Priest Holes: The Secret Hiding Places of Tudor England

A priest hole is a hiding place built into an English house so that a Catholic priest could vanish when the searchers came. Most were made between the 1580s and the early 1600s, after a 1585 law made it treason for a Catholic priest ordained since 1559 to stay in England. Here’s how they worked, who built them and where you can still see one.

Priest holes at a glance

Why England needed priest holes: the 1585 Act

Under Elizabeth I, staying Catholic cost a family dearly long before it cost lives. At Oxburgh in Norfolk, Sir Henry Bedingfeld refused to sign the Act of Uniformity, which outlawed the Catholic Mass, and the family paid for it with exclusion from public office, heavy fines and the threat of prison. The National Trust says many Catholics simply withdrew from public life and kept their faith in private.¹

The law that made hiding places a matter of life and death came in 1585. The Act against Jesuits and seminary priests ordered every Jesuit, seminary priest or other priest ordained by the authority of Rome since midsummer 1559 to leave England within 40 days of the end of the parliamentary session. A priest who stayed, or came back, was to be “adjudged a traitor” and suffer as in a case of high treason. Anyone who “wittingly and willingly” received, relieved or helped such a priest became a felon too.² For the priest that meant hanging, drawing and quartering; three of the Jesuits who hid together at Baddesley Clinton in the search described below were later executed that way.³

So a priest’s capture didn’t only end his life. As John Gerard, a Jesuit who survived several searches, put it, his hosts’ estates would have been “lost and forfeited many times over” if priests had been found in their houses.⁴ Read the Act and the reason for the trapdoors and false hearths is plain: a household with a priest under its roof needed somewhere he could disappear in the minutes between the first knock and the door giving way.

Timeline

• 1585 The Act against Jesuits and seminary priests (27 Elizabeth, c. 2) becomes law.
• c. 1588 Nicholas Owen begins working with Henry Garnet, superior of the Jesuits in England.
• Late 1580s The Bedingfelds build the priest hole at Oxburgh Hall.
• 1591 Pursuivants search the house now identified as Baddesley Clinton for four hours and find nobody.
• 1594 Gerard spends four days in a chimney hide at Braddocks, Essex; soon afterwards he and Owen are arrested in London.
• c. 1603 The hides around the Great Staircase at Harvington Hall are made.
• 1606 Owen is captured at Hindlip Hall after the Gunpowder Plot and dies under torture in the Tower.
• 1850s The double hide in the gatehouse turret at Coughton Court is found, with a rope ladder still inside.
• 1894 Harvington’s “swinging beam” hide is rediscovered.
• 1970 Pope Paul VI canonises Owen among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

Dates for the timeline come from the sources cited in the sections below; Owen’s start date is Harvington Hall’s, and the Oxburgh date is the National Trust’s.⁵¹

Nicholas Owen, the man who built the hides

Nicholas Owen was the son of a carpenter and the brother of two priests. He served the Jesuit Edmund Campion and was briefly arrested in 1582 for speaking up for Campion’s innocence, then went to work for Henry Garnet, the Jesuit superior in England.⁶ Catholics knew him as “Little John”. Gerard, who knew him well, wrote that few people in England, priests included, were more trusted.⁴

Owen served Garnet for seventeen or eighteen years, Gerard says, but his “chief employment was in making of secret places to hide Priests and Church stuff”. He thought Owen had saved the lives of many hundreds of people, and he counted himself among them: he’d been one of seven who escaped a search at the same time in a hide of Owen’s making.⁴ The Jesuits’ own biography adds that he worked openly as a carpenter by day and on the hides at night, so the servants wouldn’t know, and that only he and the owner knew where a hide was.⁶

Two habits made him different from any jobbing joiner. He never spoke about the houses where he’d built hides, and he deliberately made them “of several fashions in several places”, so that one being found “might give no light to the discovery of another”.⁴ That’s the oldest rule in concealment, and it still applies to anyone hiding anything valuable. He also worked hurt. A horse fell back on him on a London errand and broke his leg, which was badly set and had to be broken again; afterwards one leg was a little bent and shorter than the other, and he limped slightly. Years of heavy work had also left him with a rupture.⁴

Was he a Jesuit? Gerard believed Garnet had admitted him as a lay brother some years before his death, though he couldn’t prove it, and the Jesuits themselves say the date he joined remains unknown.⁴⁶ He was arrested in 1594 alongside Gerard and tortured, but his captors didn’t realise who he was, and Catholics paid what Gerard calls “a good round sum of money” for his release.⁴⁶

His death in the Tower

After his capture at Hindlip in 1606, Owen was held in the Marshalsea prison and then moved to the Tower of London. Gerard reports a leading councillor’s reaction to the news of his arrest:⁴

He was racked for hours a day over several days and gave nothing away. Because of his rupture the torture proved fatal, and he died in early March 1606; the Jesuits give the early hours of 2 March. The authorities then put it about that he’d killed himself with a knife; Gerard called that a slander that “even his enemies did not believe”.⁶⁴ Owen was declared a martyr and canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970, one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.⁷

How a priest hole was built and hidden

We’ve kept this section to what the houses and the original accounts publish: where the surviving hides are and what the people who used them wrote. Owen’s rule meant no two were meant to be alike, but the same few places in a house turn up again and again.

Gerard’s own account of his 1594 hide at Braddocks, the Wiseman family’s house in Essex, gives a sense of how carefully such a place was disguised. He got in by lifting part of the floor under the fireplace in the room above, which was used as a chapel, and the family kept wood in that grate as if a fire were laid there. The searchers knew the chimney had two flues and didn’t believe there was room left for a man between them. They were wrong, and he sat in that narrow space for four days.⁹

Harvington Hall has the best set to compare. Its seven hides include the “swinging beam” hide in the book cupboard, which the hall says is almost certainly Owen’s: 8ft long, 3ft wide and 5ft high, with an entrance barely a foot wide. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1894. The hall says the hides around the Great Staircase, of about 1603, show Owen’s trademarks.⁵ If you’re tall, five feet of headroom is the detail that stays with you.

Coughton’s hide sits in a turret of the main gatehouse, tucked between floor levels; the official list entry notes simply that the north-east turret “has 2 hiding places”. When it was found in the 1850s it still held a rope ladder, some bedding and a portable altar.¹¹¹⁰ In 2015 and 2016 archaeologists from the University of Nottingham laser-scanned it to build a 3D model, so people who can’t climb into the tower can see where it lies.¹⁰

Hides weren’t only for people. Gerard’s phrase was “Priests and Church stuff”, and when the priests at Hindlip were finally found, the searchers also pulled out the vestments and books stored with them, which had made the space even tighter.⁴ The Jesuits’ biography says some of Owen’s hides held six to ten people.⁶

The searches: pursuivants at the door

The priest-hunters were pursuivants, the Queen’s messengers, and they usually came at dawn. At the house now identified as Baddesley Clinton, Gerard was at his morning meditation at about five o’clock when four pursuivants with drawn swords tried to force the door. The servants held it, saying the mistress of the house, a widow, wasn’t up yet. In those minutes Father Southwell took off his vestments and stripped the altar, and the guests hid their boots and swords and turned their still-warm beds cold side up.⁹³ Then they all went into the hide.

The searchers went through the house with candles for four hours and found nothing. Hiding below ground were Garnet, Southwell, Edward Oldcorne, Father Stanney and Gerard himself, two secular priests and two or three laymen.⁹ Gerard doesn’t name the house, and the National Trust says only that it was “thought to be” Baddesley Clinton; historians generally date the raid to 1591.³¹² When it was over, a lady of the house came to call them out, Gerard wrote, “not one but many Daniels”.⁹

Four days in the wall at Braddocks, 1594

The search at Braddocks shows how methodical the hunt could be. The searchers locked the mistress and her daughters in their room, searched the whole house down to the roof tiles and looked into dark corners with candles. Then they measured the walls with long rods, so that any section that didn’t tally could be broken into, and sounded the walls and floors for hollows. On the second day one of them climbed into the chimney above Gerard and kicked the back of it; Gerard, sitting inside, was afraid the man would hear the hollow.⁹

By then a man in the household had betrayed him to the searchers, and on the third night the guards set to watch the chapel lit a fire in the very grate over Gerard’s head. It burnt a hole into his hiding place, and hot embers nearly fell on him. Next day the searchers stripped the plaster off a large room right up to his hiding place, then gave up. He came out after four days on a biscuit or two and a little quince jelly.⁹

