Treasures of Heaven

The impulse to keep a memento of a departed person is both ancient and profound.

Even the smallest thing can generate a powerful emotional connection.

It might be a connection to someone you've known personally, perhaps even a celebrity,

but it could also be a connection to a saint who has the power

to protect and heal you, spiritual power

that might still be present in a fragment of fabric they once wore, or even in their physical remains.

They were known as relics,

and for centuries they lay at the centre of Christian devotion.

They were held to work miracles, and they defined the relationship between Christians and their God.

The relics themselves were kept in reliquaries...

..containers crafted from the most precious materials...

..so as to express the value of what was inside.

Wow.

Poised between death and the hope for eternal life, the reliquary

is a brilliantly vivid, yet largely forgotten art form.

I believe it deserves to be brought out of the darkness of neglect and into the light.

The history of relics and reliquaries is a 2,000-year story,

rooted in the deepest human longings and fears,

and reflected in some of the richest, most enthralling,

yet also hidden away, works of art ever created.

The murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170

is one of the most infamous moments in British history.

Becket had defied the will of the King, Henry II of England,

and he was killed inside Canterbury Cathedral by four knights

who had taken it upon themselves to rid their monarch

of this contemptuous "low-born cleric".

Becket died in this space, on this spot.

We're told that his head was cleaved open by the blow of a sword,

and, for good measure,

one of the knights' party, Hugh of Horsea,

planted his foot on the martyr's neck

and used the tip of his sword to scoop some of his brains out

onto the cathedral floor.

The murder made Becket a martyr.

Within three years, he was made a saint.

And such was the number of pilgrims to his tomb that, in 1220,

Saint Thomas's body was placed in a shrine behind the main altar.

Now, this candle marks the spot where Becket's shrine once stood.

Apparently, it had a stone pillared base and was capped

by a painted wooden canopy suspended from that ceiling boss.

But within, there was a gold-plated casket,

decorated with sapphires and rubies, diamonds, emeralds and pearls,

and it contained Becket's remains.

The shrine was an intoxicatingly rich object,

designed to awe and amaze,

and it had an electrifying effect on the pilgrims of the Middle Ages.

They flocked to Canterbury in their hundreds of thousands

and established Becket as England's very first, truly international saint.

These are the Miracle Windows.

They were installed at the same time as Becket's shrine

and they describe the early history of his remains.

Now, right at the bottom of the window

we've got this precious record of the original appearance

of Becket's tomb and, if you look closely, you can see

that there are these two oval, pinkish shapes

that have been cut into the stone side of that tomb.

That was so the people at large could reach into it with their hands

and touch the coffin within, the idea being,

that act of touching might, in some way, help them or heal them.

And, indeed, all around you've got these images of people who have, indeed, been healed

of all kinds of ailments

by the miraculous, transformative power of the saint's remains.

St Thomas's shrine was destroyed in 1538, during the Reformation,

on the orders of Henry VIII.

His bones were burned and the ashes scattered.

But, nearly 500 years later,

you can still find two Becket relics in Canterbury.

They're here, in a small chapel at the Catholic Church of St Thomas.

This modern reliquary contains two relics of Thomas Becket,

a shard of bone, and a tiny piece of bloodstained vestment.

Now, they survived the destruction of his shrine because,

in the early 1200s, they were sent abroad

as part of a drive to extend the scope of his spiritual influence

across Christendom, and they were only returned to this country

in the last century, when they were donated to this church.

The bone came from a religious foundation in Belgium,

and the vestment came from Italy,

and if these really are authentic relics of Thomas Becket,

then they are objects of extraordinary historical importance.

But it's only when you really get up close to them, as I am now,

that I think you can feel the sheer amount of faith

that has been invested in these fragments.

To those who really believe,

the spirit of Becket himself is still alive there.

That is holy matter, the most precious thing of all.

To see how blood and bones came to be imbued with such significance,

you have to go back to the first century

after Christ's death, when there were no churches

and Christians were brutally tortured

and executed for their beliefs.

The only way to keep the faith alive

was for Christians to mimic the Roman practice of honouring the dead

by gathering at their tombs on feast days.

The early Christians inherited this Roman and relatively new veneration of the dead,

but they gave it their own twist.

You have to remember that theirs was a proscribed religion,

a persecuted religion, they had to bury THEIR dead, they had to venerate THEIR ancestors, in secret.

And, in a sense, down in the catacombs, as they did so,

that was all they had.

They only had the bones of their forefathers,

the early Christian martyrs' relics, and their faith, and that was it.

