A QUEST TO PARDON ENGLAND’S WITCHES: UK Government Is Being Asked to Pardon 373-Year-Old “Witches”

A growing movement in England seeks justice for women hanged as witches centuries ago, bringing ancient injustices into modern focus.

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In 2025, something remarkable happened in the quiet offices of Maidstone Borough Council. A local government leader sat down to write a letter to the Home Secretary about a group of women who died in their town. But this wasn’t about a recent tragedy or an ongoing investigation. These women had been dead for 373 years, executed on a summer’s day in 1652. Their crime? Witchcraft. And now, nearly four centuries later, their town wanted to right an ancient wrong.

The Summer of Terror

Picture the scene: July 1652, and the heat hangs heavy over Maidstone, Kent. The town’s Lower Court is packed with spectators, all craning to get a better view of the seven women standing before Justice Peter Warburton, one of the Justices of the Common Pleas. The accused were Anne Ashby, Mary Brown, Anne Martyn, Mildred Wright, Susan Pickenden, and Anne Wilson – all from the nearby weaving town of Cranbrook – along with Mary Reade, who had traveled from Lenham to face these impossible charges.

The accusations against them would sound absurd to modern ears, but in that sweltering courtroom, they were deadly serious. The women stood accused of bewitching to death a 10-day-old baby. Not just the infant, but the child’s mother too. And a three-year-old child, for good measure. The contemporary accounts, preserved in court records and pamphlets, claimed these women had confessed to keeping familiars – small demonic imps that took the form of common animals. One woman, the records state, had even admitted to sending her spirit out into the night to harm a neighbor’s child.

The star witness against them, in a sense, was a pamphlet that would soon be circulating through the streets: “A Prodigious & Tragicall History of the Arraignment, Tryall, Confession, and Condemnation of Six Witches at Maidstone.” This document painted scenes that would have made readers’ blood run cold. The pamphlet described how Anne Ashby, who authorities had marked as the ringleader or “chief actress” of this supposed coven, had confessed in open court. She claimed, according to this account, that the Devil had “carnally known her” in exchange for supernatural powers.

But then something even more dramatic allegedly happened. The pamphlet breathlessly reported that Ashby “fell into an extasie before the bench, and swell’d into a monstrous and vast bigness, crying out very dolefully.” The crowd must have gasped at this supposed transformation, this visible proof of demonic possession happening right before their eyes.

The authorities had their methods for detecting witches, and they employed them all. They conducted physical examinations on the women, searching for evidence of their supposed contract with Satan. In one particularly cruel test, a pin was thrust deep into the arm of one of the women – the records aren’t clear whether it was Mary Browne, Anne Wilson, or Mildred Wright. The woman, they reported triumphantly, did not feel it. The pin drew no blood. Surely this was proof of witchcraft, they reasoned, for what natural woman would not bleed when pierced?

Mary Read of Lenham presented her accusers with what they considered the most damning evidence of all. She had a visible teat under her tongue – likely nothing more than a harmless cyst or growth that many people develop. But to the witch hunters, this was a devil’s mark. She showed it to many people, including the observer who carefully recorded all these horrifying details for posterity. Each physical anomaly, each birthmark or blemish, became evidence in this twisted theater of persecution.

The Hanging at Penenden Heath

Three days after their trial, on July 30, 1652, the seven women were loaded onto carts for their final journey. Their destination was Penenden Heath, situated about a mile northeast of Maidstone. This wasn’t just any execution ground – Penenden had been dispensing its own brutal form of justice since Saxon times. The very name “Penenden” came from the Saxon word meaning a place associated with punishment. For centuries, it had served double duty as both a site for county assemblies and a stage for public executions.

The procession to the heath would have drawn crowds. Public hangings were meant to be spectacles, designed to terrify the watching masses as much as to punish the condemned. Men, women, and children would have lined the route, some hurling abuse at the supposed witches, others perhaps watching in silent horror or sympathy.

