St Alban Roe
Alban Roe House is the former Junior House at Ampleforth Abbey, now used for school groups who visit. It is named after St Alban Roe.
Alban Roe was baptised Bartholomew sometime in 1583, in Suffolk. He went to Cambridge University, and while there had an experience which led to his conversion to Catholicism. He visited a Catholic recusant imprisoned in St Alban's, with the intention of persuading him out of his superstitious ways, but the prisoner instead persuaded Bartholomew that it was he who needed to change. In 1608 he was accepted into the English College , Douai ( now at Ushaw & Allen Hall , London ). He was expelled, however, for criticising the principal. He then entered our Community, then at St Laurence's at Dieulouard in 1613, and once ordained travelled to England where he worked in secret as a priest. In 1618 he was imprisoned for being a priest in England- a crime which at that time carried the death penalty. In 1623, he found himself released under a general amnesty, a concession made to support attempts to win a Spanish Queen for the future Charles II ,and was banished abroad, only to return in 1625 to be re-arrested and imprisoned in St Alban's, where his adventure had begun so many years before, then in London. But executions were resumed with the rise of the Puritans at the beginning of the Civil War : St Alban was hung, drawn and quartered in January 1642.
St Alban Roe was canonised in 1970. He is one of the patrons of the youngest pupils at Ampleforth. Two sizeable buildings are named after him on the Abbey site, Alban Roe House, the former Junior House, and the Sports Centre. An image of St Alban can be seen on the outside of the south wall of the chapel at Alban Roe House.