The Thorn and The Waters

Adam Stout

This article is available as a 64-page illustrated pamphlet via the Library of Avalon.
To order, please email . The booklet costs £3.50 plus 50p p+p (inland), £1 (Europe) £1.50 (elsewhere)
The author would welcome any feedback - please feel free to contact him at

Preface

There are at least two Glastonburys. One is the mystical centre of the Isle of Avalon of international renown, home to many faiths, seekers of every kind, and the world's most famous festival. The other is a deep-Somerset market town, equally wonderful, famous until recently for shoes and sheepskins, called "the Mardi Gras of the Mendips" in honour of its legendary Illuminated Carnival.

The two towns co-exist uneasily. Mystical Glastonbury has brought shops, businesses, tourists, blow-ins, a very visible street life, but 'Avalonian' incomers are often not much interested in the everyday life of the town. 'Glastonian' locals are rude about the wild-looking 'hedgers' who hang out on the High Street; Christians and pagans are rude about each other.

This pamphlet is an exercise in what I call 'the straight history of Wyrd'. I want to show that Glaston's 'whackiness' goes back three centuries and maybe more, but at the same time to put good Somerset ground beneath the Isle of Avalon, which sometimes seems to float a mile or so above the Levels. All that I say is anchored by threads of academic referencing to 'notes' at the back, but fact is just another form of fiction and I've no desire to damage anybody's dream. There is nothing here, for instance, to challenge Nicholas Mann and Philippa Glasson's Avalon's Red & White Springs: The Healing Waters of Glastonbury (published in 2005): it is curious how completely distinct different sorts of knowledge can be. Read both, I say; we're all contributing to the many-layered mythology of Glastonbury.

Introduction

The medieval Abbey of Glastonbury played a huge role in the mystique and mystification of British antiquity. It was not only one of the wealthiest in the country, but it claimed to be the first, built around a little wattle church that was founded by Joseph of Arimathea, he who had taken Christ's body from the Cross and buried it within his own tomb. It claimed the bones of an untold number of saints and heroes, including King Arthur, thereby placing itself right at the centre of the national chronicle.

The symbolic significance that the medieval Abbey held was demonstrated at the Reformation. Glastonbury was one of the last three abbeys to be toppled, holding out until 1539 when Henry VIII chose to turn the Tor into a Calvary for Catholic England by hanging not only Abbot Whiting on its summit but two of his monks also, a macabre tableau surely intended to evoke the Crucifixion[1]. This act of breathtaking and quite deliberate blasphemy was meted out to nowhere else. Singling Glastonbury out for such treatment suggests that the Abbey and its legends had some special significance even within the awe-filled landscapes of late medieval England.

Henry won, or seemed to. The lands of the Abbey were given to favourites, and taken back, and sold, and the site of the Abbey itself divided and let on life-leases to tenants who sought to make an income from the rubble. The town's population, like that of Somerset in general, seems to have been if anything more Protestant and less Catholic than elsewhere. Yet what is now becoming clear is that the process of legend-making, far from petering out when the Abbey was dissolved, simply mutated into something that was if anything stronger, and certainly more unusual.

This paper is intended to fill a gap in the Glastonbury legend-making cycle: the eighteenth century, focussing on the remarkable events of 1751-3.

The first part seeks to establish that there really was something unusual about Glastonbury, or at least the way the place was perceived, and here I've been inspired by two scholars in particular: Ronald Hutton, whose work I've long admired, and Alexandra Walsham, whose admirable work I've only just discovered. In Glastonbury: Alternative Histories (2003), Ronald Hutton examines the many ways in which the scanty evidence for Glastonbury's ancient past can be interpreted[2]. He shows that there is little conclusive proof to suggest that the place was a powerhouse of ancient religion, little even to suggest that it was even a particularly early centre of Christianity. Glastonbury Abbey emerges from the wrack as a fairly standard bit of Anglo-Saxon new-build, an institution that came to steep itself so thoroughly in its own legendary broth that even today people are inclined to take its stories at face-value. I'm not going to tangle with this, the main thrust of his argument, but on the way to this conclusion he suggests that the roots of the modern Glastonbury cult barely go back to the nineteenth century, and enjoyed very little local support. Iconoclasm and indifference resulted in the piecemeal destruction of the Abbey over three centuries, and interest in the site and its legends was only reawakened by romantic antiquarians and people from outside - often very much outside, particularly America.

There's truth in these observations, but they are not the whole story. One of the main purposes of this screed is to show that eighteenth-century Glastonbury had a mystical status in the zeitgeist not so different to the one it's got today; and further, that this was supported and propagated by local people, not only for gain but because they believed in it. My starting-point here has been Alexandra Walsham's remarkable study of the Glastonbury Thorn, in which she demonstrates convincingly that the Reformation, far from ending the steady accretion of legends at Glastonbury, may in fact have stimulated their growth: "in short, the legend of the miraculous hawthorn was not merely a defiant survivor of the upheavals associated with the advent and entrenchment of Protestantism but also a complex side-effect of it"[3].

An earlier paper of Ronald Hutton's, which looked at the possibilities that folklore studies had to offer students of the Reformation, suggested that a sort of DIY culture of folk practices emerged to take the place of rituals once supplied by the Catholic church, tolerated by the Protestants; this, he suggests, should be seen not so much as "resistance to the Reformation as a part of the process of acceptance of it, easing the transformation of a Catholic to a Protestant society"[4]. Walsham's work suggests that this kind of blurred Reformation was particularly apparent at Glastonbury, where the legends fostered by the medieval Abbey lent themselves particularly well to the foundation-myths both of the Anglican Church and the modern state.