And that combination of circumstances explains why the relic,

through the centuries, for Christians, has had such a deep, primal power.

By the time the Roman Emperor Constantine

converted to Christianity in the fourth century,

the idea that relics provided a direct link to the saints in heaven

was a core belief.

And over the next 1,000 years, the reliquary developed

into a sophisticated art form, so that by medieval times

it had become a type of sculpture

that very precisely reflected the nature of the relics inside.

So, a few fragments of skull would be contained in a head reliquary.

Or, in this case, pieces of bone from the saint's hand or arm

would have been visible through these tiny windows.

I've come here to meet Sister Wendy Beckett,

who has a deep knowledge of relics and reliquaries,

and a deep, emotional attachment to them.

How do you think the power of the relic is expressed

by the splendour of the reliquary?

The glory of the container

is meant to show the glory of the saint.

So that was the first desire, something beautiful

to show what it means to love God

and, if possible, to get in something about the life of the saint.

So here, for example, we seem to have a Catherine relic,

because there's Catherine with her Catherine wheel.

-It's almost like a story box.

-It IS a story. There's St Catherine,

whose relics are said to be in here at the top,

holding her wheel so insouciantly, you know? Spinning it round, almost.

And then round are the stories of her life.

Here you have the famous story of how, as a young girl,

Our Lady appeared with the child Jesus, who put a ring on her finger,

and from then on she wanted to be a virgin dedicated to him.

So when the emperor fell in love with her, Catherine said no.

So he brings 50 pagan philosophers to talk her down,

and she talks them down, converts the whole 50,

who are then promptly beheaded.

And then they show St Catherine being beheaded herself.

She was originally going to be ripped apart by a wheel.

-God struck it with a thunderbolt, didn't he?

-Yes.

But inside this, presumably, there would have been,

or perhaps there still is, one of her bones?

What they would have thought was one of her bones.

I think with these very early saints, it's almost impossible

that they are the real bones, but they stand in for the real bones.

But what is it that it makes you feel?

It makes you aware...

of God's transforming love,

because we don't make ourselves saints, we're made saints by God.

We simply have to say yes.

So when you're near a relic of somebody who did say that yes,

you feel a great wave of encouragement that you, too,

might be drawn into holiness.

It's something that you should live up to?

Yes, yes.

I think this has to be the star reliquary of all, here in the V&A.

It's just amazing.

To me, this is the apotheosis of all reliquaries.

This is what they all wanted to be - gleamingly beautiful,

a complete work of art, and yet, showing the story of the saint.

Because, as you know, St Sebastian was not only shot with arrows

because of his Christianity, he was shot by his own regiment,

his fellow soldiers, and that's why, I think,

although he was wounded, he wasn't actually killed.

The officer probably thought he was killed and marched off

having done his job, but he'd just been gravely wounded.

And then St Irene came and took the body away

and brought him back to health,

just in time for him to be clubbed to death and thrown into the sewer.

So this is not his martyrdom, but a stage on his martyrdom.

And apart from being a miraculous work of art,

we have the intimacy of knowing that within that work of art are relics of the saint.

They think they might be little pieces from the arrows,

which seems to me most unlikely.

-It's a little window at the back, isn't it, with little pieces of wood?

-Yes.

But those little pieces of wood symbolise what killed him.

They are holy in their meaning, if not in their actuality.

There's such a strong sense of suffering and torture expressed in this image.

Was that sense of the martyr's suffering very important

to people's perceptions of their holiness?

Well, not all saints suffered physically, but I think it was

important to people in their own lives, because we're all very aware of pain at one level or another,

and to see a saint being tortured and rising above it like that,

that must have mattered a great deal.

But, of course, we actually know why this was made.

It was made because there was plague at the monastery,

and so the abbot commissions St Sebastian,

who is one of the patron saints of health in time of plague,

and it was all those wounds that plague brought to people.

-Like plague sores.

-Yes.

Also, of course, they were hoping that he would avert

the plague from them.

So, it's rare to know exactly why

a reliquary was made,

and it's such a magnificent one.

You couldn't have a more wonderful image of what it means to be a saint

and to suffer for God.

Another reason for making reliquaries so alluring,

and for making relics so visible,

was to attract pilgrims whose donations sustained the church,

and medieval churches did compete with each other in this way.

But relics were central to the daily business of the Church

in more than just financial terms.

As early as the eighth century, the Vatican decreed

that every altar must contain relics in order to be consecrated.

'James Robinson is curating a major exhibition of medieval reliquaries

'at the British Museum,

'and among the objects that will be on view is a rare,

'perfectly preserved example of the importance of relics

'in the act of worship.'

