Oxford, England. December 14, 1650.
The air was knife‑cold, the kind that made breath hang in front of faces like ghosts. In the narrow lanes around Oxford Castle, people were already gathering, drawn the way crowds have always been drawn—to spectacle, to punishment, to the boundary between life and death.

At the center of this grim choreography was a 22‑year‑old woman named Anne Greene.
A scullery maid. A servant. A person with no real power, no legal standing, no protection.

She worked in the household of Sir Thomas Reade, a justice of the peace—a man whose word carried weight in the courts, in the parish, in the county. In that world, his name opened doors. Hers barely registered.

Sir Thomas’s teenage grandson, Geoffrey, had pursued her with what she later described as “faire promises and other amorous enticements.” That phrase sounds almost delicate now, but in context it was loaded. It meant whispered words in hallways, hands that lingered too long when no one else was looking, and assurances that if anything went wrong, he would “take care of it.”

He didn’t.

Anne became pregnant.

 

In 1650s England, pregnancy outside marriage was not just a private shame; it was a legal and social catastrophe—especially for a servant. A maid’s honor was effectively a form of property. It belonged to her employer’s household, to her family name, to the social order that demanded that women be “pure” while quietly tolerating the behavior of the men above them.

If a servant became pregnant, there was almost always one predictable outcome: dismissal. She would lose her position, her lodging, and her income. If she was very unlucky—as Anne soon would be—she could lose her life.

Anne later claimed she didn’t even realize she was pregnant until it was effectively over. While working, she miscarried at around seventeen weeks. In modern medical terms, this is a late miscarriage, but still far from a viable pregnancy. In the 17th century, most people didn’t think in medical weeks. A woman bled. The fetus was small. It could be called anything people needed it to be.

Terrified, alone, and fully aware of what pregnancy meant for an unmarried servant, Anne tried to hide the remains. It was not the action of a calculating killer; it was the panicked instinct of a young woman who understood how the world judged women like her.

But the body was found.

 

The irony, the cruelty, is almost unbearable.

The man who brought the law down on Anne’s head was Sir Thomas Reade—the very man in whose household she worked, the man whose grandson had likely impregnated her.

Under England’s brutal Concealment of Birth of Bastards Act of 1624, the deck was stacked from the start. The law stated: if an unmarried woman concealed the death of an illegitimate child—if she hid the body, failed to “call witnesses,” or didn’t publicly prove the child was stillborn—she was presumed to have murdered it.

Presumed.
No investigation into the circumstances.
No requirement to prove that the child had ever taken a breath.

The burden fell entirely on the woman to prove her innocence in a world where she had no voice.

At Anne’s trial, a midwife testified clearly that the fetus was far too underdeveloped to have ever been alive outside the womb. In other words: it was a miscarriage. There was no “baby” that had lived and then died at Anne’s hands. No murder.

But this was 1650, and the law was as much about control as it was about justice. The midwife’s testimony didn’t matter. The statute was written to make cases like Anne’s almost impossible to defend.

The court convicted her.
The sentence was death by hanging.

 

On December 14, 1650, Anne Greene was led from her cell to the gallows at Oxford Castle. The crowd had gathered early, filling the open space around the scaffold. Public executions, then, were a form of theater: punishment, warning, spectacle, and crude entertainment rolled into one.

Some of the people who came knew nothing about her case. She was just “a murderess,” another fallen woman who had broken the rules. Others knew the story in fragments—the servant girl, the hidden child, the scandal under a respectable roof. A few, perhaps, knew the deeper truth: that the man whose family had ruined her name was not standing beside her in chains, but watching her fate unfold from a safe distance.

Anne’s hands were bound. The noose—a simple rope, not the “scientifically calculated” instrument of later centuries—was placed around her neck.

Hanging in that era wasn’t designed to be quick. The drop usually wasn’t long enough to break the neck cleanly. Death often came from slow strangulation and suffocation. The body jerked, struggled, fought for air. It could take several minutes. Sometimes it took much longer.

The authorities called this justice.
The crowd called it a warning.
For the condemned, it was terror.

 

Anne’s friends were there. Other servants, perhaps. People who had known her not as a legal case, but as a young woman who scrubbed pans, carried water, and tried to survive in a world tilted against her.

They watched as the executioner prepared. The rope. The knot. The trapdoor.

When the platform dropped, Anne fell. The rope snapped tight. Her body convulsed.