Walsham concludes that "the post-Reformation history of the Glastonbury Thorn suggests that the dramatic upheavals of the early modern period did not halt the creation and embellishment of myths about this ancient and evocative Somerset site. On the contrary, they served to initiate a fertile new phase in the elaboration and invention of its historical traditions"[5]. I hope to show that the same processes of legend-making that Walsham found for the seventeenth century can be seen at work in the eighteenth. The Glastonbury mythos, far from lying dormant or forgotten for three centuries, was in a process of more or less continuous evolution.

The second part of this paper considers the iconic development of Glastonbury as a centre of anti-rationalism during the later eighteenth century, and builds upon E P Thompson's concept of 'Jacobite theatre'[6], and Robert Poole's work on calendar reform[7], to suggest that the town's miraculous qualities were espoused with undiminished vigour by certain elements of 'the poor' as relics of a time when their needs and aspirations were better understood and met. Already by the 1750s the town's apparent resistance to the 'age of reason' was helping to establish it as a kind of capital of anti-rationalism and the imagination, a place immune from change and progress, where the millennial aspirations of the poor came true. "Avalon was again growing as Holy a Land as was ever that in which the old Bethesda flow'd", said Andrew Brice sarcastically[8]. The delineaments of today's New Age were already to be seen in 1751.

1: Glastonbury and the Past in the Eighteenth Century

Glastonbury's place in the 'national' past

To Post-Reformation England, Glastonbury Abbey was more than just another pile of Papist remains. It was the mystical seat of the British Church, with a history that was perhaps less well authenticated than the mission of St Augustine to Canterbury, but infinitely more significant since it demonstrated that Protestant England, far from being Christendom's most notorious 'rogue state', had merely reverted to a purer form of Christianity than anything emanating from Rome.

Its early holiness was attested by one of England's few tolerated miracles: the Glastonbury Thorn, which flowered on Christmas Day. It was said to be the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, miraculously transformed when that saint arrived with his twelve followers from Palestine, and planted it on Wearyall Hill. Joseph then built the wicker church, around which the later Abbey was to grow: conveniently enough, the first church outside Palestine.

This legend was probably invented and certainly exploited by the Abbey in its heyday, for it gave the English church some claim to precedence within the councils of Christendom, and much political capital to Glastonbury Abbey at home[9]. For similar reasons Joseph retained his political utility after the Reformation, since he'd got here before the Roman emissaries. His legend demonstrated that Catholics, not English Protestants, were the ones who'd deviated from the true faith. As Queen Elizabeth said in 1579, "Joseph of Arimathea planted Christian Religion immediately after the Passion of Christ in this Realme"[10]. Glastonbury was consequently revered. To William Camden, writing in 1609, it was "The First Land of God, the First Land of Saints in England, the Tomb of Saints, the Mother of Saints"[11], and when in 1621 George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, was granted land in Newfoundland, he named it 'Avalon', in David Lloyd's words "in imitation of old Avalon in Somersetshire, wherein Glassenbury stands, the first-fruits of Christianity in Britain, as the other was in that part of America"[12].

The idea was encouraged and abetted by the Anglican hierarchy well into the seventeenth century. Francis Godwin's Catalogue of the Bishops of England (1601) begins his account with the story of Joseph; James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, devoted an entire chapter of his Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (1639) to the theme. It seems probable that the connection between Joseph and the Thorn was first made by no less a figure than James Montague, one of the principal architects of Stuart Anglicanism. Although himself a Calvinist, Montague was responsible for organising a "Panegiricall entertainement" for the benefit of James I's Catholic wife Anne of Denmark, in which the character of Joseph presents the Queen with two boughs from the Thorn[13].

This gesture, given the Queen's religion, might be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between Catholics and Anglicans; but courtly Catholicism was not popular with many Protestants. Miracles of all kinds were viewed with contempt and suspicion, and it's not surprising to find that 'the Godly' took two swipes at the Christmas-flowering thorn, once in Elizabeth's reign and once during the Civil War[14]. The second attack prompted Bishop Goodman of Gloucester to suggest that the Thorn had bridged the gap between a reverent past and an irreverent present. Significantly dismissing the Joseph legend for want of evidence, he suggested that the Thorn had first appeared when the Abbey had been destroyed, its duty "to give a Testimony to Religion, that it might flourish in persecution, as the Thorn did blossom in the coldest time of Winter... so Religion should stand, or rather rise up, though Religious houses were pull'd down"[15].

The Town and its Past

Bishop Goodman's remarkable statement was made in an open letter to Oliver Cromwell in 1653, the same year that Cromwell began to enforce restrictions on the celebration of Christmas. This juxtaposition neatly demonstrates just how far 'high church' Anglicanism had drifted from the credo of the Godly: a process that David Underdown has demonstrated that, in Somerset particularly, underpinned the attitudes of both sides in the Civil War[16].

Half a century later, the same divisions are still clearly to be seen in the town of Glastonbury. There was a large Dissenter population, yet when the town was granted a Corporation in 1705 a coat-of-arms was devised that suggested unusually close links with the established Church. "Floreat Ecclesia Anglicana" was the motto, "May the Church of England Flourish", surmounted by a shield containing a mitre and two crosiers: suggesting, in Robert Dunning's words, "that Glastonbury might stand as a beacon for the survival of the Church of England against her political enemies"[17]. There was thus an Anglican 'in-crowd', which, given the evidence for Anglican endorsement of the Thorn, might be expected to have one set of ideas about the town's antiquity and antiquities; and there was an excluded Dissenter population who might plausibly have another. Yet because a large part of the Abbey ruins were let to a tenant described by William Stukeley as a "Presbyterian", who treated it as a building quarry, this tendency is often taken as typical of the whole town[18].