So, what exactly is this magnificent object?

Well, this is one of the museum's great masterpieces.

It's a very rich, visually rich and exciting object,

with this wonderful combination of ivory, painted vellum, gilt copper.

What was its function?

It's a portable altar. It dates from around 1200,

and it's from Hildesheim, in Lower Saxony in Germany.

And this altar stone in the centre

is designed to take the footprint of a chalice.

In certain contexts, Mass or Communion, the Eucharist

might need to be celebrated outside

of the confines of a consecrated church

and objects like this took the power of consecration with it.

So it could be used on pilgrimage, in the battlefield...

I was going to say, so if the emperor is going to war

against the infidel, on the morning of the battle, he can take communion

and he will be filled with the power of God.

Yeah, yeah. So, that's why it's such a densely powerful object.

But what's beneath the stone?

-Beneath the stone are relics of some 40 saints.

-40 saints!

40 saints, yes. It is an incredibly powerful object for that reason.

So how long has the museum owned this extraordinary thing?

It was acquired in 1902.

Did you know from the beginning... did the museum know it contained all these relics?

I think we probably suspected that it did, but we didn't open it

-until the late '70s, early '80s.

-Have you seen the contents taken out?

I haven't seen the contents taken out, this will be the first time.

-So are you looking forward to it?

-Very much, yeah!

I can't wait!

That's amazing!

I hadn't imagined they'd be scrunched up together in that way.

I thought it was going to be more...

It's a very compact arrangement, yeah.

It's like you couldn't get another one in there.

You're starting with the relics of St Godehard.

I have to say he's not one of my saints that I know about.

He's connected very closely to the history of Hildesheim, which is where this portable altar was made.

When was he canonised?

He's active in the late 10th and, perhaps,

the first quarter of the 11th century, and he's canonised

shortly after his death, within the 11th century.

So, it's a recent history

in terms of the manufacture of this altarpiece.

So, that all suggests to me that it's probably very likely

that those really are the remains of the real Godehard in that bundle.

-He's a local saint, relatively recent.

-Yeah.

'This particular relic is supposed to be a tiny fragment of bone.'

Gosh, there it is!

It looks like what it purports to be, doesn't it?

'Conservator Nicole Rode, whose job it is to check the condition of each

'of these fragile bundles, turns next to the relic of a rather more famous saint,

'Saint John the Evangelist.'

What do you think you're going to find inside?

I believe there's a number of strands of hair inside this bundle.

There we go.

And the hair is surprisingly quite bright, it's quite yellow.

It's the same colour as the hair

of St John the Evangelist in Leonardo's Last Supper.

He's the most angelic,

and the favourite. He's Christ's favourite.

In all those depictions of the Last Supper, John has got his head

on the shoulder of Christ, so that hair would have actually touched Christ,

so it would be yet more imbued.

Absolutely. What a wonderful thought!

I suppose the first question a sceptical modern viewer will have is,

is this really the hair of John the Evangelist?

But I rather like the idea that John the Evangelist is said to have had blond hair

and, hey presto, you open the bundle after how many hundreds of years

and the hair is blond!

So...there's room for faith.

There's room for faith, absolutely.

Wow!

As objects of faith, the relics of saints

were among the most precious things in the medieval world...

..but they weren't quite the most precious.

There was one kind of relic that was even more highly prized

and even more powerful.

To worship the relic of a saint is to approach the realm of the sacred.

But what if you could venerate, perhaps even touch,

a relic of Jesus Christ himself?

According to the Bible, Christ's body ascended directly,

miraculously, to heaven.

But there are, nonetheless, relics associated with him,

and that's why I'm here in Paris, because here,

they hold the holiest of all those remains.

At Notre Dame Cathedral on the first Friday of every month,

a remarkable service takes place -

the Veneration of the Crown Of Thorns,

the actual crown of thorns, it is believed,

that was placed on Christ's head at the time of his crucifixion.

Around 3,000 worshippers attend this service every month.

Many travel from abroad in an act of modern-day pilgrimage.

The Crown Of Thorns relic has been in Paris for nearly 800 years,

but not always in Notre Dame.

It was originally housed here at the Sainte-Chapelle,

the private church of the wealthiest and most pious king

in all of Christendom,

Louis IX of France.

Now, I've been told if you want to experience the full impact of the Sainte-Chapelle,

you've got to come here horribly early in the morning,

just as the sun is beginning to rise, on your own,

and that, amazingly enough, is what I've been allowed to do.

Wow! I mean, it is completely stunning.

The Sainte-Chapelle has often been described

as the single most beautiful medieval building in the world.

