More than 20 women convicted of witchcraft were hanged in Maidstone, a quiet country town just outside of London in southern England, during the height of English witch hunts in the 1600s, according to local historical records. Across England and Scotland during this period, approximately 5,000 women convicted of witchcraft were executed by hanging or burning.
Claire Kehily, a member of the Maidstone Borough Council, told CBS News that the targets of these persecutions shared common vulnerabilities. “They were usually single women, spinsters, or widows, usually without a man to stick up for them,” Kehily said. “… They were easier to target.”
Petitioning for an Official Pardon
Inside Maidstone’s town hall, Kehily showed CBS News a prison cell reconstructed from an earlier medieval building where accused witches were held prior to trial. Council members are now lobbying the U.K. government and preparing a petition for King Charles III seeking an official pardon for all of Maidstone’s convicted witches.
“It matters because it was a miscarriage of justice,” Kehily told CBS News. “The crimes they were accused of they couldn’t have been guilty of. And they had no way of being found innocent in many of the cases. This is 400 years ago. But there are still miscarriages of justice. There are still, to these days, people being scapegoated for things.”
While America’s most famous witch trials took place in the 1690s in Salem, Massachusetts—later memorialized by Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” as an allegory for the political witch hunts led by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—all of the falsely accused witches in Salem have since been pardoned. In contrast, not a single convicted witch has been exonerated in the United Kingdom.
Museum Records and Historical Context
Samantha Harris, collections manager at Maidstone Museum, showed CBS News the official 1652 record of a town witch trial. “There had to always be someone to blame,” Harris said, noting that natural disasters and illnesses were routinely blamed on these women. “Death of pigs, cattle. … We were scapegoating and blaming people that were often quite vulnerable.”
For Harris, the effort to secure pardons carries personal resonance. “Being single, being independent, these are things that would have been seen as threatening,” Harris said. “I probably would’ve been targeted absolutely as a witch at the time… If we don’t learn from the past, what’s to say things won’t be recurring again in the future? There’s a lot to learn from history.”