At the execution ground, something unexpected happened. Some of the condemned women made a final, desperate request that reveals just how deeply they had internalized their accusers’ narrative. They asked to be burned instead of hanged. This wasn’t because burning was somehow less painful – quite the opposite. They believed, or at least claimed to believe, that fire might cleanse their bloodline. The women feared that if they were merely hanged, the evil might become “hereditary to her Progeny.” They were trying to protect their children and grandchildren from inheriting the taint of witchcraft. The authorities, however, refused this request. Hanging was the prescribed method for witchcraft in England, and hanging it would be.

Here’s where the story takes a particularly tragic turn. Justice Warburton, who had presided over the trial, wasn’t actually convinced by the evidence presented. Even as the women stood on the scaffold with nooses around their necks, he was having second thoughts. He sent urgent word for a reprieve order, hoping to stop the executions. But in those days before telegraphs or telephones, urgent messages traveled only as fast as a horse could gallop. The reprieve arrived, but it came too late. The seven women were already dead.

The bitter irony deepens when we learn that three of these women were later to receive a Judicial Reprieve that arrived a full month after their executions. Someone, somewhere in the chain of authority, had recognized that a terrible mistake was being made. But bureaucracy moved slowly in the 17th century, and by the time the paperwork caught up with events, there were already seven fresh graves on Penenden Heath.

Actually, we don’t even know where those graves were. The bodies of executed witches weren’t accorded the dignity of marked burial plots. The women’s final resting places remain unknown, as it was common for those executed – especially people accused of witchcraft – to be buried in unmarked graves, often at crossroads or in unconsecrated ground. Their families couldn’t even properly mourn at a graveside.

A Nation Torn by War and Fear

To understand how seven women from Kent ended up dancing at the end of ropes on that July day, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture of what was happening in England. The country was tearing itself apart. The Maidstone executions didn’t occur in some isolated pocket of superstition – they were part of a massive wave of witch persecution that had swept across England during its most turbulent period.

Witch trials had been occurring sporadically in England for centuries, but they reached their absolute peak during the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Puritan era of the 1650s. Think about what that meant for ordinary people: the country had just emerged from a brutal conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians that centered on fundamental questions about the powers of the monarchy and government. Neighbor had fought neighbor, brother had fought brother. Then, in an act that shocked all of Europe, Parliament had done the unthinkable – they had put King Charles I on trial and, in 1649, chopped off his head.

The execution of a king was more than just a political act. For people who believed that monarchs ruled by divine right, killing the king was like killing God’s representative on Earth. The aftermath of this regicide, combined with the trauma of civil war, created a society drowning in anxiety and searching desperately for explanations for their suffering.

Into this chaos had stepped a man who would become England’s most notorious witch hunter. Between 1645 and 1647, while England was still embroiled in civil war, roughly three hundred people in the South East were accused of witchcraft. The man largely responsible for this carnage was Matthew Hopkins, a failed lawyer who had reinvented himself as the self-proclaimed “Witchfinder General.”

Hopkins brought a terrible efficiency to the business of witch hunting. He traveled from town to town with his associate John Stearne, offering their services to communities plagued by unexplained misfortunes. The records suggest Hopkins was responsible for more executions in two years than England had seen in the previous century. He was paid handsomely for his work – sometimes up to a month’s wages for finding a single witch. Hopkins developed a whole methodology for identifying witches: examining them for extra nipples, unusual scars or birthmarks, boils or growths, or even just owning a cat or any pet that could be deemed a ‘familiar.’

Hopkins died in 1647 – some say of tuberculosis, others whispered that he had been subjected to his own swimming test and drowned – but his legacy lived on. The wave of persecution he had started in East Anglia didn’t stop with his death. Instead, it radiated outward like ripples on a pond, reaching Kent by the 1650s. The Maidstone executions of 1652 represented this toxic tide finally washing over the Kentish countryside, bringing with it the same poisonous mixture of religious fervor, social anxiety, and scapegoating that had characterized the earlier trials.

The Anatomy of Accusation

Let’s talk about who actually ended up accused of witchcraft, because there’s a pattern here that’s impossible to ignore. The typical victim of an English witch trial wasn’t some mysterious figure living on the margins of society. She was usually a poor old woman with a bad reputation, someone who had perhaps begged for charity and been refused, or who had gotten into disputes with her neighbors. The women executed at Maidstone fit this profile perfectly. They were widows or spinsters – women who had no man to stand up for them in court or in the community. They were persecuted for being old, for being poor, for being a ‘nuisance,’ or for the crime of not going to church regularly enough. They were persecuted, essentially, for being a burden or for being different.