But it's only if you come now that you really do appreciate quite how this building works.

It's a space that is meant to be just light and colour,

almost no sense of structure at all.

A building that has dissolved into light and colour.

These great walls of stained-glass windows which tell the whole story of the Bible.

And if you look at those windows through half-closed eyes,

and you look at them in an abstract sense, you get this intense blue,

and these vivid drops of red.

It's almost like looking into a sky flecked with blood.

And I think that symbolism is very important,

it takes you to the heart of what this building was for.

Many people who visit this place don't actually know

that it's not a cathedral, not a chapel in the conventional sense.

It's a gigantic reliquary box.

King Louis had this entire building constructed

as a setting for the Crown Of Thorns.

It's an astonishing statement of earthly and divine power.

Emily Guerry has made a study of the art of the Sainte-Chapelle.

-Hi, Emily.

-Hi!

-Nice to see you.

-Fantastic space, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

-I feel like we're eating colour when we're in here.

So, Emily, how did Louis actually acquire this famous relic, the Crown Of Thorns?

Well, his cousin, who was the Latin Emperor of Byzantium, he's named Baldwin, he wrote Louis in 1238

saying, "I'm in big trouble, our empire is being invaded,

"we're in need of money, we're in need of an army,

"can you help us? And, by the way, the relics in my imperial collection

"need someone to take care of them."

So Louis immediately despatched somewhere in the realm of 140,000 livres.

That's equivalent to half of his annual income as one of the wealthiest rulers in Christendom.

So, that's half of the entire annual national budget of France?

Of France, yes. So the Crown Of Thorns relic was then given

-by Baldwin to Louis as an offering of thanksgiving for his assistance.

-Wow!

So it's a gift, because the sale of relics is technically illegal.

Louis did not purchase the Crown Of Thorns, he acquired it.

And here we have the story in glass.

This is Window A. It's the history of the Passion Relics.

You can see in the second lancet over,

that's Louis reacting to seeing the Crown for the first time,

and when Louis first saw the relic, he was overcome with tears.

In the stained glass windows, the Crown Of Thorns is painted green,

it's a living crown, it's still growing, in a way.

So, when the relic arrives in France from Constantinople,

what kind of ceremony does Louis devise to mark its arrival into the city?

Well, if you just crane your neck a bit,

at the very top, it shows the ceremony of Louis carrying

the Crown Of Thorns in its reliquary with his brother, Robert of Artois.

And they march through the streets in August of 1239,

and the adoring public come to welcome the king and his crown.

And not only the people are there, but also clerics are invited to bring out the relics

of Parisian saints to bow to Christ's relic, in effect welcoming Christ to Paris.

And he's barefoot.

-He's barefoot here.

-Which is a great statement, for a king to be barefoot.

-That's humility.

-Yes, because you're in the presence of God.

Yeah. And what does he actually do with it,

other than house it, venerate it?

What he did was he gave bits that were thorns of the crown

to missionaries, to other rulers, to diplomats.

-So he would actually break thorns off the crown?

-Yes.

That's amazing, because you'd think this was such a precious object, he'd want to keep it intact.

It's the best way he could express his thanks, as a king, to those who helped him,

was to give them a bit of the thing that mattered most to him, that is the Crown Of Thorns.

One of the few surviving thorns given away by Louis IX

is now in the British Museum,

concealed within a beautiful and intricate locket.

So, James, how is this intriguing little object

catalogued in the collections of the British Museum?

It's catalogued as a pendant reliquary of the Holy Thorn,

so actually one of most precious jewels we have, not so much because

of the external surface of it, which is amethyst and gold, but because of what it contains inside.

It's secured in place by these two small pins,

and I'm going to take them out now so you can get some sense

of just how beautiful it is inside.

-And it opens rather like a miniature altarpiece.

-Oh, Good Lord!

And that's the first face of it.

That's extraordinary.

It's decorated with translucent enamel,

laid in shallow fields, it's known as basse-taille.

What's the decoration?

At the top there's a Virgin and Child with two angels.

And at the bottom there's an image of a king and queen.

Now, based on the date of the enamels,

which we date to about 1340,

we can deduce that this is probably Philip VI and his wife, Jeanne de Bourgogne.

And the king, barefoot, in imitation of St Louis.

So, it's almost like a mini Sainte-Chapelle?

-It's like a mini Sainte-Chapelle.

-How amazing.

Of course, this translucent enamel looks rather like stained glass.

That's just fantastic.

But the real secret, in fact, the real mystery of the object

is contained beneath this panel that shows the Nativity.