In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that this tenant's attitude was not at all typical, even amongst his neighbours. Charles Eyston in 1712 found that "a considerable part of the enclosure" of the abbey was let to an innkeeper who plied his guests with lashings of legendary history and can hardly have approved of his neighbour's endeavours to wipe out the very feature upon which his passing trade depended. The Abbot's Kitchen likewise was occupied by another tenant who had very different ideas about the value of local antiquities to those of his Presbyterian neighbour; hence the building's survival, in good order, to this day.

Already some of Glastonbury's great-and-good were keyed into the commercial possibilities of its antiquity. According to Andrew Brice, the town's "chief Support" was to be found in "the Resort of People to see the Ruins of its Abbey"[19]. This may help to explain why the Corporation's coat-of-arms, as well as confirming its devotion to the cause of Anglicanism, contains more than a nod to the town's antiquity. The mitre and crosiers evoke the authority of the Abbot, and suggest a link with its legendary origins: for where better than the hometown of the first church in England to stand as a beacon for the Church of England's future?

To visitors, Glastonbury was a place of quasi-secular pilgrimage, mystically embedded in the roots of English national identity; and by the time the early travel-writers came to record their impressions the Glastonbury 'tourist industry' was already displaying an impressive degree of organisation, with a landscape to explore and guides to take you round.

A 'storyline' was developing. Defoe was told that "there are two pieces of antiquity, which were to be inquired of in this place" (King Arthur's burial-place and Joseph's Thorn). Once informed, Defoe "took guides afterward, to see what demonstrations there could be given of all these things; they went over the ruins of the place with me, telling me, which part every particular piece of building had been; and as for the white-thorn, they carried me to a gentleman's garden in the town, where it was preserved..."[20]. Wearyall Hill featured in the story, if perhaps not on the tour, since the Thorn had been grubbed up in the Civil War. Furthermore, as Defoe had found, offshoots were to be found in several places around the town. Celia Fiennes in 1698 found a bush growing "quite round a Chimney tunnell", by then much the worse for wear since "the superstitious Covet much and have gott some of it for their gardens"[21]. Selling cuttings had by then become quite a lucrative sideline. Andrew Paschal, Rector of Chedzoy on the Somerset Levels, told John Aubrey that 'There is a person about Glastonbury who has a nursery of them, who... sells them for a crown a piece, or as he can get,' and there were shoots growing in the gardens of various inns, presumably for the benefit of visitors[22].

There were other features too. Although the walnut tree in the holy graveyard that never blossomed before St Barnabas' Day had gone by Eyston's time, his innkeeper was able to tell him of another arboreal anomaly, the Oak of Avalon, planted not far from the town at the place where Joseph disembarked, having presumably sailed across the Levels in flood[23].And already there were slightly weirder, less official aspects to the Glastonbury legend that might have attracted visitors. The possibility of finding magic treasure, for instance. In 1652 Elias Ashmole found it "generally reported" that Doctor Dee and Edward Kelly had discovered "a very large quantity of the Elixir in some part of the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey" - the elixir needed to make the Philosopher's Stone. This tale may be related to the story heard by Celia Fiennes that somewhere in the Abbey precinct was a deep cellar in which the Devil sat "on a tun of money"[24]. How well known Ashmole's account was can only be guessed; it was from time to time repeated[25], and it is certainly possible that some visitors to the Abbey were hoping to find the Elixir, or the Treasure, or both. Another dimension was added in the eighteenth century by the rediscovery of the Druids, adopted and adapted by William Stukeley and others as proto-Christians. John Wood, the architect of Bath, was one such, committed to a complex and personal theory in which Bath was a major Druidical site, on a par with such sites as the stone circles of Stanton Drew and Stonehenge. Glastonbury is only twenty-three miles from Bath; where could be more natural, he asked in his Choir Gaure, Vulgarly called Stonehenge (1747), for Joseph of Arimathea to set up his stall than here, "in the very Heart of all the Druidical Works above mentioned, to preach the Christian Faith to the Britons"[26]? Again it's hard to quantify the influence of this book, but in Bath at least Wood was certainly illustrious, and some of his readers might have been tempted to venture deeper into the Druidical heartland.

Spelmanism

To traders and merchants and shopkeepers and innkeepers, then, the town's antiquities were already a source of income and were presumably revered as such, even if they could do little to prevent one obnoxious Abbey tenant from demolishing the buildings on his plot. But there are indications that the reverence of some townspeople transcended straightforward commercialism. Observers recorded a 'superstitious' reverence for the abbey's surviving ruins, reflecting a growing sense of unease about the sacrilege and iconoclasm that had accompanied the Reformation, and particularly in the wholesale transfer of ecclesiastical lands into private hands. It was a concern epitomised by the work of the eminent seventeenth-century jurist and antiquarian Sir Henry Spelman, who as early as 1637 had been told of how a sacrilegious plough, wielded by an unconcerned tenant in Glastonbury Abbey's holiest erthe, had led to the posthumous return of "a great many Abbots in rich mitres and copes" to reclaim their remains; the tenant lost a fortune[27]. Spelman, who had himself come to grief over former ecclesiastical lands he'd bought in Norfolk, collected many other such examples, but as those who'd benefited from Henry VIII's great land-grab were also running the country neither he nor his heirs much cared to commit his views to print: his History and Fate of Sacrilege was not published until 1698, many years after his death.