Marion Gibson, a professor of renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter who has studied these cases extensively, paints a picture of how these accusations typically developed. A child in the village falls ill and dies. The local healers can’t explain it, the priest’s prayers don’t help, and the parents are driven half-mad with grief. They start thinking back – who did they have a disagreement with recently? Which old woman muttered something under her breath when refused a bit of bread? Who looked at their child strangely in the marketplace?

“Maybe somebody’s child had died in sad circumstances that couldn’t be explained by any disease that the people in the village knew,” Gibson explains, “and the neighbours start to get suspicious and to think, well, this can’t be natural.” The grieving parents need someone to blame, and the community, primed by centuries of church teaching about the reality of witchcraft, is ready to provide them with a target.

“People were primed to think witches existed because the church told them so,” Gibson continues. “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.” The church had been teaching about the dangers of witchcraft for centuries. Every Sunday, people heard sermons about the Devil walking among them, seeking souls to corrupt. Is it any wonder that when tragedy struck, they looked for supernatural explanations?

Though men and even children were occasionally accused of witchcraft, the overwhelming majority of victims were women. There’s no escaping the gendered nature of these persecutions.

Consider the town of Cranbrook, where five of the seven executed women had lived. This wasn’t some backward rural hamlet – Cranbrook was actually a prosperous weaving center. Centuries earlier, Edward III had brought over Flemish weavers to develop the Wealden cloth industry, using wool from Romney Marsh. Cranbrook had become the beating heart of this trade, blessed with local supplies of fuller’s earth and plenty of streams that could be dammed to drive the fulling mills. The town had wealth, education, and connections to international trade. Yet all this prosperity and sophistication didn’t protect its most vulnerable residents from accusations of witchcraft.

In a small community like Cranbrook, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, accusations of witchcraft became a way to settle old scores. That widow who had argued with you about property boundaries ten years ago? The old woman whose cat had hissed at your child? The healer whose remedies had failed to save your sick cow? In the fevered atmosphere of witch-hunting, any of these grudges could suddenly turn deadly. As one historian noted, accusing someone of witchcraft was a quick and easy way to get back at someone who was resented by another. In the close-knit communities of 17th-century Kent, where people had to see each other every day at the market or in church, these small resentments could fester for years before erupting into accusations of diabolical conspiracy.

The Methods of “Justice”

The legal machinery that ground up these seven women had been set in motion more than a century earlier. The story of English witchcraft law is one of stops and starts, of repeals and reenactments, each iteration making the persecution more systematic and deadly.

Witchcraft was first made a capital offense in 1542 under a statute of Henry VIII, but then, in one of those quirks of Tudor politics, it was repealed just five years later. Perhaps Henry had other things on his mind – like his succession of wives and his break with Rome. But witch fever couldn’t be suppressed for long. It reached new heights when witchcraft was again classed as a felony in 1562 under a statute of Elizabeth I. The Witchcraft Act 1563 introduced the death penalty for any sorcery used to cause someone’s death. Later, in 1604, James I – who had a personal obsession with witchcraft and had even written a book on the subject – expanded the law further.

Now here’s something interesting about English witch trials that set them apart from what was happening on the European continent. In England, the use of torture was actually rare, and the methods were far more restrained than in places like Germany or Scotland. The country formally permitted torture only when authorized by the monarch, and throughout all of English history, no more than 81 torture warrants were issued for all offenses combined. Compare that to the German states, where torture was routine and extreme.

But witch hunters like Hopkins had figured out how to work around these restrictions. They developed methods that skirted the edges of what was legally permissible, pushing right up to the line without quite crossing it. Hopkins claimed he could identify witches through various “devil’s marks.” According to his manual on the subject, proof of witchcraft could include the existence of a third nipple (which could simply be a mole or skin tag), an unusual scar or birthmark, a boil or growth, or even just owning a cat or any pet that could be seen as a ‘familiar.’

