A 400-YEAR-OLD macabre relic from Stonyhurst College is attracting worldwide attention after becoming a top exhibit at the Tower of London.

The Prisoners of the Tower display includes a corporal - a white, linen cloth on which consecrated bread and wine are placed in the Catholic sacrament of communion - which five Jesuit martyrs used during their last mass before their public executions during Catholic persecution.

The cloth was loaned by Stonyhurst, which has kept it for hundreds of years. One of these five imprisoned priests was Thomas Cottam from Lancaster, whose other claim to fame is that his brother was Shakespeare's tutor. Thomas was imprisoned for two years for his faith and the crime of being a priest and subjected to terrible torture before being hung, drawn and quartered.

At the time, priests faced the death penalty because Catholics would not accept the monarch as head of the church and were not considered loyal subjects.

The names of Thomas and the four other martyrs imprisoned with him - Luke Kirby, Alexander Briant, John Shirt and Robert Johnson - are embroidered in red silk on the corporal along with a Latin inscription 'Corporate usurpatum a quinq martiribus', which means the corporal was used by five martyrs. It ended up at Stonyhurst after begin sent to the English College in Rome and then to the English Academy in St Omer, France, in the 17th Century.

The corporal, which is encased in glass inside a gold-plated case, is included in displays that chart 1,000 years of tower history.

Father Adrian Howell, priest of St Peter's, in Hurst Green, and spiritual father at Stonyhurst's prep school, St Mary's Hall, said: "I find the corporal very moving."

The exhibition will run until September 5.