Whether the publication of his book unleashed some sense of pent-up guilt or merely reflected a trend that had been going on for some time, it seems that 'Spelmanism' was not only alive and well in eighteenth-century Glastonbury, but may even have been on the increase. Stukeley observed that "throughout the town are the tatter'd remains of doors, windows, bases, capitals of pillars, &c, brought from the abby and put into every poor cottage", but such carefree plundering seemed to belong to an earlier age, since during his visit, not long after Eyston's, he "observ'd frequent instances of the townsmen being generally afraid" to buy materials from the architectural breaker's yard that the abbey had become, "thinking an unlucky fate attends the family where these materials are us'd, and they told me many storys and particular instances of it. Others that are but half religious will venture to build stables and outhouses therewith, but by no means part of the dwelling-house"[28].

Eyston and Stukeley were both told how the onset of the town's commercial misfortunes was linked to the recent construction of a Market House out of Abbey stone; the same tale - and others similar - were circulating in 1751[29] (to the concern of the sophisticated, about which more anon). John Jackson in 1755 was told that the owner of Wearyall Hill was punished for preventing visitors from reaching the Holy Thorn that grew upon his land: 'he died a beggar'[30]; and some of the same sense of divine retribution on those who sought to interfere with the town's miracles is apparent in popular reaction to the 'privatisation' of its waters, as will become apparent later in this paper.

It has to be said that 'Spelmanism' failed to deter either the Presbyterian tenant or his immediate successors, who as late as the 1780s were blithely selling Abbey stone for road-grit[31]. All I wish to do here is to suggest the existence of some other strands of thinking amongst Glastonbury's population. Both nationally and locally, Glastonbury had a specific meaning in the mid-eighteenth century, a cocktail of high holiness and mystery, of national roots and slighted antiquity. Far from wanting to eliminate all traces of the past, a significant number of eminent locals were either regretting the damage that had already been done, or were already seeing antiquity as the way ahead.

2: Glastonbury's Amazing Spring, 1751

In his own words:

"Matthew Chancellor, of the Parish of North Wooton, three miles North East of Glastonbury in the County of Somerset, Yeoman, doth hereby declare, that he hath made Oath before one of his Majesty's Justice of the Peace, That about the Middle of October last, he had a violent Fit of the Asthma in the Night-Time; after which he fell on Sleep, and dream'd he was some Way above Chain-Gate, in the Road above the Wall of Glastonbury Abbey-Gate, where he saw some of the finest of Water in the Horse-track; when he imagined he kneeled immediately, and drank some of it; and as soon as he was rais'd again on his Legs, there was seemingly a Person stood by him, pointing with his Finger, and saying, Take you a clean Glass, and drink you of this Water, a Glass full Seven Sundays following in the Morning fasting, and you will find a perfect Cure of your Disorder. He ask'd, Why Seven Sundays in the Morning? He said, The World was made in six Days, and on the Seventh God Almighty rested from his labour, and blessed it above all other Days. Moreover, he said, Where this Water descends from, is holy Ground, where a vast Number of Saints and Martyrs have been buried; when he added something concerning the Baptism of the ever Blessed JESUS in the River Jordan. He is not certain whether it was Wednesday or Thursday Night he thus dreamed; but the Sunday following he went to Glastonbury, and took a clean Glass, went to the Shoot, dipt the Glass into the Shoot three several Times, drank to the value of half a Noggin, and returned God Thanks; and so continued every Sunday till the Seven Sundays were expired: From which Time he thought himself perfectly cured of that Disorder, which he laboured under more than 30 Years.

This is a true Account of my Case, and the Substance or Meaning of what I have made Affidavit to; as witness my Hand this 2d of June 1751.

Not a huge amount of information can be added to this tale. The North Wootton parish registers confirm that a Matthew Chancellor was baptised on 22 January 1693, was married to a woman called Christian, and that they had ten children, of whom five died in infancy[33]. Those who sought to mock him called him 'dotard', 'Catholic' and 'pauper', and doubtless worse; but he himself claimed that he "hath about Forty Pounds a Year Estate of his own, on which he hath, with some Difficulty, trained up six Children"[34]. The extra child was maybe born in Glastonbury, where Chancellor appears to have been a stalwart of the congregation of St John the Baptist Church; he was buried there in 1765[35]. He seems to have taken his place at the Chain Gate every Sunday, willing to tell his tale to anyone that would listen. When the Pump Room was opened, he was "made Pumper": a somewhat arduous reward, perhaps, for a man of sixty; but then, he had been cured of his asthma[36].

Dreams are notoriously tricky things to analyse, but a couple of elements in Chancellor's dream reflect information that Chancellor had presumably heard or read elsewhere. The ritual of the seven Sundays, likewise the reference to the Jordan, have something in common with the story told in 2 Kings 5, in which the leper Naaman was told by the prophet Elijah to wash seven times in the River Jordan; he did so, and was cured. More interesting, perhaps, is the description of the Abbey as "holy Ground, where a vast Number of Saints and Martyrs have been buried", for this was how the medieval chroniclers of Glastonbury also described the Abbey cemetery, a place rendered so holy by virtue of all the saintly people buried there that even a Sultan in the Holy Land was aware of "the virtue which resides in that earth"[37]. It seems that this legend, in anecdotal form at least, was still known in mid-eighteenth-century Glastonbury.

