Glastonbury Abbey
M R James, Provost of Eton
From the book Abbeys, GWR pubs, 1925.
THERE is no religious foundation in England whose history carries us so far back as that of Glastonbury. Its origins really are lost in the mists of antiquity. True, in later times people became very precise about them, but when we come to test their assertions these melt away under the touch. It is impossible here to write down all the mythical history that gathered about the place. I will try to set down what is not seriously disputed, and then notice some of the more famous of the legends.
Long before the Saxons (the English) came to this country – far back in the days of British princelings – some Christian missionaries built a little church of wattles in the district called Avalon. Whether that was in the second or third century or later, there is no way of telling. Not unnaturally the date was eventually put back to the first century.
The church was old in the time of St. Paulinus, Archbishop of York – that is, in the early years of the seventh century – and he cased it over with wood and lead.
From the first year of the same century (601) purports to come a grant made by a King of Damnonia (the same word as Devon) of the land called Ynyswitrin to the ‘old church’, and an abbot, Worgret, is the head of the community. [William of Malmesbury, who saw the charter, says the king’s name was illegible, but I have seen it (in Mr Bligh Bond’s book) given as Gwrgan.]
A hundred years later (700 or so) King Ina gives a charter and builds what was then considered a great church, to the east of the old one.
By this time we are well into the Saxon period, and you must note that there has been no word of devastation of the place by heathen Saxons. They were Christianised before they took over this part of the country. Thus Glastonbury passed intact from British to English hands. It is the only foundation which did so.
That the history of the earlier centuries should be filled in a little was natural. St Patrick and St Benignus, his disciple, are credited with having sojourned here in the fifth century; nay, the bodies of both were said to lie here. St Bridget came, and lived at Beckery, Little Ireland, another islet in the marsh. And in the sixth century St David (d.546) came and built an addition to the Old Church at the eastern end. The dimensions of the addition were very precisely set down by the chroniclers of the Abbey. Gildas, the historian, too, died and was buried here in 512. Of these statements (and there are more like them) the most credible is that about St. David. But all of them represent a truth, that Glastonbury was so sacred a resort in those centuries that the great lights of the Celtic Church would be likely visitors to it.
If traditions of this class are not fairly to be called fabulous, some, which crystallised later, are of that description.
First, we hear that twelve disciples of the Apostles (the Apostle Philip is named) were sent from Gaul to Britain in AD 63. They came to Avalon, and king Arviragus and his successors granted them lands which came to be known as the Twelve Hides of Glastonbury. It was they who, at the bidding of the Archangel Gabriel, built the Old Church. The twelve died in course of time, and the place remained desolate until, in AD 166, King Lucius (first Christian king of Britain), by his missionaries Phagan and Deruvian, established another twelve, whose succession was not interrupted until St. Patrick, visiting the place in 433, set up a regular monastic life there.
All this while there has been no mention of Joseph of Arimathea. It seems to be the case that his name was first introduced into the story in the thirteenth century by a deliberate borrowing from French romances. Certain it is that William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century knows nothing of him, though the story was interpolated into the text of his book about the Antiquity of Glastonbury.
Nor was it a true Glastonbury legend that he brought with him the Holy Grail. In the romances he is connected with that mystic vessel, but no Glastonbury author ever pretended that the Grail was in the keeping of the Abbey. What Joseph was supposed to have brought was a pair of cruets, containing a relic of the Holy Blood and of the sweat of our Lord. These cruets he carries in the picture of him in the fifteenth-century glass in the east window of Langport Church, and there is frequent mention of them in the late days of the Abbey.
Wearyall Hill, the Glastonbury Thorn, and Chalice Well are all somewhat late additions to the Glastonbury mythology. Chalice Well, in particular, appears to be a modern sophistication of the name Chalke or Calke Well.
The first allusion to the legend of the Thorn that I have been able to find is a pictorial one, on the seal of the Abbey, where, on one side, the Virgin, standing between St Katherine and St Margaret, holds on her right arm the Child and in her left hand a flowering bush. This seal is assigned by Mr Pedrick to the thirteenth century, but to me the architecture suggests the fourteenth.
