In 1359 at York Castle, a woman named Alice of Tunstall<\/a> was brought before the court. She was not accused of witchcraft. There were no whispers of spells or dealings with the devil. Alice stood charged with killing her husband. She was found guilty of petty treason and sentenced to be burned at the stake.<\/p>\n Petty treason<\/a> applied to those wives and servants who \u201cowed faith and obedience\u201d to a social superior. A wife who killed her husband committed a rebellion against the social order itself; a husband who killed his wife had not. Husbands, and even male servants who killed their master, were hanged; women were burnt.<\/p>\n The logic of the law was explicit. Fire destroyed the body, denied burial and made the crime a public spectacle. It was punishment as both correction and warning. Petty treason made female disobedience visible, violent and unforgettable.<\/p>\n Centuries later, the law\u2019s gendered logic persisted. In 1789, Catherine Murphy<\/a> and her husband were convicted of the same crime: making counterfeit coins<\/a> \u2013 a type of high treason. He was hanged like other male offenders; she was burnt at the stake.<\/p>\n At Newgate Prison, Catherine was led past the hanging body of her husband. She was strangled until she was dead. Only then were bundles of sticks piled and lit around her body, following the post-1652 custom of ensuring the condemned was no longer alive. Even in this modified execution, Murphy\u2019s punishment was far harsher than that of the men she had worked with, reflecting centuries of legal gender inequality.<\/p>\n The execution of Murphy helped prompt reform. In 1790, the MP Sir Benjamin Hammet raised the issue in the House of Commons, citing her death as evidence that burning women \u2013 even after they were dead \u2013 was a grotesque and unnecessary punishment. The Treason Act of 1790 abolished burning as a method of execution, substituting hanging, which was the punishment for men. Even then, it was not until 1828 that a wife\u2019s murder of her husband was formally reduced to a felony.<\/p>\n From Alice of Tunstall to Catherine Murphy, these fires were not about magic \u2013 they were about control. They remind us that historically, under English law, female defiance of husbands or social hierarchy has been treated far more harshly than men\u2019s crimes. The image of the burning witch obscures this reality. In truth, it was gender, not superstition, that lit the flames.<\/p>\n Stephanie Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently appeared on the BBC radio show Woman\u2019s Hour to discuss my research on homicides committed by women. Just before my segment, singer-songwriter Katherine Priddy spoke about her song Matches, inspired by the feminist phrase \u201cwomen, not witches\u201d. It reframes witch trials as the persecution of women rather than the pursuit of the supernatural. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.com\/content\/278612\/count.gif\")
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