The first published accounts of the phenomenon, however, make no mention of the miraculous dream; nor is it altogether clear when other people started following Matthew's example. Calculating backwards from later accounts, it seems that a sizeable number of people had embarked upon their seven Sundays in mid-March, and Chancellor may have sworn his first statement before the end of the month. Not until April 1 did the phenomenon reach the newspapers, however; on that (some might say inauspicious) day the Bath Journal announced the discovery of these Waters' "virtues". They were described as "of a very purgative Nature, and perform many surprising Cures...and its Fame spreads still more, from the Experience of the whole Country round"[38].

On April 16, the Gloucester Journal also commented on the Water's "surprising Cures... and its Fame increases daily. In short, it is thought that, last Sunday, not less than 800 Persons from different Parts came to drink of this Water"[39]. By 17 April news had reached the Capital, the Penny London Post reporting that "great Numbers have resorted thither, and many have received great Benefit"[40].

The trickle of would-be-cureds became a stream, became a flood. During the month of May, according to Fleming, "above six thousand people were incamped at one time in the fields contiguous to the town, which was likewise greatly crouded"[41]. Others put the figure at 10,000: the London-based Historical Chronicle, for instance, claiming that people were deserting Bristol, Bath, and other popular resorts[42]. By June 18, it was reported that all accommodation in Glastonbury, Wells and the villages all around was taken; yet still they came. According to a letter from 'PW' in the London Daily Advertiser for July 11, some 20,000 people had come to take the waters 'within this month'[43].

The Nature of the Cure

The Glastonbury waters were said to be "very agreeable to the Taste, give great Spirits, and create a vast Appetite"[44], but what exactly were they held to be good for, and who came to take them? We have lots of information, for in addition to the many reports in provincial papers at least four accounts were printed as separate publications.

The first of these was a letter written by "an ingenious and sensible Clergyman" (hereinafter 'Ingenious Clergyman'), dated April 23 and first printed in the Sherborne Mercury six days later. The 'Ingenious Clergyman' purports to be a visitor, whose first impression was that all must be "Sham and Delusion", but nonetheless decided to look into it further. He distanced himself from the Miracle, choosing "to leave such Legendary Stuff with the superstitious Vulgar", and gave potted case-histories of six successful cures[45].

The next, in point of time, took the form of "a letter to a lady", dated June 15, from "a disinterested clergyman" who signed himself as J. Davies of Plympton, near Plymouth in Devon. It was published as a 23-page pamphlet by the Exeter printer and newspaper proprietor Andrew Brice, with the title A short description of the waters at Glastonbury, together with an impartial account of the effects thereof in a variety of cases. When the booklet first appeared is unclear, but it was first advertised in the Sherborne Mercury on 12 August[46]. Davies wishes to collect information for a lady of refined tastes: "Your ingenious Queries, Doubts and Scruples, about the Virtue and Efficacy of Glastonbury Waters, and the Politeness and Accommodations of the Place, are such as I can, by no Means, pretend to resolve to your Satisfaction"; but he nonetheless gives a detailed account of the places from whence the water was taken and attempts to explain how the waters might work and how they should be administered, together with a further thirty case-histories.

The most ambitious and most informative pamphlet was written by an anonymous "Inhabitant of Bath" and bore the assertive title of John v.6. Wilt thou be made whole?, or, The virtues and efficacy of the water of Glastonbury in the county of Somerset: the reference is to Christ's healing ministry at the pool in Bethesda. This pamphlet ran to seventy-one pages, including a full reprint of the account by the 'Ingenious Clergyman', and was published by Benjamin Matthews, a Bath bookseller. It was advertised in the Bath Journal on June 24; the advert lists an impressive 19 outlets between London and Glastonbury, along or near to the Bath Road[47]. The 'Inhabitant of Bath' claimed to have a child suffering from the King's Evil. He arrived in Glastonbury on May 28 and immediately began collecting testimonials. He seems to have stayed in a town a week or so and then returned via Wells, the Mendips and Bristol, collecting further testimonials on route; in all, he added a further twenty-seven to the tally already published.

The last of these four was first issued as a seven-part weekly serial by Robert Goadby, publisher of the Sherborne Mercury, between July 29 and September 9. Published separately as a little book of some 115 pages, entitled A compleat and authentick history of the town and abbey of Glastonbury, To which is added, an accurate account of the properties and uses of the mineral waters there, it purported to be by 'A Physician', and so will hereinafter be described as such. This may have been the much-awaited medical account of the waters' efficacy[48] but it contained little in the way of new information - only six new cures were added to the pile - and a good deal of old history, copied uncritically from Camden, Eyston and Dugdale's continuator Stevens. It was nonetheless a good seller, as the Mercury itself acknowledged,[49] and a second edition was printed.

From these four accounts, a total of seventy-two attested cures have been extracted. Not all of them give complete information, but there is enough to be able to make a few general observations. Thirty-four were female, thirty-eight male. Of seventeen whose ages were given, the average age was thirty-seven. Of thirty-one where the occupation is given, either their own or that of the husband or father, seven are farmers or yeomen, five are servants, soldiers, sailors, paupers. Three could be classed as gentry, but over half (seventeen) were tradesmen of various kinds. Six were in the cloth trade, which is little surprise in that part of Somerset. A surprising number were local. Out of 65 testimonials with traceable addresses, 57 came from within 35 miles of Glastonbury. 41 lived less than 20 miles away. No less than 22 people lived either in the town or within five miles of it.

