The hair shirt worn by St Thomas More as he contemplated a martyr's death in the Tower of London has been enshrined for public veneration.

The folded garment made from goat's hair was encased above an altar in Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in south-west England.

St Thomas, a former lord chancellor of England, wore the shirt while he was incarcerated in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London while awaiting execution for opposing the Protestant reforms of King Henry VIII.

He was beheaded July 6, 1535, after telling a crowd gathered on London's Tower Hill that he was "always the king's good servant, but God's first."