Doubt Was Not Modern
It is easy to assume that medieval people believed every relic without question and that doubt only arrived with later reformers. The evidence points elsewhere. Churchmen, preachers, poets, and ordinary pilgrims all expressed suspicion at times, and the church itself tried to set rules. Skepticism about particular relics coexisted with strong belief in relics in general. A writer might distrust one tooth or one bone and still revere the saints.
Why Fraud Was Possible
Several conditions made false or doubtful relics common enough to worry people.
- Relics brought pilgrims, offerings, and prestige, so churches had a financial and reputational reason to have them.
- Bones and scraps of cloth are hard to identify. Without records, a bone said to be a saint’s could belong to anyone, and duplicates were inevitable when several churches claimed the same saint.
- Relics moved around through gift, purchase, and theft. After large events such as the Crusades, many items arrived in Western Europe with only a story to vouch for them, and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 is often cited as a source of relic traffic.
- Wandering sellers carried relics from town to town, and few villagers could check their credentials.
Some doubtful items were probably honest mistakes made in good faith, others were misidentified over time, and some were deliberate deception. Medieval writers themselves did not always agree on which was which.
Guibert of Nogent
One of the clearest early critics was Guibert of Nogent, a French abbot writing in the early twelfth century. In a treatise on saints and relics he questioned a claim by a neighboring abbey to possess a baby tooth of Christ. His argument was theological: Christ rose bodily, so how could a part of his body be left on earth? He also objected that crowds were being drawn to a doubtful object, and he criticized the way monastic houses competed for visitors. His approach shows that the attack on fakes was often based on reasoning from doctrine and not only on suspicion of money-making.
Church Rules: The Fourth Lateran Council
The church tried to impose order. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 included a canon on relics which, in summary, forbade venerating newly found relics without papal approval and discouraged the sale of relics and their display outside their containers. Its aim was to limit abuses and control the claims. The measure did not end the trade, partly because enforcement depended on local bishops, and the rules were uneven in practice. Bishops sometimes also inspected relics and cult claims in their own dioceses.
Pardoners and Indulgence Sellers
Complaints about relics merged with complaints about pardoners, who traveled with papal or episcopal permission to raise funds, often for hospitals or churches, by offering indulgences in return for gifts. Church authorities themselves acknowledged that some pardoners overstated what they were offering. The ideas behind indulgences and vows are explained elsewhere, but the central criticism was simple: some sellers claimed more than the church actually promised and kept more money than they should.
Medieval satire made much of this figure. William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, from the late fourteenth century, includes a pardoner who shows a document with seals and tempts the crowd. Most famously, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales admits to using showy preaching and a bag of supposed relics to gain money, even though he says his sermons condemn greed. Chaucer’s Pardoner is a literary invention, not a real person, but his portrait would have rung true to an audience that knew such figures.
The Lollards and Later Critics
Reformers in the later Middle Ages went further. The followers of John Wycliffe in England, called Lollards, questioned the cult of images, relics, and pilgrimage, arguing that money spent on shrines would be better spent on the poor. Church authorities treated these views as heresy. In other parts of Europe, preachers and scholars made related complaints about superstition and abuse. Early sixteenth-century humanists such as Erasmus mocked pilgrim practices, but that falls slightly beyond the medieval period itself.
What the Critics Did Not Say
It is worth being careful here. Most medieval critics did not attack the principle of veneration. They aimed at specific abuses: greed, misidentified bones, relics sold or stolen, exaggerated promises. Criticism usually came from within the church and was often meant to protect devotion from being discredited. Whether any individual relic was genuine was frequently impossible to prove, and medieval opinion varied.
What This Tells Us
The record of complaint shows that medieval people were not uniformly gullible. They argued about evidence, weighed motives, and sometimes mocked those who profited from faith. It also shows how important relics were: they were valuable enough to be forged, regulated, and satirized.