The siege of Hindlip Hall, 1606

The longest search came after the Gunpowder Plot. Acting on a tip-off, Sir Henry Bromley arrived at the Habington family’s house at Hindlip, near Worcester (Gerard spells it Abington), early on a Sunday morning with “above a hundred men”, armed “more fit for an army than an orderly search”, and broke down the gates. Owen and Ralph Ashley were in one hide; Garnet and Oldcorne, who had a little food, were in another.⁴⁶ Gerard heard that the two men had “but one apple between them” in six or seven days. On the Saturday they slipped out of their hide in the long gallery, hoping to be taken for the priests so the searchers would leave.⁴

It didn’t work. Sure that the hide had to be in the gallery, the searchers tore down its panelling and broke into the walls for five or six more days until they found Garnet and Oldcorne, cramped among the church goods.⁴ The Jesuits’ biography says they uncovered about a dozen hiding places along the way.⁶ Gerard was writing from reports, and modern accounts give a shorter timetable: four days for Owen and Ashley, and the priests found on the eighth day.¹²¹³ Either way, the hides held out longer than the food did. Garnet was later executed.³

Priest holes you can visit

The National Trust alone lists six of its houses with priest holes.⁸ These are the best documented, with the people who run them now. Opening days change, so check before you travel.

Baddesley Clinton belonged to the Ferrers family, Catholic recusants, until 1940, and the estate was sold to the National Trust in 1980.¹⁴ The Trust says there are three priest holes to find on the tour, and the one where the priests hid for four hours can still be seen in the kitchen floor.⁸³

Oxburgh Hall has been the Bedingfelds’ home for over 500 years. The Trust dates its priest hole to the late 1580s; an Apollo article by Tessa Murdoch puts it in the 1560s or 1570s, so treat the date as open.¹¹⁵ Restoration work in the attics in 2020 turned up a late 15th-century illuminated manuscript fragment, apparently hidden for use at Mass, and scraps of silk and velvet from a rat’s nest.¹⁵

Harvington Hall was bought in 1923 by Mrs Ellen Ryan Ferris and given to the Archdiocese of Birmingham, which still owns it. Humphrey Pakington, a Catholic recusant, inherited the estate in 1578 and equipped it with hides.⁵ In 2026 it opens Wednesday to Sunday from February to early November and runs guided tours at weekends.¹⁶

Coughton Court has been home to the Throckmortons since 1409. The family gave the house to the National Trust in 1946 under a 300-year lease, and from February 2026 they manage visits themselves, so it’s no longer part of the Trust’s member offer.¹⁷ The list entry notes that the family were Catholics deeply involved in the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, and in 1605 Garnet and Owen waited at Coughton with the wife of the plotter Everard Digby, who had leased the house.¹¹¹⁰

Sawston Hall was rebuilt by the Huddlestons, with dated stones of 1557 and 1584 in the courtyard. Its Grade I list entry describes “a priest’s hole in this turret built by Nicholas Owen, and three other holes” of exceptional design.¹⁸ The family owned it until the late 20th century (the list entry says about 1975, other accounts 1982); it was then a language school, was bought in 2010 and was offered for sale again in 2014.¹⁸¹⁹

Sources for the myths: the Owen attributions follow the summary of Michael Hodgetts’ research on Wikipedia,¹² and the searches and the Hindlip hunger come from Gerard’s accounts.⁹⁴

From hiding priests to hiding valuables

A priest hole is a strongroom turned inside out. A safe tells a thief exactly where the valuables are and dares him to get in; a hide wins by making sure nobody knows there’s anything to get into. Owen’s rule of never building the same hide twice is the same thinking, and Gerard noted that the “Church stuff” hidden in some houses was “very rich”, so the hides guarded valuables as well as lives.⁴

Safe makers have used both tricks ever since. From the late 16th century the iron armada chests of southern Germany put a dummy keyhole on the front and hid the real one in the lid, as our guide to antique strongboxes and armada chests explains. Later came safes sunk into the floor itself (see old floor safes) and, in 1910, a wall safe patented by Meilink to sit flush with the plaster, because a free-standing safe was the first thing a house burglar looked for. The longer story of how the strongbox became the modern safe is in our history of safes.

Hidden rooms still pull a crowd, sometimes for nothing: one of the stories in our list of famous safes is a live TV special that opened a sealed chamber said to be a gangster’s vault and found it empty. And if you’ve found an old safe hidden under the floorboards or behind panelling in your own house, send us photos of its maker’s plate and any numbers and we’ll help you work out who made it.

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