Ninety-nine different ailments were reported (some people were suffering from more than one thing). Twenty reported cures from disfiguring ailments (of which 11 were for the 'King's Evil', now called scrofula). Thirteen reported cures for respiratory problems, of which 11 were for asthma, Matthew Chancellor's original complaint. A range of other internal complaints, including childbirth wounds, scurvy, abscesses and cancers, accounted for a further 15 cures. Seven people reported improvements to their eyesight, three to their hearing. Various fevers, agues, humours and palsies accounted for another seven. No less than 34 cures were reported for people with mobility problems, due to swollen or broken limbs, rheumatism and hip pains.

How accurate this information might be is anybody's guess. Some testimonials might have been made up, others altered or abridged. What is interesting is that the audience they were designed to reach presumably had a similar profile to that of the people who were cured: the respectable 'poor-to-middling sort' who could not easily afford doctor's fees, but with down-to-earth trades and occupations whose solidity lent credibility to the phenomenon.

The Glastonbury Spa

Establishing credibility was the essential first step to that ultimate prize, the establishment of a spa. This was the century par excellence of 'spa culture', and in 1751 the spa was approaching the height of its popularity: Phyllis Hembry's figures show that an average of eight spas a decade were being discovered or developed in England between 1700 and 1749; this rose to 13 in the decade 1750-59[50].

Glastonbury was very close to Bath, the most successful spa of all, which in a couple of generations had been transformed from a small Somerset town into a European centre of fashion; and to some that first summer it must have seemed as though the same miracle could happen for Glastonbury. Curious visitors came from "distant Parts, nay, even from London... Bath and Bristol have lost their Company", reported one 'Letter' from Glastonbury that June, with ill-disguised glee[51]. It's significant that the most important collection of testimonials was published in Bath and collected by a self-styled "Inhabitant of Bath", and as we'll see the threat was taken seriously enough for the proprietors of the Bath Journal to resort to high-profile ridicule by way of retort.

It is impossible to say who was behind the drive to transform the town, if indeed there was anyone at all; but various members of the Corporation were prominent in the process. When the Corporation was set up in 1705, the town was sorely in need of an economic boost. Celia Fiennes in 1698 had described Glastonbury as "now a Ragged poor place... very Ragged and decayed", and the Hearth Tax returns disclose a "remarkable" number of small houses[52]. Although the Corporation's functions were limited mainly to the maintenance of law-and-order - and, a cynic might say, themselves, as a self-electing, Whiggish (pro-Government) oligarchy - its membership was relatively dynamic from the start. Individually or collectively, they were involved in building a new Market House that came to serve as Town Hall and jailhouse[53], and in promoting Somerset's first Enclosure Act, passed in 1722. Corporation members also backed the Wells Turnpike Act of 1753, which held out the promise of a well-surfaced road connection between Glastonbury, Bath and London. Preparation for this Act must have been well under way in the spring of 1751, and made the spa venture seem even more feasible. John Cannon, who served as Clerk to the Corporation in the 1730s, described its members as "naturally given to conceit and self interest"[54], but that seems a little bit harsh. The Corporators were simply typical eighteenth-century 'Improvers', combining the pursuit of private and public profit, and unclear where the difference lay.

Amongst the Corporators of 1751, the Mayor, Thomas White, stands out as a particularly prominent supporter of the Waters phenomenon. It was White who attested Chancellor's cure, and a further eight of them; it was White who, as we shall see, brokered the deal to sell the water in London; it was White, and three other senior members of the Corporation, who as 'Proprietors of the Waters' signed the deal[55]. Others to take a keen interest included the Gould family, gentry from Sharpham Park just outside the town, who for almost sixty years filled the Corporation's two most senior posts[56]. Davies was informed that Cornelius Castle of Sharpham Park, if not a retainer then a very close neighbour, had been cured of a 'stubborn hot humour' by taking the waters. He was also informed by 'the Rev Mr Gold', almost certainly Davidge Gould's son William, that "a servant of his father" had been cured of the Evil. William Gould was of a scientific bent - a naturalist whose pioneering work on ants has earned him the memorable title of "father of British myrmecology" - and he was probably the author of a 280-page Enquiry into the Origins, Nature and Virtues of the Glastonbury Waters[57]. Finally, it was probably a member of the Gould family that persuaded Henry Fielding to add the role of water-seller to his other, better-known careers, of which more anon.

The entrepreneurial spirit was not slow in manifesting itself. Already by June 15, the Rev. Davies reported that "two Baths are now making to bathe in". One of these was at the Chaingate itself, perhaps on the site now occupied by a row of red-brick cottages. This was presumably "the great stone trough for washing and bathing in" that John Jackson saw in late 1755, contained in a house "like an old forsaken kitchin [sic]". It is hard to know what to make of these descriptions, unless the place had previously been used as a wash-house of some kind and now warranted a grander designation[58].

Next to this impromptu bath-house was the remarkable building constructed in 1714 from the remains of the Abbot's lodging. According to 'A Physician', this house had now become "a Coffee House for the Reception and Convenience of those who bathe and drink the Waters at the Chain-Gate"; it was also selling copies of Wilt thou be made whole?, and by great good fortune "the oldest and largest" graft from the original Glastonbury Thorn was to be found in its garden too[59].