Hopkins and his followers also used sleep deprivation – keeping accused witches awake for days until exhaustion made them confess to anything. They would “walk” the accused, forcing them to pace back and forth for hours until their feet bled and their minds broke. Technically, this wasn’t torture under the legal definition of the time. But try telling that to a woman who hadn’t slept for three days and could barely stand.

Another crucial difference from continental Europe was the method of execution. Normally, people sentenced for witchcraft in England were executed by hanging, not burning as was common in other countries. This distinction mattered theologically and legally. Burning was reserved for specific crimes like petty treason – which is what they called it when a woman killed her husband, because she had violated the natural order by rebelling against her lord and master. The choice between rope and flame carried deep symbolic meaning about the nature of the crime and the criminal.

The Long Shadow of Injustice

The seven women hanged at Penenden Heath were part of a much larger tragedy. About 500 people are estimated to have been executed for witchcraft in England over the course of about two centuries. The killing continued for another thirty years after the Maidstone executions. The 1682 Bideford witch trial resulted in the last people confirmed to have been executed for witchcraft in England, though there’s evidence that the very last person to be executed was probably Mary Hicks in 1716 – her story was recorded in an eight-page pamphlet published that same year.

The age of witch trials finally began to wind down in the early 18th century. The Witchcraft Act 1735 marked a fundamental shift in thinking – it finally concluded prosecutions for alleged witchcraft in England by treating those who claimed to practice witchcraft not as servants of Satan, but as fraudsters and con artists. The law had finally caught up with what many educated people had been saying for decades: there were no witches, only deluded or manipulative people pretending to have supernatural powers.

Penenden Heath itself continued its grim work for nearly two more centuries after the seven women died there. The last public execution on the heath took place in 1830, and it ended with a bitter irony that echoes the witchcraft trials. John Dyke from the nearby village of Bearsted was hanged for burning a hayrick – essentially, for arson. It later emerged that he was completely innocent. The site that had witnessed so much injustice over the centuries finally ceased its grim function, though not before claiming one more innocent victim.

Today, if you drive through Maidstone, you might pass through Penenden Heath without even realizing it. It’s now a residential suburb, situated between arterial roadways at junction 6 of the M20 motorway and the A249 Sittingbourne Road. One visitor described the Heath as “a bare and forsaken looking stretch of municipal unoriginality.” The place where crowds once gathered to watch women hang for impossible crimes is now just another patch of suburban England, its dark history largely forgotten by those who pass through daily. Children play where gallows once stood. Cars park where crowds once jeered or wept.

The Modern Fight for Recognition

Fast forward to our present moment, and something remarkable is happening. The dead are being remembered, and voices are being raised on their behalf. The current campaign for pardons represents the latest chapter in a long struggle for recognition of these historical injustices.

The movement has been building for years. Last year, a petition to Westminster attracted 13,000 signatures from people across the country who believed it was time to formally acknowledge the wrongs done to these women. The previous Conservative government acknowledged “the historic injustices” – careful, bureaucratic language that admitted something bad had happened without quite taking responsibility – but said it had no plans to legislate.

Then came Stuart Jeffrey’s letter. The leader of the Lib Dem-Green co-led Maidstone borough council sat down and wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, calling for new laws to pardon the Penenden Heath women and all others historically convicted of witchcraft across England. His words were direct and unflinching: “These historic acts of murder cannot be undone but those women could be granted a general pardon.”

Jeffrey’s letter drew a deliberate parallel with Turing’s Law, passed in 2013, which granted posthumous pardons to those convicted of consensual same-sex relationships. The comparison is pointed and powerful – both represent cases where the law itself was fundamentally unjust, where the state criminalized people for who they were rather than any genuine harm they had caused. If we can pardon men convicted of loving other men, Jeffrey argued, surely we can pardon women convicted of impossible crimes like flying through the air or consorting with demons.

Meanwhile, Claire Kehily, who represents Coxheath and Farleigh for the Green Party, has been fighting a parallel battle for recognition. She presented a 464-name petition to Maidstone council requesting not just words but something tangible – a memorial to the executed women. She wants the authority to install this memorial somewhere in the town centre, where people will see it every day, where it will become part of the fabric of modern Maidstone. She’s even offered to raise funds to pay for it herself if needed.

