Hiding Places

About ten years ago I was having a problem sorted on my boiler and the engineer asked where a part of the system was. I said I had no idea and he said in these houses it’s probably under this floor. He took up the lino (which was, to be honest, a mess) and there was a sort of trap door. He lifted it up and there were stairs going down into a dark space. I had been in my house for 20 years and hadn’t realised I had a 4 foot high cellar like room. Even now it’s a bit weird knowing it’s there.

But the subject of Hiding Places got me thinking about those Priest Holes deliberately designed into the houses of Catholics in the 16th Century. During Elizabeth the First’s reign there were several Catholic plots to overthrow her in favour of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots and restore England to the Catholic Church so it was made High Treason for a Catholic priest to even enter England and anyone found aiding and abetting a priest would be punished severely. To this end ‘priest hunters’ were tasked to collect information and locate any such priests.

entrance to a priest hole

The Jesuit religious order was formed in 1540 to help the Catholic Church fight the Protestant Reformation. Many Jesuit priests were sent across the Channel to England to support Catholic families. Jesuit priests would live with wealthy Catholic families in the guise of a cousin or a teacher. Sometimes Jesuits priests in an area would meet at a safe house; these safe houses were identified by secret symbols and the Catholic supporters and families would pass messages to each other through code.

Hiding places were built in these houses in case there was a raid. Priest holes were built in fireplaces, attics and staircases and were largely constructed between the 1550s and the Catholic-led Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Sometimes other building alterations would be made at the same time as the priest’s holes so as not to arouse suspicion. The priest hole was usually tiny, with no room to stand up or move around. During a raid the priest would have to stay as still and silent as possible, for days at a time if necessary. Food and drink would be scarce and sanitation non-existent.

hiding priests

Meanwhile the priest-hunters or ‘pursuivants’ would be measuring the footprint of the house from the outside and the inside to see if they tallied; they would count the windows outside and again from the inside; they would tap on the walls to see if they were hollow and they would tear up floorboards to search underneath. Another ploy would be for the pursuivants to pretend to leave and see if the priest would then emerge from his hiding place. Once detected and captured, priests could expect to be imprisoned, tortured and put to death.

One example of these safe houses is Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire. It has several priest holes built by Nicholas Owen, a lay brother of the Jesuits and a skilled carpenter. One hiding place, just 3’ 9” high, is in the roof space above a closet off a bedroom. Another is in the corner of the kitchen where visitors to the house today can see through to the medieval drains where a priest hid. Access to this hiding place was through the garderobe (medieval toilet) shaft in the floor of the Sacristy above. A hiding space beneath the library floor was accessed through the fireplace in the Great Parlour.

Baddesley Clinton

Nicholas Owen created a network of safe-houses for priests during the early 1590s but shortly after the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, he was arrested at Hindlip Hall and then tortured to death in the Tower of London in 1606. Owen was canonised in 1970 and has become the Patron Saint of Escapologists and Illusionists.

I’m not sure about this, but the following nursery rhyme is supposed to be about searching for Priest Holes.

Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn't say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

'Saint' Nicholas Owen

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.