The bath-house was soon to be supplemented by something that aspired to be far grander: a Pump Room, that indispensable attribute of a successful spa. It was built by Anne Galloway (sometimes spelt 'Gallaway'), who described herself as "from Bath, late Shopkeeper in Cheltenham, now in Glastonbury"[60], thereby testifying to her experience of the country's most famous spas. In June 1752 Galloway took out advertisements in a series of West Country journals announcing the forthcoming erection of "a commodious pump-house and baths... with other conveniences." She was nothing if not ambitious. "An assembly-room is preparing, and will soon be finish'd... a large, commodious house, pleasantly situated near the Abby, with five rooms on a floor, will be completely finish'd, and ready to let for lodgings in about a fortnight or three weeks". Perhaps in response to concerns about the quality of the water, the advert claimed that "the waters in this town are almost all cover'd along the roadway, and the rest is intended to be done as soon as possible". She offered a comprehensive range of other services: "all persons wanting to buy or sell, lett or rent, estates or lodgings, or to put out or take up money, or that want apprentices or servants, as also servants etc wanting places, may have their business register'd for one shilling each"[61]

Although Glastonbury had to wait another century for its Assembly Rooms, Galloway did succeed in building the Pump Room, just opposite the Chaingate Spout on Magdalene Street; or, more accurately, she converted a series of pre-existing cottages, grafting smart new Classical facades onto the two main frontages. It's still there today, Grade II* Listed, converted into a private dwelling[62]. (So, too, is the Chaingate Spout - now surmounted by a warning not to drink the water!)

The Pump Room was built at Galloway's own expense, as she was fond of pointing out, although she invited subscribers to share the burden and be recompensed with annual season tickets. An elevation of the new building was published in the Gentleman's Magazine in August 1753, and the publisher was stated to be handling potential subscriptions: a neat 'tie-in' with the Press of which any modern entrepreneur would be proud. The same well-respected magazine announced the Pump Room's opening in October, claiming that the Waters "increases in reputation every day"[63].

The Chalice Well

Matthew Chancellor's visionary adviser was quite explicit: the waters were to be drunk at the Chain Gate. The very first press announcements back in April, however, took pains to point out that the water came from "Six Mineral Springs, which issue from the North-side of St Michael's Mount, commonly called Tor-Hill" and made their way across the Abbey site to Chain Gate[64].

The most important of these springs was the famous Chalice Well, then also known as the Blood or Bloody Well from the reddish-brown iron deposit through which the water rises. Modern commentators have suggested that the introduction of the Chalice Well into this story is anachronistic, dating perhaps from the late nineteenth century, but both Davies and 'A Physician' are quite clear about this; indeed the account in 'A Physician may be the first time that the name 'Chalice Well' appeared in print. The confusion is not surprising, since even at the time people were unsure. According to Davies, the difference in water types "cause a good deal of Doubting and Uncertainty in those that go to Glastonbury about the most beneficial Place to drink the Waters, some drinking it near the Spring-head, others (and that the greater part) at Chaingate, and others drinking it sometimes at one Place and sometimes at another". 'A Physician' was likewise clear that the Chain Gate source was the more popular: "the World [is] so much prejudiced in Favour of that particular Spot", but he considered the water to be more "dilute" there than at the Chalice Well[65].

The Chalice Well site may have been considered as the more salubrious, at least before the Pump Room at the Chain Gate was built. Already by June 1751 the Rev. Davies was observing that "Over the Bloody Well there has been lately a large House built, designed, as I am informed, for a Pump Room". This other Pump Room has disappeared, if it was ever completed; but the stone immersion bath survives, set in a stone-flagged courtyard. Beside the well itself is an 'inner chamber' of irregular shape and indeterminate function that puzzled Rahtz and Radford when they excavated the site in 1961. They suggested that it may have been a sedimentation tank, but it may have been connected with the bottling operation which, from June that year or earlier, was despatching the precious liquid to the Capital[66].

Henry Fielding and the London link

Anne Galloway's comprehensive range of services was perhaps modelled on the example of another enterprise that sought to cash in on the Glastonbury phenomenon. This was the Universal Register Office, a venture established in London in February 1750 by two of the eighteenth century's most famous figures, the half-brothers John and Henry Fielding, which in July 1751 acquired a monopoly on sales of Glastonbury water in London[67].

Entrepreneur, magistrate, social reformer, playwright, author of Tom Jones and several other seminal novels, Henry Fielding was then at the height of his fame; according to one contemporary, he had become 'much the greatest Man in the three Kingdoms'[68]. His involvement with the Glastonbury Waters has not surprisingly been treated as a quirky footnote in studies of his own life and work, but from the Glastonbury perspective his influence may have been significant.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that Fielding seems to have been a genuine believer in the potency of the Glastonbury Waters. His health was failing (he had cirrhosis of the liver), and in early August 1751 he set out with his wife and daughter to take the Waters at Bath, but by the 24^th they'd moved on to Glastonbury. They returned to London on September 12, and Fielding informed the London Daily Advertiser that he had "received great Benefit" from the Glastonbury waters. His biographer, Martin Battestin, believes that Fielding is the author of a long and vitriolic defence of their qualities, published in the General Advertiser on October 8, and his novel Amelia, published on December 19, concludes with a character who was "last Summer perfectly cured by the Glastonbury waters"[69].