Beneath the vellum. So, as it were, it's in the middle.

-Yes. If I do this...

-Goodness me.

..and there you have the relic.

In the centre you see a thorn from the Holy Crown of Thorns.

What an amazing object!

The design of the jewellery suggests that this was a very, very intimate-feeling object.

Was this something that somebody perhaps carried on their person?

Well, when it's closed you see it's not something that would be easily worn.

The chain isn't original, but I think it replicates

the original arrangement, rather like a security strap on a camera.

-I think it was worn round the wrist.

-Why is it an amethyst?

Most jewels in the Middle Ages were used for their magical, medicinal properties.

The amethyst is invoked to prevent drunkenness,

gout, to staunch the flow of blood in situations like childbirth.

If you handle it, and by all means pick it up, Andrew,

you'll see it's immensely tactile.

It fits into the fist of your hand, in a way.

-Gosh, It does, doesn't it?

-If you clench your hand around that, you'll see.

That's how I feel the power of the relic was invoked, through clutching it in that way.

Yes. I know what you mean.

I can imagine that you could feel

that there was something almost going through you, like electricity.

I think its power was probably invoked on very special occasions, and my personal belief is that

it may have been used as a birth amulet by Jeanne de Bourgogne.

Oh, yes!

You just sent a shiver up the back of my neck because I think that's exactly right.

You're giving birth, birth is all about blood... I mean, that's how you might die, you bleed to death.

So, what do you hold?

An object associated with the Holy Blood.

And I think that also makes perfect sense of this arrangement.

Because if you are a woman in the throes of childbirth, holding on

to this thing for dear life in the hope that it might save you...

You don't want it to slip.

-And also you're very liable to lose control.

-Yes.

God, thank you. That's brilliant!

So what I'd taken for a splendid locket to be worn around the neck

turned out to be something far more magical - a hand-held charm.

And if this was indeed the birth amulet of Jeanne de Bourgogne,

she must have been in desperate need of its power.

Three of her seven children died in early infancy.

But this unique pendant isn't the only reliquary in the British Museum

connected to the Crown Of Thorns.

The other, known simply as the Holy Thorn Reliquary,

is possibly the single most remarkable object

to have come down to us from the Middle Ages.

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum,

considers it to be one of the masterpieces of world art.

Neil, tell me how you would go about reading this object.

I think this object is a theatre.

It's a theatre in which the most important drama in any Christian's life

is going to be played out,

and that's the moment when the dead rise at the Last Judgment.

The angels are sounding the last trumpet round the bottom,

and the dead are coming out of their coffins.

And on this wonderful green hillside you can see two men, two women,

in enamel, coming out of their coffins,

and what they know is going to happen next is judgment.

They look up, and there at the top is God the Father, the judge,

and the only thing that is going to save you, because you have sinned,

is the redeeming blood of Christ.

And there in the middle is one of the thorns

which caused the blood to flow.

It gives you a chance of being saved.

The stakes couldn't be higher when you're in front of this object.

Do we know who once owned this?

We know from coat of arms that it belonged to Jean, Duc de Berry,

who was son of the king of France, brother of the king of France,

and he probably had it made in the 1390s in Paris.

Paris, at that point, is THE great place in Europe for expensive

goldsmith's work, and this is one of the greatest surviving creations

of the Paris workshops.

Because every bit of this is magnificently made.

It's not just the gold.

It's the enormous elaboration of the enamel figures,

and then the way the jewels are deployed.

And the jewels not just beautiful in their colour, but also in their meaning.

Because this is an object about the blood of Christ,

so the rubies which symbolise the blood of Christ are everywhere.

Sapphire is, of course, the blue of heaven.

The pearls are about the purity of the Virgin and of Christ.

So, the object is made up of speaking stones.

They have a spiritual meaning as well as a physical value.

How do you think it was actually used?

Probably for private prayer.

One person just alone with the object, in dialogue with the divine.

And if you were Jean, Duc de Berry, and you were in your last days, dying...?

I think if he knew he was dying, this is what he would want to look at.

But it's pretty certain that Jean de Berry himself didn't, because this is made in the 1390s.

When he does die, in 1416, he's in Paris.

The English have invaded and occupied Paris after Agincourt,

and almost all his goldsmith's work is melted down by the English.

So, we have to assume that he gave it away as a very grand present.

So, with this object, we're at the end of the 14th century.

But, even then, am I not right in thinking there was a gathering discontent

with the very idea of relics, and with these splendid objects?

Not everybody thinks this is a good idea.

No, there's obviously always a concern about the connection between wealth and access to God.

