Joan Waste

Joan Waste or Wast (1534 – 1 August 1556) was a blind woman who was burned in Derby for refusing to renounce her Protestant faith.

Biography Waste was born blind in 1534, with her twin brother Roger, to a Derby barber, William Waste and his wife, Joan. By the age of twelve she had learned to knit as well as how to make ropes (her father was also a ropemaker).

In 1553, Queen Mary I came to the throne and in January 1555 it was made illegal by Parliament to hold Protestant views. At least 284 people were condemned for heresy during Mary's reign. Some were famous, the bishops Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley among them, but many executed between spring 1555 and the queen's death in November 1558 were from "the lower orders".

There is a memorial to her in Birchover church. The place where Waste was executed is now the site of a Roman Catholic church. Ralph Baines, the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield was deprived of his bishopric (21 June 1559) on the accession of Elizabeth I of England and committed to the imprisonment of Edmund Grindal, the Protestant Bishop of London. Draycot was sent to be a prisoner of the Fleet and died after being released in 1571.