Joan Bocher
Joan Bocher (died 2 May 1550 in Smithfield, London) was an English Anabaptist burned at the stake for heresy during the English Reformation in the reign of Edward VI. She has also been known as Joan Boucher or Butcher, or as Joan Knell or Joan of Kent. Life Bocher's origins are unclear, but it is known that families named Bocher and Knell lived in the area round Romney Marsh. She was associated with Anabaptists in Kent, some of them immigrants who had fled persecution in the low countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). In the 1530s and 1540s she was "much in favour in reforming circles" in Canterbury. Her first conflict with church and state came after she spoke against the sacrament of the altar, but she was released from imprisonment by a commissary of Thomas Cranmer and Christopher Nevinson. This leniency was held against Nevinson when he was charged in 1543 with involvement in the Prebendaries' Plot. Bocher developed an interest in Anabaptist ideas, and took up the idea of Christ's celestial flesh, "not incarnate of the Virgin Mary". She was arrested as a heretic in 1548 and convicted in April 1549. Then followed a year's imprisonment during which