And the kind of world where the possession of a relic

might give you privileged access

is the kind of world in which people question that privilege.

And as the Reformation nears, it becomes a stronger and stronger issue.

So, the storm clouds are gathering over things like this?

They are. And when the lightning strikes, particularly in England, it strikes savagely.

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century changed the landscape of faith in this country for ever.

The Reformation ushered in a bleak and bitter period

for those adhering to the old Catholic traditions of worship.

Churches were pillaged, stained-glass windows were smashed,

statues and paintings ripped down,

shrines were desecrated, and relics, in their thousands, were destroyed.

But the old impulse to venerate and to cherish the remains of the saints

could not be so easily routed out,

and it continued in secret and undercover.

And if you want to understand that history,

largely a concealed history,

there's no better place to come than this.

CHORAL SINGING

At this Jesuit school, they have a remarkable museum.

It's a repository of objects

from a faith that was suddenly driven underground.

Jan Graffius is the curator.

-Wow!

-It's a nice space.

It really is.

Of all the objects here,

the most revealing is also the most unassuming.

Found in the 19th century behind a wall in a nearby Catholic home,

it had lain undiscovered for more than 200 years,

and it's the only one of its kind in the world.

So, Jan, why have you led me to this

distinctly enigmatic object? What is this?

The simple answer is this is a travelling chest

used by salesmen of threads, peddlers and so on.

What does it contain?

It contains everything a Jesuit priest would need to say Mass.

-Can we open it?

-Yes, by all means. I shall...

just put my gloves on. So, the outside is pony skin

and wood, with these rather lovely handmade nails.

Well, at first sight, I can't see anything that suggests that this is a priest's box.

Quite right, as if you're wandering around and stopped by the authorities

and they flick open your chest, the last thing you want them to see is what you're doing.

So, what we've got on top here is a lady's bonnet

with a sort of linen exterior and a very beautiful pink silk lining.

Goodness me!

Part of the camouflage.

Now, this is interesting, this is the altar stone. This is consecrated.

And the crosses here, you can see the remains of wax around them, would once have held the fragments

of relics of martyrs, because, again, that was necessary for the altar stone to be consecrated.

This is a chasuble.

And, again,

you can see...

Gosh.

Early 17th century. Lovely green damask and some lovely green brocade,

and in any really elaborate 17th-century vestment,

you have beautiful embroideries and so on and, obviously,

that's not possible here, but they've done a very simple job

just by taking the most precious fabric, the brocade,

and outlining it with this white silk ribbon.

Where do you think this brocade came from?

Probably from some merchant's wife's best Sunday dress.

What we have here is a corporal.

The bread was consecrated directly on top of the corporal.

What might happen to a priest using this kit if he were to be caught?

The penalty was quite straightforward.

You would be tried for treason, because it was illegal to be a Catholic priest in England,

and then you would be hanged, drawn and quartered.

The reasoning behind it was that after the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth I,

and thereby liberated Catholics from their natural allegiance

to their sovereign, a law was passed saying

to follow the Pope meant to be a traitor.

And treason is a capital offence.

-And that's that.

-And that's the end of it.

So, they were never officially executed for their faith, they were executed for being traitors.

So, I'm intrigued by this -

I don't know how to describe it - reliquary tube.

It's sort of a tall cylinder of glass and silver gilt.

It contains the rope that tied Edmund Campion down onto the hurdle

that dragged him to Tyburn where he was hanged, drawn and quartered.

He and Robert Parsons, who founded our school,

came into England in 1580 as the first Jesuit missionaries

to go back to their own country to try and minister to the Catholics,

and Campion lasted 18 months before he was captured.

I'm familiar with the phrase "hung, drawn and quartered",

but I don't know actually what's involved.

It's probably one of the most unpleasantly painful ways of killing somebody.

You're dragged behind a horse to your execution, through the mud, you're then hanged,

but before you die, they cut the rope so you're only half strangled,

and then the executioner castrates you,

and then you're slit open from breast bone to lower stomach, and you're disembowelled.

That's the drawing part, they draw out your entrails.

They are then burned in front of you.

While you're alive?

The executioners were very skilled in keeping people alive for as long as possible.

And then your heart is removed,

then your head is cut off,

your body is divided into four pieces,

and then the pieces are parboiled

to preserve them for longer,

because they are going to be stuck up around the city to deter people.

-Urgh!

-It's a public way of displaying the State's disapproval

with your actions, and a public way of deterring anybody who wishes to follow in your footsteps.

One of the most disconcerting body parts to have been preserved

and passed down to the museum is kept in this small silver reliquary.

