Odd this day

Well, if it’s 14 December, it must be… YES, THAT’S RIGHT! The 373rd anniversary of Anne Greene being hanged for the ‘crime’ of a premature stillbirth — a case brought by the grandfather of the boy who ‘seduced’ her. Happily, though, she survived.

The facts of the case are both appalling and not even slightly surprising. Anne was a servant in the Oxfordshire household of Sir Thomas Read, where she was “led … into the foul and fearful sin of fornication” by his 16 or 17-year-old grandson, Jeffrey.

Given the imbalance of power, I leave you to conjecture to what extent freely given consent played a part in the proceedings. Either way, she got pregnant and — according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — “miscarried at about eighteen weeks”.

The 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children said that any woman concealing an infant’s death could be presumed guilty of infanticide. Many judges didn’t enforce the law fully, but Sir Thomas was determined to prosecute.

(Yes, indeed it is good to know that we live now in happier, more enlightened times, in which a woman’s body is her own, and she is not punished for what men do to her, is it not? )

The effects of overturning Roe v. Wade in seven simple charts

Anyway… Anne testified that she hadn’t known she was pregnant, and a midwife said the baby could never have survived, but neither of them had a knighthood or a penis. So, according to History Today…

A contemporary account, however, Newes from the Dead, suggests that that rather glosses over some of the details

…and she continued to suffer great indignities, even in ‘death’:

Yes, that does, indeed, mean she was repeatedly stamped on to put her out of her misery. Thankfully, the doctors took over, and… er, bled her and gave her enemas — to be specific, they ordered

an heating odoriferous Clyſter to be caſt up into her body

…or shoving tobacco smoke up her arse, as it’s also known. They did, though (eventually) get another woman to lie in bed with her, “rubbing her lower parts gently”. And one, some, or all of these things apparently did the trick. History Today again:

When she’d fully recovered, she went to recuperate in the country, and her canny father charged her many visitors, which meant they could pay the doctors’ bills and afford to sue for a pardon. They were helped in the latter cause by the fact that Sir Thomas died.

He may have snuffed it three days after her attempted execution, or three days after the pardon, depending on your source. Either way, she outlived him, and apparently also kept the coffin as a souvenir.

Mind you, her ‘last’ words on the scaffold concerned the “lewdness of the family wherein she lately lived”, so it seems that once her employers showed their true colours, Anne demonstrated that she had fully had it with their shit.

Some accounts suggest she lived happily into ripe old age, but it’s most likely that she married, had three children, and lasted only until 1659, when she would have been (roughly) 31. But then, this was the 17th century, when life did rather tend to be nasty, brutish and short.

But you’ll be pleased to know that Anne is not forgotten. Indeed, she was still being studied as recently as 2009, when an article in the Journal of Medical Biography considered the most likely explanations for her survival.

Apparently, it was a very harsh winter, and she’d given most of her clothes to her mother, so “fortuitous hypothermia” protected her heart, and

inelegantly administered external (pedal) cardiac massage

also played a role. I’m not a medical expert, but my translation of that is, yes: the guy who stamped on her may have defibrillated her. I don’t think it’s a widely recommended medical procedure, though.