ANNE GREENE: HANGED, TO NO AVAIL
Anne Greene was a 22-year-old scullery maid in 1650 Oxfordshire when she was seduced by her master’s grandson, aged 16 or 17. She became pregnant, although she reportedly was unaware of that until, after working to turn grain into malt, she miscarried in a privy, at 17 weeks. Other servants indicated she had been experiencing “issues” for about a month before the miscarriage. She buried the fetal remains near a cesspit, but they were discovered. Her master, a justice of the peace, had Greene prosecuted under the “Concealment of Birth of Bastards Act” 1624 (21 Jas. I, c. 27), which provided that a woman who had concealed the death of an illegitimate child was presumed to have murdered the child. The penalty for violating the statute was death.
There are some sketchy notes describing a few proceedings in the 1790s at the second courthouse in Barnstable, which I have transcribed and noted. One case involved precisely this issue. In 1785 the Massachusetts legislature had passed a similar statute, aimed at “lewd and dissolute women.” It applied to three sets of allegations, the second of which would have fit Greene's situation: concealing a pregnancy. The punishment here, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was to stand on the gallows with a rope around the neck for an hour, plus to submit to any further punishment in the court's discretion.
Despite what we would now consider expert testimony, that of a midwife, to the effect that Greene’s fetus was too severely underdeveloped to have ever been alive (it is unknown if Greene had even felt the “quickening” movements of the fetus, though, again, she was reportedly ignorant of her condition). Greene was convicted and sentenced to death.
On 14 December 1650, she was indeed hanged on the gallows at Oxford Castle (an early medieval fortress which by the 1640s served as the local prison). Hanging before the mid-19th century was accomplished by the “short drop”: death by strangulation, taking 10-20 minutes, sometimes longer (though the hanged would be overtaken by unconsciousness early, though not early enough, in the process), and not by the purportedly more merciful object of breaking the condemned’s neck by the “long-drop” method of hanging.
Greene had convinced friends to pull down on her hanging body in order to speed her death, which they did. Additionally, a soldier struck her four or five times with a musket butt to release her from her misery. After about half an hour, she was deemed dead. Her body was cut down and delivered to two eminent Oxford University physicians to be dissected. The following day, though, when Greene’s coffin was opened, the would-be dissectors perceived that Greene was breathing, however faintly, and had a pulse, however weak. The doctors then embarked upon a battery of tactics to revive Greene, though from this remove some treatments suggest they were trying to accomplish what the rope had not.
Some accounts report that the first attempt at reviving Greene took the form of a man stomping on her chest. Doctors poured hot cordials (specifics unknown) down her throat. Someone tickled her throat with a feather, and someone vigorously rubbed her limbs—both probably harmless enough--but then her blood was drawn: how much is unknown, though bloodletting could render a patient worse off, sometimes drastically. A heated plaster of some kind was applied to her breasts, and then a “heating odoriferous Clyster”—a smoke enema--was administered. She was then placed in bed with another woman for warmth.
Because of, or in spite of, these efforts, Greene recovered. That she did so was considered the result of divine intervention. She was pardoned of her offense. Even before she fully revived—three days after her attempted execution—her master, the engine of her prosecution, died. She could remember nothing of the attempted execution. But she embarked on a kind of speaking tour, displaying her coffin, and relating her story. Greene lived another 10 years, maybe 15, and had three children before she died in childbirth.
Woodcut from “A Wonder of Wonders, being a faithful narrative and true relation of one Anne Greene. . . . “ (1651).