Dunstan

Hermit, artist, statesman and saint

Armine le Strange Campbell

From The Glories of Glastonbury, 1926

Long centuries ago a nobleman with his little son knelt in prayer before the altar of Our Lady of Glastonbury. While his father kept vigil through the night the boy, childlike, weary of long prayer, slept. He beheld in a vision an aged man in garments of dazzling whiteness. The old man, taking the child by the hand, led him through fair cloisters and monastic buildings to a very beautiful church and told him that he should one day become the builder and the ruler of this place.

The child was Dunstan. The dream came true.

As in the dream if [Pope] Innocent III nearly three centuries later, in which Francis appeared to be upholding the tottering Lateran Basilica, so Dunstan supported and rebuilt the spiritual edifice of the church in Britain and then raised the material walls of his monastery after the pattern of those which had been so mysteriously shewn to him. The inspiration of his life throughout his long and brilliant career was derived from Glastonbury and it thus came about that this was the centre from whence there spread throughout the land not only a far-reaching revival of monastic discipline and fervour but also, through the wonderful genius of this great statesman, the consolidation of the whole kingdom in a power and unity beyond anything to which it had hitherto attained.

Born at Baltonsborough [three miles from Glastonbury] and educated at Glastonbury, Dunstan was a boy at the court of Athelstan. On leaving it he visited his kinsman St Alphege, bishop of Winchester. There he fell ill and on his recovery resolved to renounce the world and enter the Benedictine Order at his old home. When about 15 or 16 years of age he assisted at the requiem of the king, who was buried under the altar at the ancient sanctuary.

Edmund I, surnamed the Magnificent, 'protector of friends and refuge of warriors', was but eighteen at his accession and twenty four at his death. He sought the advice of Dunstan, but the jealousy of the courtiers was aroused and he was driven from court.

Not long afterwards, when the king went out to hunt the stag in the Mendip Forest, he was in full chase of his quarry and separated from his companions when he suddenly found himself on the verge of the Cheddar cliffs. He saw the stag and the hounds rush headlong over the precipice. In vein he tried to rein in his horse when he saw that death was imminent. In a flash he remembered the injustice he had done to Dunstan and resolved that if his life were spared he would make amends to him. At the very brink of the chasm his horse stood still. The king gave thanks to God, rode away to find Dunstan, bade him follow him and they went together to Glastonbury. There the king prayed silently before the altar, gave him the kiss of peace, then took him by the hand, seated him on the abbot's throne and promised to aid him by every means in his power. The saint was then in his nineteenth or twentieth year, and later on he was Keeper of the Treasure and the chief adviser to the king. When his royal friend was stabbed in May 946 by the outlaw Leof, the abbot buried him in the abbey.

A man of prayer and a lover of solitude, Dunstan is said to have lived for some time in a tiny cell five feet by two and a half feet, the foundations of which were possibly those of which may be seen a few paces west of St Mary's church [at the western end of the abbey]. There, in fasting, watching and intercourse with God, he strove to attain perfection and became by divine grace a fitting instrument for fulfilling the great work which he was destined to accomplish.

Here too he transcribed and illuminated parchments, composed melodies and Mass music, sang the praises of God to the accompaniment of the harp and hammered exquisite chalices and altar vessels by the light which passed through a hole in the door of his cell.

Here again he wrestled with temptations and bravely withstood the devil whom, on one occasion – so the legends tell us – he seized by the nose with the goldsmith's tongs with which he was working. And glorious visions were no doubt granted to him, "for all his life this unique and marvellous man had revelation of things distant in space and in time, and his happy spirit, full of the artist, metal-worker, lover of tunes and gay, lived on the edge of this world: the good and the evil of the unseen supported and attracted him as they do such few as are placed on the outposts of humanity". [Belloc, History of England].

In his beloved monastic home, where he spent about fifteen years before he was called to a wider sphere of work, he carefully supervised in every detail the order of the house, visiting the cells and kitchen to see that discipline was observed, designing and superintending the building of the monastery which he raised upon the ruins of the old abbey. He walked in the cloister-garth with his brethren or instructed the children for whom he had a very special love and, rapt in God, spent long hours of the day and night in prayer, in tears and in the contemplation of celestial secrets.

To his brother Wulfric he confided the temporal affairs of the monastery that he might devote himself to the formation of saints and holy religious. Among these were St Elphege who, succeeding his spiritual father as Archbishop of Canterbury, finally gave his life for the poor; and St Ethelwold, who carried on the reform of the monastery which his master had inaugurated. Sigfrid too was brought up in this nursery for saints, and became the evangeliser of pagan Norway. From this time onwards Glastonbury was the centre of Christianity in the West and came to be known as the 'Second Rome'. Pilgrims flocked thither in ever greater numbers and its renown spread all over Europe.

Edred, half-brother to Edmund and his successor, also confided greatly in Dunstan, and with his help he drove the Danes of the north, who had risen up against him, out of Northumbria, and Eric of the Bloody Axe, the tyrant of Norway, fled before the king's huge army. Edred, always an invalid, only reigned nine years, and as he lay dying at Frome, Dunstan hastened from Glastonbury to assist him, but while he was still a long way off he was warned by an interior light that the king had already peacefully expired. He bore the king's body to Winchester and buried it beside Alfred the Great.

Edwy, a boy of fifteen, as beautiful as he was corrupt, ascended the throne in 955. Dunstan, banished from court through the revengeful spite of one whom he had reprehended, fled to Ghent. But upon the accession of the good king Edgar he was immediately recalled and was first made bishop of Worcester and of London and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. It is said that Edgar the Peaceable founded or restored forty Benedictine monasteries, and great peace and prosperity came to the country under the beneficent rule of the 'Incomparable Edgar'. On his death in 975 at the early age of 32 he was buried at Glastonbury beside Edmund and Athelstan.

Edmund II, called 'the Martyr' on account of his youth, innocence and tragic death, was crowned at thirteen. St Dunstan and St Oswald anointed the child-king at Kingston, and the former foretold the calamities which would come to him.

In 988 Dunstan slept in the Lord and was buried at Canterbury. After the great fire of 1184 it was asserted that St Dunstan's relics were stolen from Canterbury after that attack of the Danes upon St Alphege in 1012 and were brought to Glastonbury. The monks maintained that they had hidden them and found them again after the fire. Lest the relics should be surreptitiously taken back to Canterbury the grave was made very secretly, and the secret was entrusted only to one monk who, when dying, passed it on to another.

The account of the burial of the relics is as follows: "Two who had charge of the matter take a wooden coffin, suitably prepared for the purpose, and paint it on the inside, and on the right side they put the S and on the left side they put the D, intending that they should stand for the name of Sanctus Dunstanus. Putting the relics into this coffin, they bury it beneath a stone taken out for the purpose in the 'Larger Church', by the side of the holy water stoup, on the right hand side of the entrance of the monks. Everyone else was ignorant of the place altogether. There for a hundred and seventy years it lay, the secret being committed to one at a time, according to the manner arranged. But a young monk is said to have prevailed upon his master to hint enigmatically at the place of the burial, and the secret became known and all was found as has been described." [William of Malmesbury, Chron].

The monks at Glastonbury denied these assertions and the dispute went on for centuries. In 1508 Warham and Goldston examined the Canterbury shrine and reported that it contained all the principal bones of St Dunstan, but not until the death of the sixtieth and last abbot of Glastonbury in 1539 did the dispute come to an end.

The third Danish war began in the same year that St Dunstan died. Massacres, battles and treacherous plots succeeded each other and the land was laid waste from shore to shore. Sweyn and his men, like a swarm of locusts, swept over Wessex destroying and pillaging churches, burning towns and ravaging the land. Yet though much damage was done to the monastic buildings the ancient church of Glastonbury was spared. It is said that the Danish hordes came to the gate named Hawete, a mile from the sanctuary. The men, hearing that the place was guarded by saints, feared to proceed, but some of them ventured further and were struck blind. They repented, their sight was restored to them and they gave a jewelled cross to the shrine.

The great struggle between Saxon and Dane continued. Edmund Ironside fought with Canute. He granted lands and estates to Glastonbury, and by his own wish he was buried there on the epistle side of the high altar. His former enemy, king Canute, in 1030 prayed at his tomb and placed over it a rich pall exquisitely wrought with peacocks by skilled Saxon embroidresses, and his son, Hardicanute, also shewed his devotion to the abbey ten years later by placing there a new shrine for the relics of St Benignus. Thus did the kings of successive dynasties vie with one another in giving rich gifts to the sanctuary.

	Web IsleofAvalon

   Isle of Avalon 

 NEXT 

 BACK 

 PRINT