6. Eating, or at least tasting, the Holy Foreskins was a (relatively) common pastime.

Consuming the flesh of Christ was, and remains, an important part of Catholic doctrine – the Catholic Church's position is that the wafer of the Eucharist literally becomes Jesus's actual flesh after being eaten. But the Holy Foreskin had (allegedly) always been Jesus's flesh, and was therefore especially holy (according to Shell), in the same way that the Grail, which had held Jesus's blood as it dripped from him on the cross, was more holy than the Eucharist wine.

St Birgitta, a Swedish nun, had a vision in which she ate the Foreskin. "So great was the sweetness at the swallowing of this membrane that she felt a sweet transformation in all her members and the muscles of her members," it says in her book Revelations.

More commonly, though, people tasted the alleged Holy Foreskins to verify that they were real. There was an industry, "particularly in the medieval period, throughout Europe, in the production and veneration of holy relics", says Stavrakopoulou. "Churches could earn a lot of money from pilgrims, who would pay a lot of money to look at these things and touch them and kiss them and everything, so there was a huge industry in forgeries."

The most accepted test of the veracity of a Foreskin was tasting. Shell says that "A properly trained physician chosen by the local priest would taste the shrivelled leather in order to determine whether it was wholly or partly human skin." Surgeons who had thus consumed the body of Christ were known as croques-prépuces.