If you look, it's inscribed,

"Oculus Dexter".

Oculus Dexter.

The right eye?

-So, this actually contains an eye?

-It does.

That is the right eye of the Blessed Edward Oldcorne.

That is really getting to the grizzly end of the relic spectrum.

It's quite a powerful thing. It is.

May I ask how we come to possess

the right eye of Oldcorne?

He was hanged, drawn and quartered in Worcester in 1606.

And you remember I was describing the process,

the last part of which was the parboiling.

At this point, the eye obviously came out of the socket and was collected

by some Catholic brave enough to gather it from the pot.

-Oh!

-Sorry!

-Oh, dear!

When I see that, I can't help thinking that's the eye that watched

the process as he was tortured to death,

that watched the entrails leaving the body, so in a sense...

There's a very tangible link.

I have never seen anyone look at this and not be moved, shocked.

There is always a reaction, there's always a human reaction.

It's a relic of torture.

What to you think the underlying message

that Catholics might have got from these objects would have been?

I think the real comfort that Catholics derived from holding,

looking, being near these objects is a sense of affinity

with the sacrifice of the priests who were trying to bring their faith to them, and hope for the future.

Keep these safe until such a time when this cruelty and persecution

is no longer in England.

So, it's a pledge for the future as much as a contact with the past.

The laws which banned Catholics from worshipping

were not repealed until the end of the 18th century.

Emancipation led to a revival of the faith.

But there was a problem.

Where could Catholics congregate?

The Church of England had occupied their old places of worship,

stripped them of their images and their shrines,

so, this new generation of Catholics had to make new churches, and this is what they looked like.

This is the chapel of St Edmund's College near Ware,

and the architect of all this flamboyance

was a Catholic convert named AWN Pugin.

The Catholic Revival caught the wave of the Gothic Revival,

an architectural movement inspired by the medieval world.

It brought rich decoration, bright colour

and images of Christ and the saints back into British churches.

Rosemary Hill is Pugin's most recent biographer.

Rosemary, thank you for coming. What a fantastic space.

It's wonderful. I think it's one of Pugin's best buildings,

actually, marked by this huge and beautiful stone rood screen.

A rood screen was one of the things that Pugin

was most enthusiastic to revive.

R-O-O-D, meaning cross.

Meaning cross, yes, with the crucified Christ above it.

Rood screens existed in medieval churches.

They divide the part of the church

where the congregation sits from the sanctuary.

One of the many ironies of Pugin's career was that he used all the steam power and technology

of the Victorian Age to push art and architecture back 300 years.

And what he was trying to do here is to recreate the essence of medieval Gothic art.

Sort of Stephenson's Rocket in reverse?

Pugin's Backward Rocket, whoosh!

Absolutely! And one of the things

Pugin wanted to do was to remake, if you like, that breach in history that the Reformation had caused.

I was very struck, looking at this drawing of the design for the chapel here...

OK, it's in monochrome, but having visited the chapel

I can see all those colours, I can feel that coming through.

Do you think that was part of Pugin's ambition

to re-enchant sacred space?

Certainly, I think there were a lot of people who by then were feeling pretty starved

by what the English Church was offering, which was very square, Georgian preaching boxes.

It was all about sermons, very little colour, very little emotional warmth.

And what was his attitude to relics?

Well, he believed in them, I think both in a sacred sense, and also as romantic objects.

I notice this beautiful reliquary, which is a Pugin design, as well, isn't it?

Yes. A very architectural form, as medieval reliquaries often were.

But it is like one of Pugin's buildings in miniature.

In the Middle Ages, they were using gold and precious stones to symbolise heaven and eternity.

Here he's using very polished brass and semi-precious stones, crystal.

Yes. Well, this was the problem for Pugin,

and the whole English Catholic community,

after emancipation, as one of the bishops said, "We're like the first family after the flood."

They hadn't got anything because they hadn't been allowed to build.

So, everything was needed and there was very little money.

Poor Pugin always had to battle against accusations of Brummagem ware,

the very shoddy metalwork that the Victorians churned out of Birmingham.

But to be fair to this particular "made in Birmingham" object, it's actually not half bad, is it?

It's absolutely beautiful.

The detailing, the finishing, is very fine,

and the stones are only semiprecious stones

but they're very beautiful colours and very carefully chosen.

-And whose are the bones?

-The bones are of Thomas a Becket.

Pugin was a great enthusiast for the English Catholic Church,

so in the context of the 1840s, it is a statement of English Catholicism.

Pugin was a man of the modern industrial age

who deliberately harked back to the medieval past.

