Teeth, bones and books

St Erasmus, it is said, met a particularly unpleasant end: his abdomen was slit open and his intestines were unwound. St Symphorianus, more conventionally, was beaten to death with clubs, and St Magnus of Orkney was struck on the head with an axe. 

After their deaths, they travelled across Europe, or rather, pieces of them did. The skull of Erasmus is believed to be in Munich, while his body is preserved in Gaeta, in Italy. And according to the 15th century prior John Flete, teeth from each saint made it to Westminster Abbey, where they joined countless other relics, stored close to the Shrine of St Edward. 

In order to keep track of all these holy items, the Abbey’s shrine keepers needed various books and pamphlets on hand, from the old – a 13th-century chronicle called the Flores Historiarum – to the ‘new’ – Flete’s own History of Westminster Abbey. More than 500 relics, Flete admitted in his text, were unidentified. 

Some, it’s true, were catalogued, such as a phial of Christ's Blood, hairs from St Peter’s beard, the girdle of the Virgin Mary, and an arm of St Thomas. But the Virgin’s girdle was apparently also in the cathedral of Prato in Tuscany, while Thomas’ arm was claimed by so many places that, upon being shown an example in Rhodes, one German pilgrim remarked, ‘I’ve seen a lot of those.’ 

This particular pilgrim, a knight named Arnold von Harff, was always on the lookout for counterfeit relics, but his awareness that multiple places claimed to be home to a single sacred body part did not in any way shake his faith or lead him to question the practice of pilgrimage. It does not even seem to have made him less interested in other relics. 

He simply notes in the account of his pilgrimage that he will ‘leave the errors of priests for God to decide’ and continues with his devotions. So, what was it that made people in the Middle Ages leave their homes and embark on a pilgrimage? Why were they drawn to the resting places, or the purported resting places, of saints? Why was it in the Abbey’s interests to cultivate such a large collection of relics? 

In short, relics are usually the physical remains of saints, or items which have touched them. They are not, in themselves, items of worship; as St Jermone put it in a letter to a priest in the fifth century, ‘we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore him whose martyrs they are.’ 

Nonetheless, relics were often viewed as extraordinarily powerful in themselves: a pilgrim might come to view, or even touch, a relic in order to seek a cure for a physical ailment. Sometimes shrines had holes in them, so that pilgrims could reach inside to make physical contact, and consuming the dust around a saint’s tomb was not unheard of. Relics also had the power to make other things and other places holy. 

Pilgrims who travelled to Jerusalem were often given small relics to take away with them, so that they could literally bring the Holy Land home. The presence of the physical remains of a particularly ‘highly-regarded’ saint could turn a relatively ordinary church into a site of pilgrimage. 

It was not Canterbury Cathedral’s ecclesiastical status within the English Church which drew pilgrims from across Europe, but the shrine of the murdered archbishop, Thomas Becket. Hundreds of miracles were reported at his tomb in the first decade after his death in 1170, and his relics were sent all around Europe, in what might seem to us to be a rather grisly type of spiritual diplomacy.

Westminster Abbey was in the unusually fortunate position of having the shrine of a saint of its own, and not just any saint, but the King of England. 

The Shrine of Edward the Confessor was therefore a great draw in itself, bringing in countless pilgrims, especially on Edward’s feast days (5th January and 13th October). But evidently it was not quite big enough, because the Abbey’s monks looked for ways to increase the number of visitors. 

More pilgrims, after all, meant more money in offerings, and the monks seem not to have been particularly fussy about the means by which they attracted visitors, nor about whether religious devotion lay behind their visits, at least if we are to believe England’s first printer, William Caxton. 

In his preface to Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Caxton alerts his readers to King Arthur’s red wax seal, kept at Edward’s shrine in Westminster Abbey. Such an item could only be a forgery and amid general contemporary scepticism about Arthur’s existence, it would cater directly to those drawn by historical curiosity rather than religious fervour. 

The seal’s supposed presence at Edward’s shrine bestowed an ancient and mystical royal power on the Abbey and the saintly monarch buried inside, whose holy presence in turn legitimised what, if it existed at all, was an audacious 15th-century forgery. 

The reference to this potentially homegrown fake, however, does not mean that the same cynicism should be extended to all the relics in the Abbey. As an essentially secular artefact, the seal belongs in a different category. Even if the provenance of many of the catalogued saintly effects was dubious, not to mention those 500 or more unattributed relics, that does not mean that the monks necessarily understood them as anything other than genuine.

Flete himself makes note of a ‘head with jaws, teeth, shoulder blades and other small bones of an unknown saint’. The identity of the skeleton is lost and he does not attach a spurious famous name. That it is a saint, he is certain. Which saint is less important.  

The sheer volume of relics, all assumed to belong to God’s ‘chosen ones,’ their names known and unknown, increases the sanctity of the space where they are kept, and thus increases the appeal to those pilgrims who came primarily to pray or to seek healing, ‘the better to adore him whose martyrs they are’. A financial offering for being in that presence, for a better chance of answered prayers, might well have seemed like a fair exchange. 

Dr Mary Boyle is the author of Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages and a Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge.