March 25th.

St. Margaret Clitherow.

A butcher’s wife in the famous street known as the Shambles in York, she was brought up in the reformed religion, to which her husband also conformed (they were married in 1571). In 1574, however, she was reconciled to the Catholic church and allowed her house to be used for the shelter of priests and as lodging for a Catholic schoolteacher for her own children and those of neighbours. She kept this up for twelve years, during which time she was arrested on several occasions and spent a total of three years in prison. Eventually her house was searched, and, under threat, one of the pupils revealed where the Mass vestments were hidden. She refused to plead at her trial, wishing, she said, to spare the jury’s conscience; the penalty for this refusal was to be pressed naked beneath a heavy stone and left for three days without proper food or drink. The sentence was not fully applied, but she was crushed to death under a weight at the Tollbooth on the Ouse Bridge in York on the feast of the Annunciation in 1586. Her husband never returned to the Catholic faith, but one daughter became a nun, at Louvain in the Low Countries.