The Forgotten Witches of Goudhurst, Kent.

In 1652, two women from the Kentish village of Goudhurst were accused of witchcraft: Mary Allen and her daughter, also named Mary. They were tried at Maidstone and hanged. Their story has all but disappeared from the history books. And yet, they died for being unusual, visible, and quietly independent.

The elder Mary (nee Adson) was married to Steaphen Allen. Their daughter Mary was a spinster described during her trial as “a common witch and inchantrix,” accused of keeping a spirit in the form of a black dog. Her true crime, we must imagine, was being a woman who stood out. Or refused to shrink.

Unlike the popular image of the village wise woman or poor widow, the Kentish witch trials followed a slightly different pattern. Due to Kent’s unique inheritance custom known as gavelkind, women in this county could more readily inherit and hold land in their own name — a rare exception in early modern England. Unlike the rest of the country, where primogeniture ruled and property passed through eldest sons, gavelkind allowed for a more equal division of land amongst heirs, including daughters when no sons were present. This made women in Kent not only more economically visible, but — at times — more vulnerable to accusation, especially when land ownership or inheritance was contested. A well-placed accusation could solve a dispute. Or clear a title. And so, in a number of Kent’s recorded witch trials, it was not the poorest women who were accused, but those with property, independence, or connections.

There’s a strange postscript to Mary Allen’s story. Nearly 15 years after her execution, another woman from Goudhurst — Sarah French — was also accused of witchcraft. Oddly, her accuser was a member of the Allen family. The connection has never been explored, but it raises uneasy questions. What happened in this village, in the wake of the hangings? What grief or guilt rippled through the years? What disputes were solved by false accusations leading to the death of these women? The Frenchs' and Allens' were two large Goudhurst families at that time.

When I moved to Goudhurst twenty-five years ago, I knew none of this, and I certainly knew nothing of my own ancestral connections...

Keen for community and fellowship I stepped into the village church. I was seeking peace — friends, maybe even sanctuary, as I'd converted from paganism to Christianity some decades previously. But something changed when I began to write. I did not write sermons, or heresy. Just quiet truths — about the women who came before: the healers, the plant-workers, the ones who prayed with their hands and remembered things the world had told them to forget.

But the air shifted, my friends began to whisper as the gossip arrived like frost — 'Witch' they hissed, behind their hands, and soon, to my face. The deliverance ministry was even called with suggestions of book burning, as if fire can eradicate truth. Public acts of penance and exorcism were recommended for me. All because I was once a pagan who now wrote about women wrongly accused of witchcraft and murdered. I was told I had invited darkness. Not because of what I’d done, but because of what I remembered.

For years, I avoided the village. I kept my head down. Walked quietly. As if the word they had spoken over me had stuck to the soles of my feet — 'Witch!'.

And then, one winter’s evening, I stood at my door — snow beneath my boots — and looked towards the church. I remember thinking: If this were the seventeenth century, would they come for me with pitchforks?

What I didn’t know then was that they already had.

Right here, in this village. Right here, on this ground.

When fiction remembers what history buried…

My book Cunning Woman began as a reckoning. After writing Old English Medical Remedies and A History of Women in Medicine, I thought I was finished telling the stories of England’s forgotten women. But after what happened here — the whispers, the spiritual exile — I realised I had to write differently.

I created Eden, a woman of faith and scholarship, haunted by grief and drawn to Goudhurst. In the novel, Eden discovers she is descended from the very woman once accused of witchcraft.

I thought it was fiction. Until I looked into my own family history — and found that my ancestors lived here, in Goudhurst in the sixteenth century and well into the nineteenth. One of their gravestones still stands behind the church — upright, unmoving, looking out over the village that once tried to shame me into silence.

Same village.Same church.Same story, turned once more.

The bramble path home…

I walk the same paths Mary Allen once did. I write in the shadow of the same steeple. And where I was once named by whispers, I now stand by name and by bone.

This is my ancestral home. And I no longer walk with my head down.

Some witch trials end in hanging.Some end in exile.And some — eventually — end in return.

Cunning Woman is a novel. But it is also a remembering.A reclamation — of land, lineage, and light.

A final note…

I am delighted to be able to say that Mary Allen and her daughter have been added to the recent government pardon petition led by Councillor Stuart Jeffrey and Claire Kehily, which seeks justice for Kentish women executed for witchcraft at Maidstone. I’m currently researching the lives of Mary and Mary Allen, the case of Sarah French, and the wider history of Goudhurst’s forgotten women — so that no names are lost to silence.

If you'd like to follow this research, or have family connections to these women, I’d love to hear from you.

This is my offering. My healing. And my homecoming.

🌙 If this stirred something in you...

You can read the first chapters of Cunning Woman here →

Or find the full book on Amazon here →

Sign the petition for the pardon of the Maidstone witches HERE