Saint of the Day – 19 July – St John Plessington – Priest and Martyr – also known as John Plesington, William Scarisbrick, William Pleasington. Additional Memorial – 25 October as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales – (c 1637 at Dimples Hall, Lancashire, England – hanged, drawn and quartered on 19 July 1679 at Barrows Hill, Boughton, England). He was buried in the local cemetery of Burton, England. He was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI and canonised on 25 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI.
He was born at Dimples Hall, Garstang, Lancashire, the son of Robert Plessington, a Royalist Roman Catholic and Alice Rawstone, a family thus persecuted for both their religious and political beliefs.
He was educated by the Jesuits at Scarisbrick Hall, then at the Royal College of Saint Alban at Valladolid, Spain and then at Saint Omer Seminary in France. He was ordained in Segovia, Spain, on 25 March 1662. He returned to England in 1663 ministering to covert Catholics in the areas of Holywell and Cheshire, often hiding under the name John Scarisbrick. He was also tutor at Puddington Old Hall near Chester. Upon arrest in Chester during the Popish Plot scare caused by Titus Oates, he was imprisoned for two months and then hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of being a Catholic priest.
It would be another 200 years until the bones were found in a trunk in the Old Star Inn in the village of Holywell close to St Winefride’s Well, a medieval pilgrimage site visited by Henry V after Agincourt, and where John Plessington himself had ministered during his lifetime.
It was known that the building had doubled as a secret headquarters for the Jesuits, and the obvious signs of violent death made it seem likely that the bones were those of murdered Catholics. They were taken to the nearby St Bueno’s Jesuit retreat house at nearby Tremeirchion and venerated as those unknown martyrs until recently but went largely forgotten to the wider world.
At the time, no-one considered the possibility they could be those of John Plessington, not least because there was already a grave thought to have been his in the village of Burton on the Wirral. It was not until 1962, as moves were afoot to canonise the executed priest, that it was exhumed and remains removed for study by experts at Liverpool University but found to be those of a younger man and therefore ruled out.
Then more recently, after the bones had been returned to Holywell, a group of forensic pathologists were asked to investigate them.
They singled out a portion of skull with a large hole apparently cut from inside – consistent with having been impaled on a spike after the person was beheaded.
It matched vertebrae from a neck which they concluded appeared to have been hacked off and a section of leg which linked to bone from a pelvis also bearing the marks of being cut.
Together, the report concluded, the presence of what appeared to be one of the quarters of a body and the fact that had been preserved in a Catholic context, as well as date of the clothing they were wrapped in meant they were almost certainly those of an executed priest.
St John Plessington’s close connection with the area, the date of his death and the mystery over his supposed grave now point to the possibility that the remains are his.
Bishop Davis is hoping to raise tens of thousands of pounds for new research including DNA testing which could connect them to a lock of hair which has also attributed to St John Plessington.
“By his faithfulness to the point of death, St John Plessington stands out as the great witness to the priestly life and mission in Shrewsbury Diocese,” said the bishop.
“As one of England’s 40 martyrs he points to the long continuity of our Catholic faith and our unswerving loyalty to the See of Peter.
“If funds could be found to identify and authenticate his relics it would allow our connection to his heroic ministry and martyrdom to become visible and tangible in a new way for generations to come.”
AnaStpaul 