09/01/2026
Oxford, England. December 14, 1650.
Anne Greene was 22 years old, a scullery maid with no power and no protection.
She worked in the household of Sir Thomas Reade, a justice of the peace. His teenage grandson, Geoffrey, had pursued her with what she later described as "faire promises and other amorous enticements."
She became pregnant.
In 1650s England, pregnancy outside marriage for a servant meant disgrace, dismissal, and legal suspicion. Anne claimed she didn't even know she was pregnant until she miscarried at seventeen weeks while working. Terrified, she tried to hide the remains.
When the tiny body was discovered, Sir Thomas—the very man whose grandson had impregnated her—prosecuted Anne under England's brutal Concealment of Birth of Bastards Act of 1624.
Under this law, any unmarried woman who concealed the death of an illegitimate child was presumed to have murdered it.
A midwife testified that the fetus was far too underdeveloped to have ever been alive.
It didn't matter.
Anne was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.
On December 14, she was led to the gallows at Oxford Castle before a crowd. The noose was placed around her neck. The platform dropped.
Hanging in that era didn't break the neck cleanly. It was slow strangulation, sometimes taking agonizing minutes.
Her friends, watching from the crowd, did the only mercy they could: they pulled on her legs to add weight. A soldier struck her chest four or five times with a musket butt. They were trying to end her suffering faster.
She hung there for nearly half an hour.
When she finally stopped moving, the ex*****oners cut her down. Her body was placed in a coffin and delivered to physicians William Petty and Thomas Willis at Oxford University.
Bodies of executed criminals were legally given to anatomists for dissection—considered an additional punishment, a violation even after death.
The following morning, Petty opened the coffin.
Anne Greene was breathing.
Her pulse was faint. Her body was still warm. She was alive.
The physicians who had arrived to dissect a co**se now fought to save a life. They poured hot cordials down her throat. They rubbed her limbs. They bled her. They placed her in a warm bed with another woman to raise her body temperature.
Fourteen hours later, Anne spoke.
Four days later, she was eating solid food.
Within one month, she had fully recovered—though she remembered nothing of the ex*****on itself.
News of her survival spread through Oxford and beyond. People didn't interpret this as a medical anomaly.
They saw it as divine intervention.
God had spared Anne Greene. Her survival was a miracle, proof that she had been wrongly condemned.
The authorities had no choice. Anne was formally pardoned. Her conviction was overturned. Her sentence was nullified.
When she left Oxford, she took the coffin with her—as a trophy of her survival.
Sir Thomas Reade, the man who had prosecuted her while his grandson faced no consequences, died three days after her pardon was granted. Many saw this as justice.
Anne Greene went on to marry. She had three children. She lived until approximately 1659 or 1665—sources differ—but she lived.
Her case was meticulously documented, inspiring poems, pamphlets, and medical writings that still exist today. An 18-year-old student named Christopher Wren—who would later design St. Paul's Cathedral—wrote verses in her honor.
Anne Greene's story exposes the brutal intersection of poverty, power, and women's bodies in early modern England.
She was a servant with no voice. Likely pregnant by someone who faced no consequences while she faced death. Subject to laws that assumed guilt based on social status rather than evidence. Executed for a crime that may never have occurred.
Her only crime was being poor, female, and unlucky.
But she survived.
She drew breath on that dissection table. She forced authorities to acknowledge what they had done. She married, bore children, and lived.
Anne Greene refused to die when she was supposed to.
And in doing so, she became living proof that the law, the church, and society could all be wrong.
~Old Photo Club