And in that moment, her friends did the only act of mercy left to them.

They grabbed her legs and pulled, trying to add weight, trying to make the drop harder, sharper. If they could not save her life, they could at least try to shorten her suffering. A soldier joined in this grim act of kindness, striking her chest with the butt of his musket—four, five times—attempting to jar her into a quicker death.

It was a strange, heartbreaking scene: violence used not as cruelty, but as mercy. Rough, desperate attempts to speed up what the law had already decided must happen.

Anne hung there for nearly half an hour.

Eventually, her movements stopped. There was no visible sign of life. To the executioner, to the watching crowd, to the officials present, she was dead.

They cut her down.
They placed her in a simple coffin.
They sent her to the next stage of her “punishment.”

 

In 17th‑century England, the state had one more humiliation reserved for certain executed criminals: dissection.

The body of a condemned person could be legally handed over to anatomists—physicians and scholars who used corpses to learn about human anatomy. For them, it was invaluable access to the inside of the human body. For the condemned, it was considered an extra layer of shame.

Dissection wasn’t just a scientific act. It was seen as a spiritual violation. To many, a cut and opened body could not be properly buried, could not rest. It was meant to follow the criminal beyond death.

Anne’s body—so the authorities believed—was now one of these.

Her coffin was delivered to Oxford University, to the care of two physicians: William Petty and Thomas Willis. Both men were ambitious, curious, involved in the early stirrings of what we would recognize today as modern medicine. They had expected another anonymous body, another lesson in flesh and bone.

Instead, they met Anne Greene.

 

It was the following morning when William Petty opened the coffin. Tradition has him doing so in preparation for a public anatomy demonstration—a dissection that might be observed by scholars and students.

He lifted the lid, expecting stillness.
Instead, he found movement.

Anne Greene was breathing.

Barely. Faintly.
But breathing.

Her chest rose and fell with shallow, labored motions. Her pulse, when they pressed fingers to her neck, was weak—but it was there. Her body was still warm, not with the false warmth of nearby fires, but with the residual heat of someone whose heart had not accepted the verdict the law had delivered.

The physicians who had come to cut into a corpse now faced something else entirely: a living woman who had already been declared dead.

In that moment, they made a decision that changed everything.

They did not “finish what the law had begun.” They did not call the authorities to correct the “mistake.” They did not step back and let nature take its course.

They fought to keep her alive.

 

The techniques they used seem strange now, some crude, some harmful by modern standards, but they reflected the best medical thinking of their time.

They poured hot cordials down her throat—strong, stimulating liquids meant to rouse the body. They rubbed her limbs vigorously to restore circulation. They bled her, believing that adjusting the balance of “humors” could help her system revive. They placed her in a warm bed, side by side with another woman, using shared body heat and blankets to slowly raise her core temperature.

It was a strange reversal. The body meant for dissection was now a patient. The woman who had been treated as disposable was suddenly precious—medically and, very quickly, culturally.

Fourteen hours later, Anne spoke.

Imagine the room at that moment. The physicians leaning close, checking for breathing, expecting at most a moan. And then, actual words. Coherent sound from a throat that had been wrapped in a rope, squeezed nearly shut.

Within four days, she was eating solid food.

Within a month, she had fully recovered—at least physically. The strangulation had not broken her neck. The hanging had not destroyed her brain function. Her body had been pushed to the edge, but not beyond it.

Of the execution itself, Anne would later say she remembered nothing.

 

News of Anne Greene’s survival spread at a speed that might surprise us, given the era. Oxford was a scholarly town but also a gossiping one. Word moved through taverns, through college halls, through markets. It traveled along roads with merchants, messengers, students returning home for the season.

People did not frame this as a “medical anomaly.” They didn’t talk about oxygen deprivation, latent pulse, or misjudged time of death.

They talked about God.

In 1650, England was steeped in religious and political turmoil. The Civil War had ended, the king had been executed a year earlier, and Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth was reshaping the country’s political and spiritual landscape. People were primed to see meaning in events, especially anything that hinted at divine approval or condemnation.

A woman hanged in public, declared dead by officials, sent for dissection—and then found alive? That was not just news. It was a sign.

To many, Anne Greene’s survival was proof that God had intervened. That heaven itself had reached down into the anatomy theatre and said, “No. Not this one.”

The midwife’s testimony that the fetus had never been viable took on new weight. Perhaps she had been innocent all along. Perhaps the law had erred. Perhaps the callousness of Sir Thomas Reade’s prosecution had offended a higher court.