“This isn’t really about witchcraft,” Kehily explains, and you can hear the passion in her words. “It’s about giving voice to those who never had one. About acknowledging an injustice. Even in a small way, it matters.”

The Maidstone Borough Council has thrown its weight behind these efforts, officially declaring that these alleged witches were “victims of a huge injustice rooted in misogyny.” The council’s statement pulls no punches about what really happened to these women. They were convicted not for acts of maleficia, but for being poor, single, widowed, or healers. Their persecution was rooted in misogyny, fear, and social scapegoating – forces that haven’t exactly disappeared from our modern world.

Lessons from Scotland

England’s activists have been watching developments north of the border with a mixture of hope and frustration. Scotland’s approach to this historical injustice provides both inspiration and a cautionary tale for English campaigners.

Scotland has particular reason to grapple with this history – more people per capita were convicted of witchcraft there than anywhere else in Europe. The Scottish witch hunts were particularly vicious, with torture routinely used and entire communities sometimes swept up in waves of accusation. So when campaigners there pushed for recognition, they had the weight of truly massive historical injustice behind them.

In 2022, they achieved a significant victory. They persuaded the then First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to issue a formal apology for what she called an “egregious historical injustice.” Standing in the Scottish Parliament, Sturgeon acknowledged the horror of what had been done in Scotland’s name. A member’s bill asking Holyrood to officially pardon those convicted attracted widespread support from across the political spectrum.

But then came the frustration. The bill foundered for technical reasons – the kind of procedural obstacles that would have seemed trivial compared to the magnitude of the injustice being addressed. The pardons that seemed so close slipped away into the maze of parliamentary procedure.

The campaign group Witches of Scotland hasn’t given up. They say they’re confident another Member of the Scottish Parliament will take up the cause in the coming session. Claire Mitchell KC, the group’s co-founder and a senior lawyer who understands both the legal and moral dimensions of this fight, explains why this matters for all of us, not just the dead.

“We are somebody else’s history,” Mitchell says, “and I want people to know that in the 21st century we took a stand. But perhaps much more importantly, it’s not for those people, it’s for us.”

Mitchell’s next words should make us all pause and think about our own times. “We need to look at what happened at that time when times got tough. What happened was the church and the state picked a scapegoat, and they said: ‘These are the people that are causing you ill, and when we get rid of those people, our problems will be over.'” She pauses, then adds with a note of warning: “Unfortunately, that’s all too timely in the present day.”

Why Pardons Matter Now

The question hangs in the air: why does any of this matter? These women have been dead for centuries. They can’t be brought back. Their suffering can’t be undone. So what’s the point of official pardons or memorials?

Not everyone agrees that posthumous pardons serve any real purpose. Even Claire Kehily, one of the strongest advocates for recognition, acknowledges the skepticism: “For some people, it’s completely pointless and achieves nothing.” It’s a fair point. No government declaration can undo what happened on Penenden Heath that July day in 1652.

But Kehily argues there’s real value in the gesture, even if the women themselves will never know about it. “Yes, those women will never know – though maybe they’ll rest a little bit more peacefully,” she says. “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.”

That last phrase cuts to the heart of it. They weren’t witches. They were just women. Women who had the misfortune to be old, or poor, or different, or disagreeable in an age when being any of those things could get you killed.

Councillor Tony Harwood feels this weight of history personally. As the elected member for Penenden Heath and Cabinet Member for Planning Policy and Management, he represents the very area where the executions took place. He talks about feeling a “heavy responsibility” to “ensure the memory of the unspeakable cruelties inflicted on so many at the Heath are never forgotten.”

But Harwood sees this as more than just historical remembrance. He draws a direct line from the witch hunts to modern-day persecution. “Now, when the powerless and voiceless in our society are once again being demonised and scapegoated by unscrupulous populists, it is vital that we remember and learn from our history.” The parallel he’s drawing is uncomfortable but important. The mechanisms of scapegoating, the willingness to blame society’s ills on vulnerable groups, the way fear can be weaponized by those in power – these things haven’t disappeared. They’ve just taken new forms.

