The Carpenter Who Hid England's Priests

Nicholas Owen was a Jesuit lay brother, about five feet tall, who suffered from a painful hernia and is believed to have worn an iron truss.

From roughly 1588 to 1605–1606, he travelled England under aliases, carving “priest holes” — hidden chambers inside walls, floors, staircases, and chimneys of Catholic manor houses — to protect outlawed priests from arrest and execution.

He usually worked alone and mostly at night, posing by day as an ordinary carpenter. Only he and the homeowner knew where the hiding places were. To this day, no one is certain whether all of his priest holes have been found.

The Horror

From 1585 onward, any Catholic priest ordained abroad and found in England was guilty of treason, punishable by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Owen’s work was the only thing standing between dozens of Jesuit missionaries and that death.

He used false walls, hidden trapdoors and trompe‑l’oeil carpentry to hide spaces inside active fireplaces, beneath staircases and behind panelling, designing them specifically to defeat “pursuivants” — professional priest‑hunters who brought masons and carpenters to measure houses and detect missing volumes of space.

At Baddesley Clinton and other safe houses, priests survived intensive raids by hiding in Owen’s chambers for days while search parties smashed ceilings and tore panelling from the rooms around them. At Harvington Hall in Worcestershire — which now has one of the best collections of surviving priest holes in England — a major hide wasn’t rediscovered until 1894, when a child leaned on a cupboard wall and part of it gave way, revealing a secret room 8 feet long, 3 feet wide and 5 feet high.

In January 1606, in the panic that followed the Gunpowder Plot, Hindlip Hall near Worcester was surrounded by about a hundred men. Officers spent days searching the house. Owen and another Jesuit hid in one set of priest holes; the missionaries he was protecting hid in another. Owen emerged after several days in appalling conditions and was taken to London.

In the Tower, the interrogators realised they had captured the one man who knew the locations of priest holes and safe‑houses all over the country. They tortured him on the rack and then suspended him for hours at a time in iron gauntlets by his wrists, adding weight to his feet until, according to Jesuit accounts, his abdomen burst and his intestines spilled out. He lingered through the night and died on 2 March 1606.

He never revealed a single hiding place. The Tower officials claimed he had killed himself with a small knife, but even contemporary observers noted that his injuries made this physically impossible.

He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Catholic stage magicians and escape artists have claimed him ever since as the patron saint of illusionists and escapologists — a title as strange as it is fitting for a man who made people vanish into walls.

The Modern Relic

Harvington Hall in Worcestershire is open to visitors. You can stand inside its priest holes. The famous “swinging beam” hide — almost certainly Owen’s work — opens from a disguised beam into a cramped secret chamber about 8 feet long, 3 feet wide and 5 feet high, discovered only in the 1890s. Step through and you are inside a space carved by a five‑foot‑tall, injured man working by candlelight, whose locations the state could not beat out of him even when his body was literally coming apart.

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