Saint Margaret Clitherow – York, UK
Posted by: 
dtrebilc
N 53° 57.559 W 001° 04.805
30U E 625965 N 5980702
Margaret Clitherow was martyred in York in 1586 for hiding Catholic Priests.
Waymark Code: WMBD2Y
Location: Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 05/08/2011
Views: 8
Margaret Clitherow lived in the time just after Henry VIII of England had split the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. By this time Henry had died and his daughter had become Queen Elizabeth.
She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1574 when she was 18. She was imprisoned several times because she did not attend Protestant services.
Then in 1585 a law was passed that made it high treason for a priest to live in England and a felony for anyone to harbour or aid a priest. Despite this Margaret did allow priests to hold mass in her house. There was a hole in the attic of her house to allow the priest to escape into the next house in case of raids.
York was quite isolated from London in those days and a special body called the Council of the North was used to carry out the royal policy in this remote area of the land. Because of this remoteness a large proportion of people round York still followed the Roman Catholic faith.
Those close to the Queen demanded that the Council of the North crack down with strong measures to make an example of the prominent Catholics in the community.
Maragret was eventually caught and taken to trial. She refused to enter a plea of either guilt or innocence. This was because once the trial started her children would have been tortured to get them to tell what had happened.
However a trial could not start until she entered a plea. The punishment for not entering a plea was to be crushed with heavy weights. If a person still refused to plead the weights would be left until their death by suffocation or in her case a broken back.
She was canonised in 1970 by Pope Paul VI as 'The Pearl of York'.
Here statue is in the shambles in a building called The Shrine of Saint Margaret Clitherow. At one time it was thought that this building was her actual home, but it was later discovered that was actually at numbers 10 and 11 The Shambles.
It is free to enter the shrine but there is an offertory box for donations.
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