St Nicholas Owen

Had today not been a Sunday it would have been, in this archdiocese, the feast day of St Nicholas Owen. 

St Nicholas was the Jesuit laybrother who used his remarkable skills as a carpenter and stonemason to construct numerous ingenious priest holes to safeguard mission priests in the late sixteenth century. Born in Oxford  c.1550 in a house on the junction of what is now Queen Street and St Ebbe's Street he died as a result of torture in the Tower of London on March 2nd 1606, having been apprehended in the follow-up to the Gunpowder Plot.

There are biographies of St Nicholas, who was canonized in 1970, here, and here, and here.