The Reliquary on the Record: Sacred Remains and the Limits of English Property Law

Fedor Arkhipov, PhD candidate, University of Insubria https://personale.unimore.it/Rubrica/dettaglio/319480

St Mary & Eanswythe, Folkestone Chris Whippet

In 2020, human remains were uncovered in the wall of St Mary and St Eanswythe’s Church in Folkestone, Kent. Scientific testing suggested that the bones belonged to a young woman of noble ancestry, consistent with the historical figure of St Eanswythe – a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princess and abbess. In 2024, following ecclesiastical blessing and a public ceremony, the remains were reinterred inside the church in a reliquary for veneration. While rare, such rediscoveries expose complex and unresolved questions in English law: what is the precise legal status of relics, and how does the law reconcile the competing demands of secular property regimes and religious significance?

English law begins with a clear but counterintuitive principle: there is no property in a corpse. A dead body, once separated from life, is not a chattel. This rule – first articulated in Haynes’ Case (1614) and reaffirmed in Dobson v North Tyneside Health Authority (1996) – means that no individual, not even relatives, can own human remains. The dead are owed dignity, but not property rights. The bones of St Eanswythe, therefore, cannot be said to belong to anyone in a conventional legal sense. This principle serves to prevent commodification of human remains, reflecting deep-seated ethical and societal values that human dignity persists beyond death. The law thus establishes a protective stance, ensuring that remains are treated with respect rather than subject to ordinary property transactions.

Yet these remains now reside in a dedicated space inside a functioning Church of England parish, cared for by clergy and accessible to pilgrims. Their treatment suggests more than mere custody – a kind of legal possession akin to trusteeship, if not ownership. This raises fundamental tensions: relics are human remains, but in this case also religious objects venerated as sacred. Are they protected under laws governing burial, cultural heritage, or as ecclesiastical property? English law does not clearly answer these questions. The indeterminacy arises partly because relics intersect several legal regimes, none of which fully encapsulates their hybrid nature. For instance, burial laws focus on the resting place, heritage laws protect historical artifacts, and ecclesiastical law regulates sacred property – but relics straddle all these spheres simultaneously.

The Human Tissue Act 2004 governs the handling of human remains for medical and scientific purposes, requiring consent from individuals or relatives to store or use human tissue. However, it explicitly exempts remains over 100 years old, removing relics such as St Eanswythe’s from regulatory oversight. This exemption creates a bifurcated regime: recent remains face strict regulation, while ancient ones can be displayed or venerated without statutory licensing, provided respect is maintained and commercial exploitation avoided. This gap reflects the law’s secular orientation, which struggles to accommodate religious practices centered on ancient remains.

Cases like R v Kelly and Lindsay (1998) suggest that human tissue may become property if altered through skill or intervention, in this case through dissection and preservation techniques. The ruling, based on Doodeward v Spence (1908), leaves open whether religious ritual can transform relics into property. While physical modification is absent in ritual veneration, the symbolic enshrinement of bones in reliquaries arguably constitutes a transformation of meaning, if not material substance. The law has yet to definitively resolve whether this symbolic transformation suffices for property status, highlighting the conceptual ambiguity relics provoke. These cases underline a broader legal debate about the nature of property rights: is it solely material or can it include intangible aspects such as symbolic meaning and cultural significance?

More illuminating is the analogy to consecrated burial ground. The Burial Act 1857 prohibits disturbing interred remains without a licence, not because remains are property, but due to the sanctity of their resting place. Churches treat relics as permanently “enshrined,” subject to ecclesiastical trusteeship rather than ownership. The Church of England’s faculty jurisdiction operates as an internal legal regime controlling consecrated buildings and their contents, including relics. This ecclesiastical autonomy contrasts with civil law and is unavailable to non-established churches, which face stricter secular regulations and lack statutory exemptions. Faculty jurisdiction enables the Church to approve or refuse changes to churches and churchyards, ensuring protection of religious heritage and ritual continuity. The statutory protection of relics is uneven. For example, the Treasure Act 1996 might apply to precious reliquaries but exempts objects under faculty jurisdiction since the 2023 Amendment. This means relics within the Church of England enjoy protections unavailable to Roman Catholic or Orthodox communities, which often place greater theological emphasis on relic veneration.

This imbalance reflects the broader tension between secular legal frameworks and religious worldviews. Modern Western legal systems developed through secularisation, transforming but not erasing religious concepts. Consequently, two epistemological paradigms coexist: secular law grounded in materialist, positivist reasoning, and religious worldviews rooted in metaphysical belief and ritual practice. Legal practitioners often find these paradigms incompatible, generating fragmented discourses and jurisprudential dissonance – especially around sacred objects like relics. The resulting legal discourse often struggles to articulate religious meaning within secular frameworks, leading to gaps and inconsistencies in judicial reasoning.

