Tanner on Nicholas Owen: A Note

Extract

Allan Fea, Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places (1901, 1904, 1908), pp. 20-21, quotes Mathias Tanner, Societas Iesu Militans … sive … Vita et Mors … (Prague, 1675), p. 75 (should be p. 73), as saying that Nicholas Owen ‘with incomparable skill knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages, to hide them between walls and bury them in impenetrable recesses, and to entangle them in labyrinths and a thousand windings’. But, although there are reasons for supposing that Owen may have converted the medieval sewer at Baddesley Clinton into a hiding-place, Fea and others who have followed him are incautious in quoting the first part of this sentence at its face value. Tanner's Latin is reminiscent of Aeneid V, 588-591, and should perhaps be taken rather as an elegant tribute to a craftsman worthy to be compared with Daedalus:

Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta parietibus textum caecis iter ancipitemque mile viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi frangeret indeprensus et inremeabilis error.

The labyrinth of subterranean Crete: A legend for evasion and deceit; Where blind partitions wove a baffling maze, And sly devices turned a thousand ways.