Seven martyrs

By Debbie Smyth on September 7, 2024

Seven martyrs in the nave screen in St Albans Abbey, Hertfordshire, March 2017

The seven statues of martyrs were installed in the previously empty niches of the nave screen in St Albans Abbey in 2015 to commemorate the cathedral's 900th anniversary. They are the work of sculptor Rory Young.

History and the quality of the original work suggest that the original nave screen, constructed in 1350, was completed in a rush and therefore the niches never were filled. It is also thought that these are the first painted statues to be restored to a nave since the Reformation.

The figures represented, from left to right, are:
Oscar Romero – Roman Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, who spoke out against poverty and social injustice and was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass;
St Alban Roe – imprisoned for a time in St Albans Abbey Gatehouse and hanged for treason in London in 1642 for being a Roman Catholic priest;
St Amphibalus – a Christian priest given shelter by Alban in the third century AD, and whose recently renovated shrine stands in the Abbey;
St Alban – Britain's first saint, a citizen of Roman Verulamium, martyred by the Romans on the site of the present day Cathedral, and whose shrine also stands in the Abbey;
George Tankerfield – a Protestant, burnt to death in Romeland, an area overlooking St Alban's Abbey, in 1555 because he refused to accept the doctrine of transubstantiation;
St Elisabeth Romanova – granddaughter of Queen Victoria who married into the Russian Royal Family and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. In her widowhood she became a nun and Abbess before being killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918;
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Lutheran pastor and theologian imprisoned in a concentration camp for his opposition to the Nazis, tried without witnesses or defence and hanged in April 1945.