Definition
Reliques (also relics) are the physical remains of saints or other holy persons — bones, bodily fragments, and associated sacred objects — preserved and venerated as religious memorials. In English law, the term carries specific legal significance: the importation and use of reliques was prohibited in England by statute. The legal treatment of reliques sits at the intersection of ecclesiastical law, anti-Catholic penal legislation, and the regulation of religious objects by the Crown.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of relique; relique itself is an archaic or poetic variant of relic, meaning a surviving remnant of something past, or a physical object venerated for its association with a holy person.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Relique — that which remains; a relic; especially, in the plural, the body after death; remains. Also used in the devotional sense of objects venerated in connection with saints.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow in one direction but significant in another. Ordinary usage treats reliques as objects of religious sentiment or historical curiosity. English law treated them as contraband — objects whose very presence on English soil constituted a statutory offense. The word carries no inherent legal weight in modern common use, but in historical English legal sources it is inseparable from the penal statutes directed at Catholic religious practice.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering reliques in historical English legal sources should understand the term almost exclusively in the context of the Jacobean anti-Catholic penal statutes. The controlling authority cited across the dictionary sources is 3 Jac. I. c. 26 (1605–06), enacted in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot and part of a broader legislative campaign against Roman Catholic practice in England. That statute prohibited the bringing of reliques into England, and violation exposed individuals to the legal consequences applicable under the recusancy and penal laws framework.
The term will rarely appear in American legal sources except in three contexts: (1) academic or historical treatment of English ecclesiastical law; (2) property law questions involving the ownership, bequest, or seizure of religious objects; and (3) First Amendment or religious liberty scholarship drawing on English antecedents.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that reliques as a legal term is essentially dormant in modern American and English law. The penal statutes targeting Catholic practice were repealed or fell into disuse over the nineteenth century, and the regulatory framework around religious objects now operates — where it operates at all — through property law, cultural property law, and export/import controls on antiquities, not through ecclesiastical prohibitions.
A corpus trap: the word reliques and its variant relics appear frequently in ecclesiastical law materials, canon law sources, and histories of the Church of England without any connection to the penal statute framework. Not every appearance of the word signals legal significance. Conversely, in searches focused on the Reformation-era and early Stuart penal statutes, reliques is a productive search term that clusters with recusancy, superstitious uses, and the broader anti-Catholic legislative program.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement: all three define reliques identically as the remains of saints preserved for veneration, and all three cite 3 Jac. I. c. 26 as the governing prohibition. The uniformity across sources is notable — there is no divergence in definition or authority.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is worth flagging. None of the sources situates the statute within the broader recusancy law framework, nor do they address whether possession of reliques (as distinct from importation) was separately actionable. The entries are skeletal — definitional markers pointing to a single statute rather than substantive legal analysis. Researchers needing depth on the penal laws context will need to go beyond the dictionary shelf to ecclesiastical law treatises and histories of English anti-Catholic legislation.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry contains an apparent typesetting artifact in which text from adjacent entries (relief of paupers, poor law, relief to widow) intrudes into the reliques entry, reflecting the challenges of working with historical dictionary sources in digitized form. Researchers should be aware this intrusion is a reproduction artifact, not substantive content within the reliques entry.
Jurisdictional Note
The prohibition on reliques is a creature of English law with no direct American statutory counterpart. In the United States, regulation of religious objects intersects with First Amendment free exercise doctrine, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and general property law. The English penal statute framework has no continuing force in any American jurisdiction.