. But does anyone know of any other English medieval saints whose relics are still known to lie in the church where they were held, or even on the site of a medieval shrine in that church? Answers to this question – or indeed other stories of the fate of such relics, welcomed…

There is a body of opinion - mainly in St Albans itself - which believes that the (surviving) bones of Albanus, the British (not English as frequently said) proto-martyr were smuggled out of England and put in a Shrine in St Panteleon's church in Cologne. This shrine, which already had some bits of St Albans bones dating from the marriage of Theophanou and Otto. (Emperor Otto I or II ?) She had as part of her dowery the bits of Alban which St Germanus was given when he came over to give Pelagius a set down. The bones in the Shrine at St P. were examined recently when the Shrine was moved from the Treasury into the body of the church. Those who examined the bones within were very interested to find the skull had a thin gold circlet round its temples, corresponding to what King Offa is supposed to have done to the head of St Alban when he (Offa) founded the Benedictine Monastery in what is now St Albans, England.

The implication of this is that at the Reformation, the monks of St Albans, seeing what was happening to the other Religious Houses, took steps to preserve their greatest treasure - Albans' bones - by sending them to the one place in all Christendom where there was an existing cult of St A. In this way Henry VIII would not have discovered what was going on. (The last Abbot of St A recycled himself as the first grammar school headmaster, taking over the redundant Lady Chapel to be his class room - he was not the stuff of martyrs but that doesn't mean he was not a devotee of St A.) and the reformers presumably flung on the dunghill the bones of some anonymous monk from the graveyard who had a few brief weeks of glory ...

A few years ago, a bone from the Shrine to St A. at St Pantaleon was given to the (Anglican) Cathedral at St Albans (which is of course the old Benedictine Abbey Church and still called The Abbey by the locals, not the Cathedral - tho that is what is now is.) As a gift it had a mixed reception. Some of the Church of England clergy were charmed and delighted with the gift and its cementing of friendship between the two churches. Some of the more - shall we say "of the rigorously reformed tradition" ?- were embarrassed if not actually scandalised. The ceremonial arrival of the Bone - I think a shoulder blade - was the occasion of some ecclesiastical high jinks and a great deal of jollity and reunions between members of the two comgregations who had made friends on previous occasions. The Bone was placed in a casket and put on the top of the restored Shrine of Saint Alban underneath the new crimson canopy. This occupies a prime position just behind the High Altar.

We said afterwards - I was there - that Saint Alban had come home. Not that he had ever really left. Like Durham, St Albans is very much a place where there is a strong sense of Our Local Boy being around, bones or not.