This interpretation was powerful—and dangerous. If God had spared Anne, then what did that say about the verdict that condemned her? About the men who pronounced it?

 

The authorities were cornered.

They could not simply hang her again. Public sentiment was shifting. To execute a woman who had “returned from the dead” would look less like justice and more like defiance of the divine. The story had outrun the court. The narrative no longer belonged to the judge alone.

Anne was formally pardoned.
Her conviction was overturned.
Her sentence was nullified.

The state, which had tried to assert total control over her body—even beyond death—was forced to step back. Anne Greene walked out of Oxford not as a condemned criminal, but as a living contradiction of the system that had nearly killed her.

When she left, she took the coffin with her—the same box that had carried her “body” to the university. It became both a symbol and a trophy: the container they had assumed would hold a corpse now belonged to the woman who had outlived it.

 

Then, another twist.

Sir Thomas Reade—the justice of the peace who had prosecuted Anne, while his grandson Geoffrey faced no punishment—died three days after her pardon.

In strict historical terms, correlation is not causation. He may have been ill already. His death might have been entirely unrelated to Anne’s case. But people in 17th‑century England did not think that way.

To them, this was poetic justice.
The man who had wielded the law so harshly against a powerless servant died just as the woman he condemned emerged alive and freed.

Stories circulated. God had judged him. Divine balance had been restored. In a world where courts often failed the poor, the idea that heaven had intervened carried enormous emotional weight.

 

Anne Greene’s life after the scaffold did not become a fairy tale of wealth and power. She did not suddenly rise into the gentry. But she did achieve something rare and valuable for someone of her background: a second chance.

She married.
She had three children.
She lived for nearly another decade—sources differ whether she died around 1659 or 1665—but the key point is this: she lived.

Her case did not disappear into rumor. It was meticulously documented in pamphlets, legal accounts, and medical writings. Poets and preachers used her story as a moral example. Physicians used it as a case study in resuscitation and the limits of hanging.

An 18‑year‑old student named Christopher Wren—who would one day design St. Paul’s Cathedral in London—wrote verses in her honor, celebrating her unexpected return from the edge of death.

 

Anne Greene’s story isn’t just a bizarre footnote in medical history. It exposes a deep, ugly seam in early modern English society: the intersection of poverty, power, and women’s bodies.

She was a servant with no voice and no legal leverage. Likely impregnated by a young man who never faced trial, never stood at the gallows, never felt rope around his neck. She lived under a law that assumed her guilt based on her status: unmarried, poor, pregnant, hiding a miscarriage.

The Concealment of Birth of Bastards Act wasn’t a neutral statute. It was a weapon. It allowed courts to treat poor women’s bodies as sites of suspicion, their pregnancies as potential crimes, their grief as evidence.

Anne was not a scheming killer.
She was a terrified young woman in a world that punished her very situation.

Her “crime” was being poor, female, and unlucky.

 

And yet, despite all of this, she survived.

She hung from the gallows for nearly thirty minutes. She was declared dead. She was placed in a coffin, loaded onto a cart, taken to a university, and set out for dissection.

She should have been nothing more than an entry in a parish burial record.

Instead, she drew breath on the dissection table. She forced physicians, scholars, and judges to confront what had nearly been done in their name. She forced the legal system to admit, however reluctantly, that it had made a mistake.

She married. She bore children. She walked through streets where people had once watched her choke on a rope. She slept in a bed instead of a cell, ate meals instead of prison rations, held her children instead of a coffin lid.

 

Anne Greene refused to die when she was supposed to.

That refusal—whether you see it as chance, biology, or miracle—became a kind of quiet rebellion. Her survival was a body‑level contradiction of everything the law, the church, and society claimed to know:

That the poor were disposable.
That the courts were infallible.
That women like her were always lying.
That execution was final.

She proved them wrong simply by breathing.

Her story still speaks today, not because we still hang people in castle courtyards, but because the core dynamics haven’t entirely vanished. Power can still crush the powerless. Systems can still assume guilt instead of proving it. Women’s bodies can still become battlegrounds where law, morality, and control collide.

Anne Greene didn’t write a manifesto. She didn’t stand up at her gallows and deliver a speech. Her protest was unplanned, unspoken, and undeniable:

They tried to make her a symbol of punishment.
History made her a symbol of survival.