Saint Swithun Wells 

Our Patron Saint is St Swithun Wells, one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

He was born at Brambridge, between Otterbourne and Twyford in Hampshire in 1536  and he was the youngest of the five or six sons of Thomas Wells of Brambridge, by Mary, daughter of John Mompesson. He  was a teacher who spent most of his life teaching boys who were to become missionary priests. In 1582 he came under suspicion for his popish sympathies and gave up his school. He actively supported priests, organising their often dangerous journeys from one safe and friendly house to another. He and his wife, though impoverished, moved to Gray's Inn Fields in 1586 and made their house a centre of hospitality to people who wanted to celebrate mass. Wells was twice arrested and interrogated, but released for lack of evidence. In 1591 two priests, Edmund Gennings and Polydore Plasden, were arrested in his house while saying Mass. They were accused of high treason and later executed: St Swithun Wells and his wife were both accused of harbouring priests and were also condemned to death. Mrs. Wells, who had given the priests hospitality, was reprieved but spent the remaining ten years of her life in prison; but Swithun Wells, who had been absent when the priests arrived, was executed at Gray's Inn Fields on 10 December. 

On the scaffold, he said to Topcliffe, "I pray God make you a Paul of a Saul, of a bloody persecutor one of the Catholic Church's children." 

Swithun Wells was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

We celebrate a special mass each year in honour of St Swithun Wells.