Note 54 — Chapter XIII

— “Collecti Cardwelli,” Public Record Office, Brussels Vitæ Mart, p. 147.

In Foley’s “Records,” vol. iv., there is a beautiful picture of Father Edward Oldcorne, S.J., now “the Venerable Edward Oldcorne,” one of York’s most remarkable sons. In the left-hand corner of the portrait is a representation of a portion of Old Ouse Bridge, with St. William’s Chapel (at present the site of which is occupied by Messrs. Varvills’ establishment). St. Sampson’s Church, the ancient church which gave the name of the parish where Oldcorne first saw the light of the sun, is still standing. It is near Holy Trinity, King’s Court, or Christ’s Parish, where “the Venerable,” Margaret Clitherow lived. Oldcorne must have known that great York citizen well. She was born in Davygate, and was the second wife of a butcher, named John Clitherow, of the Parish of Christ, in the City of York. She was married in the Church of St. Martin, Coney Street, in 1571. She was one of Nature’s gentlewomen, by birth: and the Church of Rome, ever mindful of her own, declared in 1886 (just three hundred years after the martyr’s death in the Tolbooth, on Old Ouse Bridge) that Margaret Clitherow, a shrewd, honest, devout York tradeswoman, is one of the Church’s “Venerable Servants of God,” by grace. — See J. B. Milburn’s Life of this extraordinary Elizabethan Yorkshire-woman, entitled, “A Martyr of Old York” (Burns & Oates, London).