All this may seem iconoclastic, but Glastonbury is really so ancient and so venerable a site that it can afford to have these ivy-like accretions to its history pulled away. It is, without doubt, the oldest Christian sanctuary in England.
I have brought its story down to King Ina’s days. I cannot dwell long upon any stage of the subsequent developments.
The next great figure in the history is that of Dunstan, who was Abbot here (in 945), repaired the ravages of the Danish invasion-period (about 870), and established a stricter mode of life. The English reform, begun by Dunstan at Glastonbury, in after years was reinforced by men who had seen something of the parallel and somewhat earlier reform-movement in France. Oswald of Worcester spent some years in the Abbey of Fleury on the Loire; and Ethelwold, though he never went abroad, sent his pupil, Osgar, to Fleury, and also got trained chanters from Corbie to teach his monks at Abingdon.
But the beginnings of the movement were independent of France and were due, so far as we can see, to Dunstan.
Whatever the later chronicles of this of other Abbeys may say, it is clear that before the days of Dunstan monasteries were often very badly managed. How far the Benedictine Rule was observed it is hard to make out. It has even been said that before 960 or so, when Ethelwold began his reforms, there was no true Benedictinism in England. Certainly the monks’ life very much needed an organising hand. There was no well-known standard to which they could conform themselves. The scattered monastic establishments were very much at the mercy of the princes and lords in whose domains they lived. King Alfred, indeed, founded two regular houses before 900, for nuns at Shaftesbury, for monks at Athelney; "but the time for the revival of English monasticism was not yet”. In very many cases we read that monks were replaced by ‘secular canons’, even by married men. But be it always remembered that, in the second half of the tenth century, strict monasticism was introduced – and the three great names in the movement of reform are those of Dunstan, Ethelwold, and Oswald of Worcester.
It is Dunstan who is figured in the central place on one side of the Abbey seal in the fourteenth (?) century (between SS Pattick and Benignus) and beneath him is a representation of that encounter of his with the devil, which nowadays is the first thing that springs to the memory when his name is mentioned. The tongs with which he pinched the devil’s nose were shown at the Abbey in the fifteenth century.
After the Conquest two Norman abbots, Turstin and Herlwin, are both named as builders of new churches, Herlwin (1101-1120) having done away with Turstin’s church and built another larger one. It must be kept in mind that all through these years the Old Church still stood, at the west end of the successive Abbey Churches.
More building was done, over which we need not delay, during the twelfth century. None of it is left, for, on May 29, 1I84, a great fire consumed the whole place, including, alas! the Old Church.
The first thing done after this catastrophe was to rebuild the Old Church in stone. It was consecrated in 1186-7.
This rebuilt chapel is the completest piece of the Abbey that remains. It will be briefly described later, but I am intent on making it clear here that it is the Lady Chapel of the Abbey, though it stands at the west end of the church, and we are accustomed to Lady Chapels at the east end. Here, it is so placed because it occupies the site of the ancient Chapel of the Virgin. At Durham there is also a western Lady Chapel, but the reason for it there is different.
The great Abbey Church, dedicated to SS Peter and Paul, was begun about the same time, and considerable progress made. But there were constant troubles and interruptions. The choir and transepts were complete in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, and the Lady Chapel was lengthened eastward by a Galilee porch joining it to the west front of the church, and finally an uninterrupted passage was made through.
All through the fourteenth century the abbots were active in building. The nave was finished and vaulted, the central tower built, and perhaps the two towers which seem to have flanked the west end, and the large north porch.
Abbot Walter de Monington (1342-74) lengthened the choir by four bays and remodelled the whole interior of it in a way comparable to what we see in the choir of Gloucester Cathedral. Mr Bligh Bond’s excellent Architectural Guide to the Abbey gives full details of the reconstruction, which he has most ingeniously worked out.
Monington’s successor, Chinnock, rebuilt the cloister, and either he or the next Abbot, Frome (1420-53), built the abbot’s kitchen.
The last Abbot but one, Richard Bere (1493-1524), made important additions. He vaulted the central tower, and to support the extra weight put in St Andrew’s Cross arches (such as we see at Wells) into the two transept arches. He also built a large chapel to King Edgar (regarded as a saint at Glastonbury) at the east end of the church. The foundations of it were discovered by Mr Bligh Bond in 1908. Further, after a pilgrimage to Italy, Abbot Bere built a chapel to Our Lady of Loretto on the north side, west of the transept. The sketch plan, made before the foundations of these buildings were uncovered, does not show them.
