On 30 July 1652, seven women were executed by hanging on Penenden Heath in Maidstone, Kent. Witch trials were commonplace in 17th-century England, but it was rare for so many to be condemned together. 

Anne Ashby, Mary Brown, Anne Martyn, Mildred Wright, Susan Pickenden, Anne Wilson and Mary Reade were accused by neighbours of “bewitching to death” a 10-day-old infant. Some were said to have “carnally known” the devil in exchange for their “monstrous” powers.

Campaigners now hope to right what they describe as a 373-year-old injustice.

The leader of Maidstone Borough Council, Stuart Jeffery, has written to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood urging the government to introduce legislation pardoning the seven women and all others convicted of witchcraft. “These historic acts of murder cannot be undone but those women could be granted a general pardon,” he wrote.

The Home Office has yet to respond. Backers of the campaign say the point is not legal redress but recognition.

“For some people, it’s completely pointless and achieves nothing,” said Green councillor Claire Kehily, one of the organisers. “Yes, those women will never know – though maybe they’ll rest a little bit more peacefully. But I think it sends a strong message that injustice will be called out and fought against. At the end of the day, they weren’t witches, they were just women.”

Marion Gibson, professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter, said the Penenden Heath case was “just one among many”.

“This was happening all over Britain,” she said. “Maybe somebody’s child had died in sad circumstances that couldn’t be explained by any disease that the people in the village knew, and the neighbours start to get suspicious and to think, well, this can’t be natural. People were primed to think witches existed because the church told them so. And it was really easy for them to think not just that witches existed generally, but actually, maybe the old woman they didn’t like down the road was a witch.”

It is not the first effort to clear the names of those executed for witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. A petition to Westminster last year gathered more than 13,000 signatures, prompting the government to acknowledge the “historic injustices” while confirming that it had no plans to legislate.