Fairmeadow: The Riverside Walk Where Seven People Were Burned Alive in 1557

Day 8 of 15. Yesterday's story was an unsolved Victorian drowning with a suspicious fire and an insurance trial trailing after it. Today's is older, state-sanctioned, and entirely undisputed in its basic facts: in June 1557, seven people were burned alive on a stretch of riverside meadow in the middle of Maidstone, on the orders of the Crown, for their religion. The spot is now a road and a car park that thousands of people walk past every week without knowing what happened there.

Fairmeadow is a strip of land beside the River Medway that was probably left undeveloped for centuries because the river flooded it regularly. In June 1557, during Queen Mary I's persecution of Protestants, it became an execution ground. Wikipedia's history of the town dates the burning to 18 June 1557: William Allin, a miller from Frittenden, and his wife Katherine were burned at the stake there, along with five other Protestants - seven people in total. Visit Maidstone, the council's own heritage pages, names six of the group directly: Walter Appleby and his wife, of Maidstone; Edmund and Catherine Allin, of Frittenden; Joan Bradbridge, of Staplehurst; and Elizabeth Lewis, known as "Blind Bess".

Four hundred and seventy years on, the paperwork has some gaps. Wikipedia names the Frittenden miller William Allin; Visit Maidstone calls him Edmund. Walter Appleby's wife appears as Jean Manning on the council's own website, and as Petronil in an online martyrology database that separately records her death at Maidstone on 18 June 1557. What every source agrees on is the place, the month, and that a group of six or seven ordinary people - a miller, a wife, neighbours from Frittenden and Staplehurst, a woman known only by a nickname - died there together, burned for what they believed.

The detail that survives about the Allins is a human one: contemporary accounts say they fed the poor, sold corn at half price when they could afford to, and read scripture aloud to their neighbours. That kind of visible, practising faith was exactly what made Protestants conspicuous - and vulnerable - under Mary's restoration of Catholic orthodoxy. Maidstone paid a particularly heavy price for it: only Canterbury recorded more Marian executions anywhere in Kent, a toll heavy enough that local historians trace a hardened Puritan streak in the town for decades afterwards. Maidstone's religious violence didn't start in 1557, either - Thomas Hitton, an early follower of William Tyndale, had already been burned in the town in February 1530, under Henry VIII rather than Mary, in a case usually reckoned the first Reformation martyrdom in England.

The burnings didn't stop Fairmeadow becoming, within a generation, one of the liveliest spots in Maidstone. The town corporation ordered its May, Midsummer and Autumn fairs held there from 1570, it held the town's maypole, and by 1597 it was also used for archery, other pastimes and militia training. In 1699 a tree-lined public walk with railings was laid out along the river - one of the earliest provincial walks of its kind in the country - and it stayed a popular promenade long after the animal market moved across the Medway to Lockmeadow in 1879. Today Fairmeadow is mostly a road and car park on the edge of Maidstone town centre, with the old towpath still open alongside the river. A plaque to the Marian martyrs stands on the route today, on the walk from Fairmeadow towards Earl Street, according to the council's own historic plaques trail - easy to miss, on a stretch of tarmac that gives no other sign of what happened there.

Source: Visit Maidstone, "Fairmeadow", Wikipedia, History of Maidstone