The Edgar Chapel was finished by the last Abbot, Richard Whiting. His story is too sad to dwell upon. An old man of saintly life, a beneficent power in his countryside, he, rightly refusing to surrender his Abbey to the king, was executed on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement and treason on Glastonbury Tor, November 15, 1539.
At the Dissolution, the annual value of the Abbey was estimated at £3,500 odd. It was granted by Edward VI to the odious Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. There were thoughts of restoring it in some form in Mary’s reign, but they came to nothing.
There was no one found to plead for the preservation in any form of the place, and yet it had a stronger claim on the sentiment and reverence of the country than almost any other of our religious foundations.
It became the quarry of all the country round. When interest had begun to awaken in the minds of antiquaries like Hearne and Stukeley it was impossible to do anything. A Presbyterian owned the site and took a pleasure in defacing the buildings, and at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth another Presbyterian, John Down, was owner, and did all the mischief he conveniently could. Those who followed him were differently minded, and deserve our gratitude for care lavished on the remains. Finally, in 1907, the site was purchased for the Church of England and placed under trustees.
The church was an enormous building. The total length, including the Lady Chapel on the west and the Edgar Chapel on the east, was some 590 feet. It consisted (going from west to east) of the Lady Chapel, the Galilee (joined to the west front), a nave of nine bays, with aisles, transepts with two chapels in each (the north transept extending somewhat farther westward than the south), choir of eight bays, with aisles, and Edgar Chapel. There was a central tower and probably two western ones, and a large north porch. Some smaller chapels were attached to various parts of the main structure.
Of these there remain: the shell of the Lady Chapel and Galilee, three bays of the south aisle wall of the nave; the eastern piers of the crossing; a bit of the north transept; a large portion of the south wall of the choir aisle; fragments of the east wall; besides foundations exposed by excavations. The Lady Chapel (often called St Joseph’s Chapel) is, as I have said, the completest piece of the ruins. We have the shell of it, a beautiful late twelfth-century building of four bays, with angle turrets.
The eastern bays attached to it in Early English style form the Galilee, which joined it to the main church. The crypt was not constructed till early in the sixteenth century; old materials were then used, which tends to confuse one at first sight. The well, which is quite outside the foundation wall of the chapel, is not mentioned in any medieval record.
There is much beautiful detail in the building, though the Purbeck marble shafts, which must have been a most effective feature in the decoration, have all been made away with. The relics of the church are dreadfully meagre. A more or less perfect chapel in the north transept is conjectured to be that of St Thomas of Canterbury. Had not Leland told us about the St Andrew’s Cross arches in the transept arch, it seems unlikely that their existence would have been guessed. On the other hand, very slight traces of Abbot Monington’s reconstruction of the choir do remain; but only so alert an eye as that of Professor Willis or of Mr Bligh Bond could make much of them.
As for the monastic buildings, they may be said to be non-existent. The outside of the south aisle of the nave tells us more of what can be learned about the cloisters, for to this wall they were attached. They were rebuilt (we saw) by Abbot Chinnock (1374-1420) and were vaulted. They were about 140 feet (a little less or more) each way. Excavation has laid bare the foundations of the chapter house and frater; what we see of the latter (on the south side of the cloister) is the remains of the undercroft.
The only really intact building is the very pretty abbot’s kitchen; whether it was the work of Chinnock or his successor Frome is not decided. It should by all means be entered, and the fine effigy of an Abbot, and the many fragments of tiles and carving which are stored there, be inspected. Many pages would be needed to give an idea of the ancient splendour of the Abbey in the days of its greatest prosperity; only one or two points can be touched on here. One of the boasts of Glastonbury was that it preserved the bones of King Arthur and Guinevere. This was no part of the primitive story. The tale which has spread farthest is that in 1171 Henry II, staying at St David’s, heard from a Welsh bard the tale of Arthur’s death and burial at Avalon, and was insistent with the Abbot that search should be made for the relics. But it was not till 1191, in Richard I’s time, under Abbot Henry de Soliaco, that the spot indicated by the bard was searched, and the bodies discovered at a depth of sixteen feet. A leaden cross inscribed (according to the fullest form reported), ”Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon with Guinevere his second wife”, served to identify the relics, which lay in the trunk of a hollowed oak; Queen Guinevere’s flaxen hair was there to be seen, but fell into dust when touched. The bones of Arthur were of gigantic size.