In legal adjudication, courts do not explicitly invoke theological doctrine but respond to religious meanings by adapting legal procedures. This dynamic is visible in cases like Re St Nicholas Sevenoaks, where the court upheld the sanctity of burial grounds based on Christian beliefs about bodily resurrection and eternal rest. Such decisions illustrate how secular law absorbs fragments of religious ontology, acknowledging spiritual continuity without doctrinal endorsement. Relics thus occupy a liminal legal space, simultaneously biological remains, cultural heritage, and objects of devotion. Courts, while refraining from theological judgment, often consider religious significance as a factor informing their decisions on disturbance and protection of remains.

The relationship between the relics themselves and the reliquary is equally significant. While the bones in St Mary and St Eanswythe’s Church represent the physical remains of the saint, the reliquary serves as a sacred container, mediating access and symbolizing the sanctity of what it holds. Legally, the reliquary may be property subject to treasure laws, whereas the bones may not. Yet the spiritual value and criteria of veneration depend on this interplay: the relics derive sacred status through the reliquary’s ritual enclosure, and vice versa. This interdependence challenges legal categories that separate material from symbolic value. The reliquary transforms the physical remains into objects of devotion, combining tangible and intangible aspects that law struggles to categorize distinctly.

The holding and care of relics can thus be analogized to a trust relationship. The Church acts as trustee, charged with protecting sacred remains for the benefit of the religious community and the public, balancing spiritual obligations with legal duties. Trusteeship better captures the nature of possession here than ownership, accommodating the dual physical and transcendent significance relics possess. However, English trust law evolved in a secular context and struggles to incorporate religious ontology fully, leaving grey areas in accountability and rights. The law of Trusts traditionally deals with tangible and intangible property but rarely with objects that carry metaphysical significance, making relics a challenge to existing legal categories.

The Church of England’s established status further complicates matters. Its privileged legal position, including faculty jurisdiction and exemptions from secular heritage controls, creates a de facto hierarchy among denominations. Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, despite often placing greater emphasis on relics, lack these protections and face more regulatory hurdles. This disparity highlights the difficulties secular law faces in fairly accommodating religious pluralism and the diverse valuation of sacred objects. The differential treatment underscores the complexity of balancing constitutional recognition, religious freedom, and equality before the law.

In sum, the recent rediscovery and reinterment of St Eanswythe’s relics reveal deep and unresolved tensions in English law. Relics challenge conventional legal categories by embodying both physical remains and transcendent sacredness. The law responds by patching together doctrines of burial, trust, heritage, and property, producing a hybrid legal status marked by ambiguity. The unequal treatment of denominations further complicates the landscape. Ultimately, relics expose the complex interface between secular law and religious reality – a space where legal theory must evolve to accommodate pluralistic understandings of identity, sanctity, and possession.

Further Reading

Medievalists.net, “Medieval Saint Eanswythe’s Relics Returned to Rest in England,” https://www.medievalists.net/2024/11/medieval-saint-eanswythes-relics-returned-to-rest-in-england/ 

BBC News, “Relics of St Eanswythe Reinterred in Folkestone Church,” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp870er3dnro

Helen Parish, “Multe etiam alie reliquie quorum scripta desunt’: the migration of relics in Reformation England,” Reading Medieval Studies, 45 (2019): 133–150.

Sophie Vigneron, “The Holy Thorn Reliquary and Cultural Heritage,” Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 68 (2017): 329.

Case Law

Haynes’ Case (1614)

Dobson v North Tyneside Health Authority [1996] EWCA Civ 740

R v Kelly and Lindsay [1998] 3 All ER 741

Doodeward v Spence (1908) 6 CLR 406

Re St Nicholas Sevenoaks

Re Holy Trinity, Bosham [2003] Chichester Consistory Court, Judgment of Chancellor Mark Hill QC, 10 December 2003

Re Hither Green Cemetery [2018] ECC Swk 3

Re St. Mary the Virgin, Burton Latimer [1995] Peterborough Const. Ct., Thomas Coningsby Ch.

Re St. Lawrence, Oakley with Wootton St. Lawrence [2014] Court of Arches

Re Coombes Parish Church [2016] ECC Chi 5

Re St. Mary Magdalene, South Bersted [2014] Chichester Const. Ct., Hill Ch.