On 30 July 1652, seven women were hanged on Penenden Heath in Maidstone, Kent. Witch trials and executions were far from unusual at the time, in the town or elsewhere, but rarely were so many convicted at once.
The women – Anne Ashby, Mary Brown, Anne Martyn, Mildred Wright, Susan Pickenden, Anne Wilson and Mary Reade – had been accused by their neighbours of terrible acts including “bewitching to death” a 10-day-old baby, the child’s mother, and a three-year-old. Several were claimed to have “carnally known” the devil in exchange for their monstrous powers.
In the centuries since, the names of the seven women, like those of the many hundreds of others executed for the same crime in England and Scotland, have slipped from popular memory. Now, however, the town in which they were sentenced wants to right a 373-year-old wrong.
The leader of Maidstone borough council has written to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, calling for new laws to pardon the Penenden Heath women and all others historically convicted of witchcraft. “These historic acts of murder cannot be undone but those women could be granted a general pardon,” wrote Stuart Jeffrey, the leader of the Lib Dem-Green co-led council. The Home Office is yet to respond.
No rational person today can believe these women were justly killed. But what would a pardon achieve? “For some people, it’s completely pointless and achieves nothing,” acknowledges Claire Kehily, a Green councillor who has been central to the local campaign. She disagrees. “Yes, those women will never know – though maybe they’ll rest a little bit more peacefully. But I think it sends a strong message that injustice will be called out and fought against. At the end of the day, they weren’t witches, they were just women.”
Terrible as this case may be, “it’s just one among many, really”, says Marion Gibson, a professor of renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter who has written extensively about historical beliefs about witchcraft.
She adds: “This was happening all over Britain. Maybe somebody’s child had died in sad circumstances that couldn’t be explained by any disease that the people in the village knew, and the neighbours start to get suspicious and to think, well, this can’t be natural.
“People were primed to think witches existed because the church told them so. And it was really easy for them to think not just that witches existed generally, but actually maybe the old woman they didn’t like down the road was a witch.” Though men and even children were also accused, the overwhelming majority were women, she says.
This is not the first attempt to win a pardon for those convicted of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. A petition to Westminster last year attracted 13,000 signatures; the previous Conservative government acknowledged “the historic injustices” that were done but said it had no plans to legislate.
Campaigners in Scotland, where more people per capita were convicted than anywhere else in Europe, came closer in 2022, persuading the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to issue a formal apology for an “egregious historical injustice”. A member’s bill asking Holyrood to pardon those convicted attracted widespread support but foundered for technical reasons.
The campaign group Witches of Scotland says it is confident another MSP will take up the cause in the coming parliament. “We are somebody else’s history,” says the group’s co-founder Claire Mitchell KC, “and I want people to know that in the 21st century we took a stand. But perhaps much more importantly, it’s not for those people, it’s for us.
“We need to look at what happened at that time when times got tough. What happened was the church and the state picked a scapegoat, and they said: ‘These are the people that are causing you ill, and when we get rid of those people, our problems will be over.’
“Unfortunately, that’s all too timely in the present day.”
• This article was amended on 11 October 2025 to correct the spelling of Claire Kehily’s surname.
