Many of these Holy Relics were bogus and served mainly to extract money from the pilgrims. Sort of like some modern day televangelists. While many of the saintly remains underneath cathedrals or abbeys were real, many other Sacred Artifacts (particularly those associated with Christ Himself) were quite false. The bogus nature of some of these items were obvious to many Medieval Christians, and high churchmen often attempted to authenticate relics, but there was always a sufficient supply of gullible people to keep these scams going, and dishonest churchmen who knew a good thing when they saw it. A good example was "the foreskin of Jesus," which somehow survived from the circumcision of the infant Jesus to the 13th century, in the process turning into three foreskins. There were so many pieces of the "True Cross" --the one used to crucify Jesus-- to give rise to jokes about being able to build a house from it. There were sufficient "remains" of prominent saints to indicate that these pious people were a race of giants, or at least had more than the normal allocation of body parts.