reforming circles in Canterbury in the late 1530s and early 1540s. After being denounced for words against the sacrament of the altar she was imprisoned for a period, before being released largely on the initiative of Cranmer's commissary Christopher Nevinson. The failure properly to prosecute Joan at this time was one of the charges made against Cranmer in the prebendaries' plot of 1543. Her opponents alleged that she had previously abjured in Colchester, a charge which has led to her being identified with the 'mother Bocher' and 'Joan Bocher, widow' named in Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall's 1528 investigations in Essex. There is no record, however, that this Bocher abjured, although one who did abjure was a William Bocher of Steeple Bumpstead, a man with a family history of heresy. It is possible therefore that Joan Bocher had a Lollard background, a possibility also raised by some of the accusations against her, for instance that she had declared 'that matins and evensong was no better than rumbling of tubs' (Davis, 229). However, the execution for treason in 1538 of William Knell, head of the Kentish Knell family, may point to religious conservatism elsewhere in her family.

In the years after 1543 Bocher's beliefs took an Anabaptist turn. She became convinced of the theory of Christ's celestial flesh—that Christ did not derive his physical body from his mother but that it was a divine distillation. Such views were unusual in England. Although they had been heard from exiled Dutch Anabaptists in the mid-1530s, it is more likely—as Martin Micron, himself Flemish born, hinted—that she picked them up from the influx of refugees early in the reign of Edward VI. She was arrested, probably in 1548, and convicted of heresy in April 1549. She was then imprisoned for more than a year, for some of the time in the house of Lord Chancellor Rich, while great efforts were made to persuade her back to Edwardian orthodoxy, led by Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop Ridley of London. When she remained adamant in her opinions, the privy council decided to proceed with her execution by burning, despite the lack of a statute under which to proceed. Although there are difficulties with Foxe's account of Cranmer's browbeating the reluctant Edward VI into signing the death warrant, it is likely that the archbishop did indeed have some role in bringing Joan Bocher to the stake. She was burnt at Smithfield on 2 May 1550, still upbraiding those attempting to convert her, and maintaining that just as in time they had come to her views on the sacrament of the altar, so they would see she had been right about the person of Christ. She also asserted that there were a thousand Anabaptists living in the diocese of London.

Immediately after Bocher's death attempts were made to discredit her: there were sermons from Hugh Latimer, an academic refutation from Roger Hutchinson, and doggerel verse from Edmund Beck. Her views were described by Latimer and others as 'Arian', that is, heretical in denying the full divinity of Christ, which they were not, having far more in common with those of extreme opponents of Arius. Her death led to Joan's being much cited by opponents of the Elizabethan church. She was adopted by separatists for whom her fate exposed the true nature of established episcopal church government; and her execution was also used by Catholics responding to charges of cruelty in the Marian persecutions. The Catholic apologist Robert Persons, writing in 1599, is the first to record three interesting stories about her which are otherwise unattested: that she took part in the smuggling operations to bring Tyndale's New Testament to England; that she smuggled books to the Henrician court hidden under her skirts; and that she was a close friend of Anne Askew. All are possible and although the stories are late, Persons claims to have spoken to someone present at her trial. It was not for her views however, which despite the fears of the Edwardian establishment never became popular, but as a victim of intolerance that Joan Bocher was to be remembered—and by none more eloquently than William Wordsworth in whose sonnet to her she is described as condemned by 'mandates nature doth disown' (Poetical Works, 343).

Sources

  • J. Strype, Memorials of the most reverend father in God Thomas Cranmer, 3 vols. in 4 (1848–54)
  • R. Persons, A temperate ward-word, to the turbulent and seditious wach-word of Sir Francis Hastinges knight (1599)
  • The works of Roger Hutchinson, Parker Society, 4 (1842)
  • E. Beck, A brefe confutacion of this most detestable, & Anabaptistical opinion, that Christ did not take hys flesh of the blessed Vyrgyn Mary nor any corporal substaunce of her body, for the maintenaunce whereof Jhone Bucher otherwise called Jhone of Kent most obstinantly suffered and was burned in Smythfyelde, the .ii. day of May (1550)
  • Sermons and remains of Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie, Parker Society, 20 (1845)
  • The acts and monuments of John Foxe, ed. J. Pratt [new edn], 8 vols. in 16 (1853–70), vols. 5, 7
  • APC, 1550–52
  • J. Strype, Ecclesiastical memorials, 3 vols. (1822), vols. 1–2
  • J. Davis, ‘Joan of Kent, Lollardy and the English Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982), 225–33
  • LP Henry VIII, vols. 4, 13, 18/2
  • J. Ridley, Thomas Cranmer (1962)
  • M. Huggarde, The displaying of the protestantes (1556)
  • The works of John Knox, ed. D. Laing, 6 vols., Wodrow Society, 12 (1846–64), vol. 5
  • Life and letters of Thomas Cromwell, ed. R. B. Merriman, 2 vols. (1902)
  • G. R. Elton, Policy and police (1972), 294–5
  • The chronicle and political papers of King Edward VI, ed. W. K. Jordan (1966)
  • S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (1989)
  • D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a life (1996)
Page of
Acts of the privy council of England, new ser., 46 vols. (1890–1964)
Page of
J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, & R. H. Brodie, eds., Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 23 vols. in 38 (1862–1932); repr. (1965)