The crime occurred in Dorset in the 1800s – and many factors in the case are still relevant today (Image: Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
A desperate woman who suffered ongoing domestic abuse in the hands of her younger husband eventually retaliated – and smashed his skull with an axe. It’s 1856 in the rural county of Dorset, and 45-year-old Martha Brown was home alone, but she’s already aware of her husband’s affair with a neighbour.
John Brown was Martha’s second husband; her first spouse, Bernard Bearn, had died over 10 years ago. Martha was nearly 20 years older than her second husband John, who was aged 26 when he died, the pair met through their work as servants at Blackmanston Farm in Dorset. The couple had been married since January 1852, rumours were rife that John married Martha for her good looks, but also for her money as her first husband had left her £50 when he died (worth over £6000 in today’s money).
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They lived at Birdsmoor Gate, a hamlet in Dorset, but the marriage was doomed from the start, and reached its breaking point when Martha found John in bed with another local woman, Mary Davis.
Naturally, this caused an argument. Martha would have been at her wits’ end. Then, later, the same day, John returned drunk, he’d lost his hat, and his wife assumed he’d hooked up with Mary again.
When she accused John of further infidelity, he hit her with a whip and the row escalated. In a later statement, Martha said “he then kicked out the bottom of the chair that upon which I had been sitting”.
She added: “We continued quarrelling until 3am, when he struck me a severe blow on the side of my head, which confused me so much that I was obliged to sit down.”
Martha later explained that “supper was on the table” and John retorted “eat it yourself, be damned” followed by other threats, at the same time, he grabbed a large whip.
She continued to explain in a statement at the time: “He reached down from the mantle piece a heavy horse whip with a plain end and struck me across the shoulders with it three times.
The Purbeck Hills, where the couple first met, is a popular tourist spot these days (Image: Bill Allsopp via Getty Images)
Martha went on: « Each time I screamed out. I said ‘If you strike me again I will cry murder’. He retorted ‘if you do, I will knock your brains through the window’. He also added ‘I hope I shall find you dead in the morning’.
“He then kicked me on the left side which caused me much pain, and he immediately stooped down to untie his boots.
“I was such enraged and in an ungovernable passion, on being so abused and struck, I directly seized a hatchet which was lying close to where I sat and which I had been using to break coal with to keep up the fire and keep his supper warm, and with it (the hatchet) I struck him several violent blows on the head, I could not say how many.
“He fell at the first blow on his head, with his face towards the fireplace. He never spoke or moved afterwards.
“As soon as I had done it, I wished I had not, and would have given the world not to have done it. I had never struck him before after all his ill-treatment, but when he hit me so hard at this time, I was almost out of my senses and hardly knew what I was doing.”
HM Dorchester Prison on October 31, 2008. This Victorian building dates back to the 1800s (Image: David Goddard/Getty Images)
Martha’s words revealed the truth, but only after she was imprisoned. Initially, when she was arrested on July 5 1856, she blamed her spouse’s death on being kicked by a horse.
She said she’d found her husband “lying down on his face and hands” with a “great many wounds on his head,” and later she insisted “I am accused of murdering my husband, but am as innocent as the angels in heaven.”
The 45-year-old woman had hit her husband over the head with a wood chopping axe – and later admitted the killing in prison, along with the ongoing ordeal of domestic abuse she’d endured.
At the time, many were sympathetic with her predicament, several petitions to save Martha’s life were sent to the Home Secretary, but she was tried before a jury consisting of 10 local men – and they found her guilty.
She was condemned for “wilful murder” and sentenced to death by hanging, yet her dead husband’s father and his sister visited Martha in jail days before she was hanged.
In a further twist to this sad tale, on the dismal day of Marth’s hanging (Saturday, 9 August, 1856), 16-year-old Thomas Hardy was one of 4,000 spectators watching the woman’s final moments – and Hardy went on to become one of the most renowned writers of the time.
Hardy Monument, to Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy on Blackdown Hill, Dorset (Image: CM Dixon/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Thomas Hardy’s famous novel, Tess of the D’Urbevilles, was inspired by the grim sight he saw on the day of Martha’s death – and the story surrounding her circumstances.
On the day of the hanging, Hardy wrote: « What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back. »
Martha became the last woman to be publicly executed in the county of Dorset, largely due to the outrage surrounding her hanging, as many knew about the ongoing abuse she experienced at the hands of the man she loved, then killed.
A reporter for the Dorset County Chronicle and Somerset Gazette also watched the public hanging of Martha, writing that people came “merely to glut their morbid curiosity” in seeing a woman being hanged.
It was reported that spectators came “laughing and jeering and full of no pleasant sentiments towards the human victim”.
Then, they left the shocking scene, not to “retire and meditate” but to “drink and carouse, to riot and blaspheme and keep the town all day in a state of perturbation and misery”.
