Joan Waste

Life and Ministry

Joan Waste was born blind, the daughter of a Derby barber and ropemaker, and worked alongside her father from childhood, learning to knit and to do rope-work by touch. After her father's death in her early adulthood she lived with her brother Roger, supporting herself by her trade. Under Edward VI she purchased a New Testament — at a cost of about a week's wages — and paid an old man named John Hurt, a prisoner in the local jail, to read it aloud to her. She memorized large portions of it word for word. When the Marian restoration brought the Latin Mass back to Derby, she refused to attend, on the simple ground that she had heard read out of the New Testament that the Lord's Supper was to be administered in a way which the Mass did not match.

Circumstances of Death

Arrested in AD 1556 and brought before Bishop Ralph Baynes of Coventry and Lichfield, Waste was examined on her refusal of the Mass. She answered (as Foxe records) that she could not give her consent to that which she had not read in the New Testament. The bishop and his chancellor argued the doctrine of transubstantiation with her; she answered with the verses she had memorized from her purchased Testament. Convicted of heresy on 1 August AD 1556, she was led, holding her brother's hand because she could not see the way, to the place of burning on the Derby common ground called Windmill Pit, where she was burned at the stake the same afternoon.

Legacy

Joan Waste became one of the most-cited individual Marian martyrs in the Foxe tradition because she was the contrary instance against every charge that Protestant reformation was an enterprise of the educated, the male, or the privileged. A blind, unlettered, working-class young woman who paid a prisoner from her own purse to read her the Scriptures, and who died because she had heard them and trusted them, stands as the witness of the gospel for the laity. Her brother led her to the stake; the New Testament had already led her to the Lord. A modern memorial in Derby marks the site of her death.