I have been traveling the last week with my brother Don. He is a British sports car enthusiast so I tempted him with a vacation that combined that interest with our Catholic faith. We rented a Morgan and did a tour of site associated with the English martyrs of the Elizabethan period.Here’s the car at our final stop–a lovely village in Oxfordshire.

Before our arrival there we drove to Cornwall to the shrine of St Cuthbert Mayne, then to Chideock in Dorset to learn about the Chiceock martyrs, then on to Bredwardine in Worcestershire before heading to the Birmingham area to view the priest holes built by St Nicholas Owen.

Don returned to USA on Sunday and I came up to Oxford to visit friends, but also to visit the site of Nicholas Owen’s childhood home–a carpenter’s workshop in Castle Street. In Nicholas’ day (1580s) the area would have been thronged with the simple Tudor housing of  medieval England. To the East was the great monastery of the Greyfriars–the Franciscans–and close by the monastery of the Dominicans.

You can listen to the dramatized story of Nicholas Owen (for which I wrote the script) at the Saints podcast here. Note: if you listen to the end of the episode it will lead you straight to the next episode.

I’ll be writing a book about our adventure with plenty of detail about the martyrs during the Tudor terror, Nicholas Owen, priest holes and the fun of touring modern England in an open topped car.

So today I have some time back in Oxford. The story of how a Bob Jones boy ended up here at Oxford, became an Anglican vicar then a Catholic and a Catholic priest is recounted in my memoir: There and Back Again.

Medieval Castle Street in Oxford is now covered by a modern glass, chrome and concrete shopping mall called Westgate Center. However, the area around the shopping center still echoes medieval Oxford with twisty little narrow lanes with names like Turn Again Lane– a few surviving medieval buildings and some surprising details. So, for example, wander down Brewer Street towards Christ Church and a blue plaque on the wall of an old house informs you that Dorothy Sayers was born there.

Despite the chrome, glass, steel and parking garages I sat outside the Castle Pub in castle street with a pint of ale and tried to visualize medieval Castle Street and Nicholas Owen’s origins there. I always have ideas, so two doors up from the Tudor looking Castle Pub is an abandoned old building that was once a Chinese Restaurant. What if we bought that, I thought, and turned it into a museum honoring Nicholas Owen and the English martyrs? It could be a retirement project for me! Any millionaires out there who would like to invest in an exciting English Catholic heritage project–send me an email!

Here in Oxford the history is everywhere. One of the most moving details is a memorial in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. It is a memorial to the English martyrs from Oxford on both sides of the Reformation divide–and there is the little carpenter Nicholas Owen alongside the brilliant scholar Edmund Campion, Archbishop Laud, Latimer, Ridley and a cast of others who gave  their lives for their beliefs.

After visiting with friends here in Oxford I’ll head to London tomorrow to meet Tony Reynolds–Nicholas Owen’s biographer, then on to Sussex to visit family.

I’m staying at Blackfriars as a guest of my old friend Fr Lawrence Lew. Blackfriars Chapel in Oxford (main image) is one of my favorite churches in the world. It is an oasis of great calm and spiritual lucidity.