Once found, they were given a foremost place among the sacred treasures of Glastonbury; on the occasion of the visit of Edward I in 1278 they were translated to a prominent place before the high altar, and there – apparently in a tomb of black marble – they remained until the Dissolution. It seems strange that no interest whatever was shown in their preservation at that time.
That bones were indeed found in 1191 we can hardly doubt, but it was not an ancient belief that Arthur was buried in any tomb.
"A grave there is for Mark, a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword; not wise the thought – a grave for Arthur”, says a Welsh poet as old at least as the twelfth century, and we cannot help noting that the date of the discovery (1191) falls at a time when the monks were in a great strait for funds for the rebuilding of their church, and that so important an addition to the prestige of the place as would be conferred by Arthur’s relics would have been most opportune. The identification of the bodies depended, so far as we can see, on the leaden plate.
It has been suggested that the discovery was engineered from headquarters in order to put an end to the belief in a future return of Arthur, and to British national aspirations which were prejudicial to the reigning dynasty. If that was the hope, it failed. "The Britons believe yet ” (a generation later) "that Arthur is alive and dwelleth in Avalon with the fairest of all elves, and ever yet the Britons look for Arthur’s coming”.
Among the strange old things at Glastonbury which I most regret, unlike what any other Abbey in England could show, were certain structures which William of Malmesbury calls ‘pyramids’ of stone, in the cemetery, carved with figures and inscriptions which even in his time were difficult to make anything of. They went back to the period of Celtic influence, and I cannot but suppose that they were something in the nature of the ‘high crosses’ of Ireland, or the sculptured stones of Scotland, whose figures and lettering have taxed the ingenuities of the best modern antiquaries to decipher. No fragment has ever turned up which can be supposed to have belonged to one of these; the hope still remains that, built up in some house or wall, something may yet survive.
Had Henry VIII retained any of the interest in literature which, as a young through man, he seems to have possessed, he would have given orders that the whole library of Glastonbury should be transferred to one of his palaces. We have a catalogue of that library, made in the thirteenth century, and it shows that the Abbey then owned a number of books so antiquated in script that the monks of the day could not read them. We have also a panegyric of Leland on the subject. He visited the place in Abbot Whiting’s days, and was overcome by the sight of the venerable treasures which were shown him. Very few Glastonbury books are to be found now; but among the survivors is a wonderful old volume in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, containing not only a picture of St Dunstan at the feet of Christ, said to have been drawn by the Saint himself, but also a collection of extracts from the Bible in Latin and Greek, written in Wales a century before Dunstan’s time, ‘the patriarch of all Welsh books known’, which is one of the very few monuments we have of the learning of the ancient British church. This book, written partly by Celts, partly by English, marks out Glastonbury once more as the meeting-place of British and English influences and traditions.
Besides the Abbey ruins, which are the centre of interest, Glastonbury has other medieval things to show. The Abbey Barn, a beautiful cruciform structure with the emblems of the Evangelists on its four gables; a gate house; the George Inn, one of the few medieval stone-built inns we have; the two churches of St John Baptist and St Benedict (properly St Benignus), with their admirable towers; the Tor with its tower; none of these should be neglected.
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But though Glastonbury rightly claims more space in our pages than any other of the Abbeys we are to notice, I feel that that space must be allotted to the central object of interest, and not to subsidiary ones. I have advisedly refrained from saying anything of the remarkable ‘revelations,’ as they may be called, which have in recent years been laid before the public by Mr Bligh Bond in his books, The Gate of Remembrance, The Company of Avalon and others. The thesis of them is that communications can be and are received by means of automatic writing, from men who in ancient times were connected with Glastonbury, and it is by means of these that he believes himself to have been led to the discovery of the Edgar Chapel, and of that of Loretto. Here is obviously a highly controversial field, into which I do not feel myself called upon to enter.