The Monymusk Reliquary
About 750
It is tiny, small enough to sit in the palm of a hand, and yet this little house shaped box is one of the most important objects in Scotland. Made around the middle of the eighth century, it is a reliquary, a container for the bones or belongings of a saint, shaped like a church with a pitched roof. The wooden core is covered with sheets of copper alloy and silver, decorated with engraved animals whose bodies twist and interlace, and with enamelled mounts of red and yellow. Hinged fittings on the ends show that it was once fixed to a strap so that it could be carried around the neck or on a horse.
Look closely and you will see two artistic traditions meeting. The animal ornament on the silver plates is in the style of Pictish metalwork, while the shape and the enamel mounts belong to the Irish tradition of house shaped shrines. It was made in a monastery where these worlds overlapped, quite possibly at Iona or in the Pictish east. The surviving decoration is worn, which tells you the box was handled and carried for centuries, not kept in a treasury. Some of the original mounts are missing, and their ghost outlines are still visible on the metal.
For a long time the reliquary was identified with the Brecbennach, the battle standard of Saint Columba that was carried before the Scottish army at Bannockburn in 1314. That link is now doubted by scholars, but the object certainly belonged to the abbey of Arbroath and passed to the Grant family of Monymusk in Aberdeenshire, where it was kept for three hundred years. It was bought for the nation in 1933. It matters because it is the only reliquary of its kind to survive in Scotland and because it embodies the early Christian church that shaped the country. A memorable detail: when it came to the museum it was still being kept as a treasured family heirloom, not as a museum piece.
Did You Know? The reliquary is small enough to be carried around the neck on a strap, which is probably how it travelled with early Scottish armies.
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