纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 066圣荆棘之匣（5）（在线收听）

"To have a relic particularly connected with the Passion of Christ was the best thing you could have. But there were also relics of the saints, particularly the martyrs. I think they provoked a lot of envy, especially the French collections. The rivalry in England - 'We want to have a better relic than they have because we are a better nation than they are.' They're subject to all kinds of external influences. Like everything else, it can be part of commerce, can't it? Politics, commerce, exchange - yes, this is certainly all round the relics."

In this complex economy of influence, a thorn from the Crown became the ultimate French royal gift. In the late fourteenth century one was awarded to a powerful French prince, Jean, Duc de Berry. Looking at the Reliquary, we can be absolutely confident that it belonged to Jean de Berry - it's got his coat-of-arms enamelled on to it. But it also sums up many of his preoccupations. He commissioned some of the greatest religious art of the period, and he was a passionate collector of relics - he had the marriage ring of the Virgin, a cup used at the Wedding at Cana, a fragment of the Burning Bush and a complete body of one of the Holy Innocents, the children murdered by Herod. He was also an enthusiastic builder of castles and so, appropriately, the base of our Reliquary is a castle made out of solid gold.

This Holy Thorn Reliquary is without question one of the supreme achievements of medieval European metalwork, but sadly there is no way of knowing if it was in fact the greatest thing in Jean de Berry's collection. The bulk of his goldsmith's work was broken up and melted down within months of his death, when the English occupied Paris after the battle of Agincourt in 1415. The fact that this Reliquary survives tells us that he must have given it away before his death.