The Martyrdom of three women

Katherine Hut of Brocking, Joane Hornes of Billericay and Elizabeth Thacknell (or Thackuell) of Great Burstead, Essex, were executed together by burning alive at Smithfield on 16 May 1556. The three women had been sent to the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, by two justices of the peace, Sir John Mordant, Knight, and Edmund Tyrell, Esquire, for examination of their religious beliefs. The three women followed the Protestant belief in denying the ‘reall presence of Christes body and bloud in the Sacrament of the aultar’, in contravention of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which had been reestablished in England by Queen Mary I. For this heresy Bonner condemned the women to death.

This woodcut depicts the three women in prayer as the flames surround them. It is one of many illustrations in the Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a popular polemical chronicle of Protestant history and martyrology by the historian John Foxe, first published in 1563.