On the 26th of February in the year 1401, an English priest named William Sawtrey was hauled before his Archbishop to learn whether he would live or die.

Sawtrey wasn’t a witch or satanist, or even a criminal. He was, however, an early leader in a breakaway religion known as Lollardism, which both the Church and the English government viewed as a major threat.

The Lollards followed the basic plotline of Christianity. But they criticized the heavy taxes that people paid to the Church, and they questioned the ways in which the Church spent its riches.

More importantly, the Lollards believed in the separation of church and state. They also strongly opposed war and preached that all Christians should live in peace.

Those last points were enough for the English government to treat the Lollards as subversive enemies of the state. And in 1401, parliament passed a law authorizing heretics to be burned at the stake.

Sawtrey was the first victim of this law. He was charged with heresy, convicted on February 26, and burned at the stake days later.

The government hoped that Sawtrey’s death would silence the Lollards and scare everyone into submission. But it actually had the opposite effect; support for Lollardism grew, and many people spoke out against Sawtrey’s unjust punishment.

In fact, little by little, people started having the courage to speak out against the harsh treatment of heretics.

Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the most famous intellectuals of the Middle Ages, and he wrote later that heretics should be treated with “gentleness, courteous language, softness,” and that Catholics should “not be feared with cruelness”.

Martin Luther similarly wrote that heretics should be engaged with logic and reason rather than violence. If you have to burn someone at the stake just because he disagrees with you, your argument doesn’t have much merit.

The last heretic to be burned at the stake was executed on July 26, 1826. It’s been nearly two centuries since then. And while heretics are not longer burned alive, the practice of persecuting certain individuals for their ideological convictions still runs deep today.