During the reign of Queen Mary Tudor, 1553-1558, the Protestant faith was illegal. Anyone who practiced it or who was identified as belonging to a Protestant group was burned alive for heresy. Edmund Tyrell played a vital role in this procedure and gained the nickname The Informer. Living in Rawreth, Essex, he occupied a large manor house at Beeches Farm. Present at several burnings, Edmund Tyrell has been mentioned in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. A story tells of the time when he passed by two strangers on his way home. Through cunning, he was able to determine that they were Protestants and promptly reported them as such. Of course, they were burned. A woodcut of the day depicts Edmund Tyrell holding a candle beneath the hand of Rose Allen of the Munt family. As the sinews cracked, she did not cry and she is said to have praised the devil for putting his plan to work. On Tyrells own gravestone, the inscription reads "God grant him a blessed resurrection", a wish which almost none of the locals shared. His legacy lived on with the rumour that a barren patch of field where nothing ever grew was where he had a local woman burned.