For 500 years, the Black Rood symbolised the legitimacy and independence of Scotland’s kingship. Supposedly containing a piece of the True Cross (the wooden cross on which Jesus was crucified), the Black Rood was a gold and jewelled reliquary that arrived in Scotland in 1068 as the possession of Margaret of Wessex, the sister of the heir to the Anglo-Saxon kingship of England.
One of the earliest fragments of the True Cross to reach northern Europe, the Black Rood relic would have been thought to have had a secure provenance. Understood to have been passed down among empresses and emperors, popes, kings and