Lady Alice Lisle

On 1st September 1685, a dignified Lady Alicia Lisle entered The Eclipse Inn and was escorted upstairs by armed guards. She spent her last night in fervent prayer, while her distraught family and friends waited for her execution. 

Sleep would have been hard to come by, as hammering echoed around The Square where a scaffold had been erected

The following morning, on 2nd September, Lady Alice stepped out from the window of The Eclipse to meet her fate. 

Her crime? Motivated by Christian charity, she had taken in two runaways of the Monmouth Rebellion from the Battle of Sedgemoor and offered them lodging.  Unknown to her, one of the men was a wanted fugitive - a traitor. 

The punishment for sheltering traitors was death.

Judge Jeffreys who presided over Lady Alice's case wanted to make an example of her.  

She was charged with harbouring the king’s enemies and sentenced to death. 

Taken to Fisherton Gaol in Salisbury, Lady Alice was held there for five weeks before being tried for treason in Winchester.  Three times the jury found her innocent. Judge Jeffreys insisted they review their verdict and after coercion, and in fear for their own lives, they reluctantly agreed to the conclusion he had already decided upon.

Sentenced to death, Judge Jeffreys sought to have Lady Alice burned at the stake, but she appealed successfully to King James II that as a gentlewoman of some note, she had the right to be beheaded – a swifter and less horrible end.

Judge Jeffries sought to have Lady Alice dragged ignominiously through the streets of Winchester on a hurdle to her place of execution, but the clergy and citizens of Winchester objected vociferously. And so it was that she was beheaded outside The Eclipse Inn, to the despair of all who knew her, before being laid to rest in Ellingham churchyard, near to her ancestral home of Moyles Court.  

Such was the local affection for her, that her funeral procession was followed by a mournful cortege of hundreds of men and women who walked behind her body to her final resting place. 

Since then, Dame Alice Lisle has returned regularly to the timbered tavern where she spent her last night. Clothed in a grey woollen dress, she has emerged from dark recesses and is heard walking the upstairs floorboards.

Her ghost continues to captivate writers and is included in The Haunted Pub Guide by Guy Lyon Playfair, Haunted England by Christina Hole and The Penguin Book of Ghosts: Haunted England by Jennifer Westwood.

However, her appearances have not been confined solely to those at The Eclipse Inn.

The swish of her silken dress and the tapping of heels have also been heard in hallways at Moyles Court. Locals report seeing her riding out from the nearby churchyard in a driverless coach drawn by headless horses.

Lady Alice was the last woman to have been executed by a judicial sentence of beheading in England. 

She continues to make her presence known at The Eclipse.