But the relic and the reliquary

can still speak very directly to the present,

the traumas of recent history and the desire to heal their wounds.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a brutal campaign of repression

by the military government in El Salvador

claimed thousands of lives.

The leader of the Church, Archbishop Oscar Romero,

began to speak out on behalf of the victims and their families.

Finally, on 23rd March 1980,

he made a direct appeal to the Salvadoran army.

The following day, Oscar Romero was shot dead in church,

while celebrating Mass.

In the eyes of most Salvadorans, Romero had been martyred,

and today he is revered there as a saint,

although he's not yet been declared to be one by the Vatican.

Romero's body was buried, but his possessions,

including the vestments he was wearing when he died,

have become modern relics.

Jan Graffius, curator at Stonyhurst College,

was closely involved in helping to preserve them.

So, what are the relics and what's happened to them?

The main relics are the contents of his tiny little three-room house

in the grounds of the hospice where he lived,

and in the little back room

are the clothes he was wearing when he was shot.

What do they look like?

Well, he was a very simple man, so they're very simple clothes

A simple purple chasuble, the semicircular garment

that a priest wears when he's saying Mass, very thin cotton.

Underneath that, a white alb, which is a floor-length white garment.

-Are they very bloodstained?

-They're very bloodstained.

On the chasuble there is a tiny little hole directly over the heart

and no sign of anything else.

But when you look at the white alb underneath,

it gives you some idea of the violence of his death.

It's completely coated in blood.

Are they just leaving it completely as it was, without touching it?

Pretty much. It's now in a position where it should be safer

from the point of view of environment,

but at the end of my work - I was there over three years -

the sisters presented me with a tiny piece of the blood-soaked alb

to take back to Stonyhurst.

It lives in this very small jewellery box,

which is how it was given to me.

And inside...

is just...

-Goodness.

-We're in the process of commissioning a reliquary

and we've asked Fernando Llort,

who's a very famous Salvadorian artist, to design and paint

something appropriate.

It's an object rather like a folding altarpiece with wings

and you've got two angels on the front?

We've got the Annunciation on the outside, with Gabriel and Mary,

then when you open it up,

we have this central painting,

and around it I will have painted the readings from the Mass

that he was saying when he was murdered

and a quotation from his last sermon,

which was spoken seconds before he was shot.

The Gospel that he was reading

was about the grain of wheat that falls to the ground

and unless it dies, it remains a grain,

but if it dies, it brings back a rich harvest.

-He knew he was going to die?

-Oh, he did, yes.

-Will this all be coloured?

-Brightly coloured.

When I was last there, I saw in one of the markets

this little Christmassy triptych,

which I bought for one of my children. This is not by Llort,

but it's very much in his style.

-In a sense, it's El Salvadorian folk art.

-Very, yes.

-With these bright colours.

-Strong colours.

-So, that gives us a sense of what your reliquary will look like.

-Yep.

Where are you going to keep the relic?

It's such a tiny little fragment

that what I plan to do is to have a little silver and glass locket,

which will be fixed permanently underneath the main painting

and above it, this central figure here you can see,

this is Archbishop Romero himself

with his hand outstretched, holding his heart.

And at the bottom, the rifle that killed him.

And what do you hope it will say to the world?

I want it to get some idea of the vibrancy

of the culture and the people who Romero was standing up for.

I want people to go away and think, "Who was this man?"

and learn more about him.

And I want them to understand

that working for truth and justice and peace has a terrible cost,

but that the end of your life is not the end of the struggle.

In Stonyhurst College, where it will be displayed,

we have many young people who are beginning to learn

that the world has much injustice,

and I want them to go and find out more

and, maybe, in their own small ways,

work to promote a more just and a peaceful world.

When I set off on this journey into the art of the reliquary,

I had my own preconceptions.

I felt this was very much going to be

an exploration of death and religion,

and yes, of course, those things are there.

I think of that wonderful Holy Thorn reliquary in the British Museum,

an object designed

for the contemplation of a man in his last days,

perhaps fixing his eyes on God.

But there's so much else to the art of the reliquary as well.

I think of that extraordinary eye of Edward Oldcorne,

a thing that speaks so eloquently of a community's determination

to survive persecution and oppression.

I think of that wonderful silver St Sebastian reliquary

and I think of a very different community's desire

to survive the strike of an epidemic.

And, perhaps above all,

I think of that amazing little birth amulet

once held by a woman absolutely determined to give birth

to a healthy child.

So yes, reliquaries, at the literal level, speak of death,

they contain emblems of death,

but I think at the deepest level of all,

what they really speak about is life,

the passions that move us all as human beings.

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