The campaign has connected these historical injustices to broader contemporary concerns about violence against women. It’s no coincidence that Maidstone Borough Council’s push for pardons aligns with their broader commitment to tackling gender-based violence. Under their Community Safety Partnership Plan 2025-2028, the council has introduced a new priority focused specifically on preventing and addressing violence against women and girls. They see the witch trials not as some disconnected historical curiosity, but as an extreme example of misogynistic violence that echoes through to the present day.

The proposed Maidstone memorial, if it’s built, won’t be Kent’s first recognition of witch trial victims. Last year, a plaque was installed in Faversham to commemorate victims of historical witch trials there. It’s a small gesture, but for the descendants and for the community, it matters. Meanwhile, Maidstone Museum has recently opened a redesigned gallery that includes the story of the 1652 trial alongside the wider local history of superstition, healing, and fear. Visitors can see objects linked to Tudor and early modern superstitions, including a Bartmann jug (known as a witch bottle) and a witch glass potion bottle – artifacts that show how deeply these beliefs permeated everyday life.

The Names We Must Remember

Let’s return to the seven women whose deaths started this story. History has preserved their names, even if it’s preserved little else about their lives. We should say them aloud, these names, make them real again.

Anne Ashby, called “Cobler” by some – perhaps she repaired shoes, perhaps it was a nickname whose meaning is now lost. She was marked as the supposed ringleader, the “chief actress” in this imagined conspiracy.

Mary Brown – a name so common it could belong to anyone, which is perhaps the point. She could have been anyone’s neighbor, anyone’s mother or grandmother.

Anne Martyn, Mildred Wright, Susan Pickenden, and Anne Wilson – all from Cranbrook, that prosperous weaving town. Did they know each other before their arrests? Were they friends, rivals, or strangers thrown together by terrible circumstance?

Mary Reade of Lenham – who had to travel to Maidstone to face her accusers and her death. What was that journey like, knowing what awaited her?

These weren’t mythical figures emerging from folklore or servants of some imagined darkness. They were real women living in real communities, trying to survive in a world that offered them few protections and fewer options. When disaster struck their neighbors – when children died unexpectedly, when cattle sickened without explanation, when crops failed despite all efforts – these women became convenient targets for fear and rage that needed somewhere to go.

The movement to pardon these women isn’t about rewriting history or pretending the past didn’t happen. Nobody’s suggesting we forget that these trials took place or minimize their horror. Instead, it’s about acknowledging something crucial: that the state itself was the instrument of injustice, that the law was used as a weapon to destroy innocent lives. It’s about saying, formally and officially, that what happened was wrong.

In an age when scapegoating and demonization of the vulnerable remains a political tool, when “witch hunt” has entered our vocabulary as a metaphor for persecution, the lessons of 1652 feel uncomfortably relevant. The mechanisms that led to those seven deaths on Penenden Heath – fear, prejudice, the need for someone to blame when things go wrong – these haven’t vanished with the centuries. They’ve just put on modern clothes.

The government has said that a royal pardon could be granted in incredibly rare cases under the royal prerogative of mercy, but there are several conventions that are considered when an application is made after a person’s death. The bureaucratic language is careful, noncommittal. Whether the seven women of Penenden Heath and hundreds of others like them across England will receive their pardons remains to be seen. The wheels of justice, it seems, turn as slowly in the 21st century as they did in the 17th.

But here’s what gives hope: 373 years after their deaths, people still care enough to fight for their memory. In a world that often seems eager to forget its cruelest moments, that persistence itself carries meaning. Every signature on those petitions, every letter to Parliament, every person who stops to read a memorial plaque – they’re all saying that these women mattered, that injustice matters, even when the victims have been dust for centuries.

Standing on Penenden Heath today, with cars rushing past on the nearby motorway, it’s hard to imagine the terror of that July day in 1652. But maybe that’s exactly why we need memorials and pardons and official acknowledgments. Because forgetting is too easy. Because the same fears and hatreds that killed Anne Ashby and her companions haven’t really gone away. They’re just waiting for the right conditions to surface again.

The seven women of Penenden Heath can’t be brought back. Their suffering can’t be undone. But their names can be spoken, their innocence can be proclaimed, and their deaths can serve as a warning. In the end, maybe that’s all justice can offer to the dead – the promise that we remember, that we’ve learned, and that we’ll try to do better.

Even if it takes 373 years.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.