Fielding had strong local connections. Henry (though not John) was born at Sharpham Park, and his uncle was Davidge Gould, one-time Recorder of Glastonbury. Nephew and uncle appear to have remained on good terms; certainly Battestin suggests that Henry stayed at Sharpham when he came to take the Waters in August 1751. He was in these parts in 1746, investigating the salacious tale of a lesbian who married a woman as a husband and convinced her for two months. The 'husband' was prosecuted by "Mr Gold, an eminent and learned counsellor at law"; this was almost certainly Henry's cousin Henry Gould, who in 1748 succeeded his father as Recorder of Glastonbury[70]. Motivated either by concern for the failing health of their kinsman, or a hope that he might apply his renowned entrepreneurialism to improve the failing health of their town, or a combination of both, the Gould connection seems a likely conduit for early and 'insider' information to have reached Henry Fielding[71].

In March 1751 the URO published the first of eight editions of Henry Fielding's A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, a seventeen-page publicity brochure in which the URO was presented as a general-purpose agency for buying, selling and renting property, for employment, for finance and insurance, education, ship and coach timetables, parcel dispatch... "be the Wants of Persons ever so singular or extraordinary, 'tis highly probable they may have them supplied by enquiring at this Office"[72].

Glastonbury's miraculous water was that season's most singular and extraordinary Want. Already in June John Brooks of Blue Boar Court in Friday Street was offering sealed bottles at 1/6d a quart, "In Fine Order, being fresh taken up at the Spring Head". Nor was Brooks the first, since he warned the public against "a spurious Sort sold for the real Waters" which was selling much more cheaply. This was apparently drawn from the Chain Gate, since Brooks describes it as "only the waste water taken up a Mile distant from the Spring"[73]. "Waste water"! Matthew Chancellor must have been mortified.

Somehow the Fieldings managed to squeeze Brooks out. One brother or the other journeyed to Glastonbury and hatched a "Scheme" with Thomas White, the enigmatic Mayor, the upshot of which was an Agreement, signed on July 8, in which the "Proprietors of Glastonbury Waters", identified as White and three other members of the Corporation, accorded the URO the right to sell "our Mineral Waters in London", and "no body else, whatever".

This agreement was announced in the London Daily Advertiser for July 25. Readers were informed that the Waters "are now fresh arrived from the Spring Head", and were available from the URO at 14d a bottle, including 2d deposit. This was a tanner a quart cheaper than Brooks had been charging, but it was still relatively pricey compared to other mineral waters, some measure of the faith that people had in their potency[74].

Corporate Dividends

The 'Ingenious Clergyman' in the Sherborne Mercury made no bones about his hopes for the Waters. He wanted their curative properties to be proven, "for the Good of Mankind, and the Revival of old decay'd Glastonbury"[75]. Some observers suggested that furthering the good of Glastonbury's mankind, or some of them, had much to do with the phenomenon. To Collinson, writing in 1792, "the whole story was designedly trumped up with a view of bringing custom to the town, which had strangely dwindled since the demolition of its abbey"[76]. To Brice, "some People here, in 1751, dream'd of being miraculously soon enabled to build superb Houses of their own, high as the Torr itself, and rich as ever was the Abbey"[77], and an unkind observer in the Gentleman's Magazine that August opined that

It is true enough that, in the short term, the town's great-and-good did very nicely out of the phenomenon. Accommodation was at a premium. The Rev. Davies listed several people, including the present Mayor, his successor, and the Vicar, who were willing to "board Strangers in a genteel Manner, most of them not exceeding Half a Guinea a Week"[79]. By mid-June, according to the Gloucester Journal, Glastonbury, Wells and the surrounding villages were "so full of People from distant Parts, nay, even from London, that the Inhabitants cannot procure them Lodgings", prompting "the Proprietor of the Waters" to build "small Lodging-Places, for the better Conveniencing of Persons who resort thither"[80]. By July 8, when the deal was struck with the Universal Register-office, the Proprietors turned out to be four in number, all senior members of the Corporation, all destined to serve as Mayors before 1755[81].

Self-interest does not necessarily equate with unbelief, however, least of all in the eighteenth century. Fielding profited from the sales of Glastonbury Water but nonetheless believed in them, coming to Glastonbury to take the Cure himself; and as we've seen his cousin William Gould, brother of the Town Recorder, was probably the author of a chunky manuscript about the phenomenon. Mayors and magistrates all risked their reputations by signing affidavits, and some were willing to testify personally. The "Mr Stibbens" whose son was cured of asthma[82] was probably White's successor as Mayor and one of the named 'Proprietors of the Waters', and in 1754 Mayor Blake (not, incidentally, one of those aqueous 'Proprietors') allowed his name to be used for one of Anne Galloway's testimonials: "Mr BLAKE, Mayor of this Town, who is a Gentleman in Years, and was afflicted with the Rheumatism and Gout, that he could not walk, is now recovered by Bathing"[83].

Collapse

Any hopes the civic fathers might have had of transforming their town into a second Bath soon foundered, for the Glastonbury Spa rapidly evaporated. To Anne Galloway, it was the "Want of proper Accommodations" that had made it "like to fail amongst the better Sort": a want she sought to rectify with the Pump Room. Yet by February 1755 it was clear that even this venture was struggling. Although she had "been at a very large Expense, and taken a great Deal of Pain, to build a commodious House for drinking the Waters, and also another for Bathing, and other Conveniences", it was felt that a "more speedy Success" might be obtained were there to be "an Annual Subscription paid to the Benefactrix, for the better encouraging her to continue in the Service, for the general Good." A subscription of a guinea a head for the Season was suggested, but it seems that the subscribers stayed away[84].

Nor was the London trade so brisk as formerly. The URO adverts trail away after April 1752, and no more is heard of Henry Fielding at Glastonbury. Despite the miracle waters, his health continued to decline. In 1754 he went to Portugal to convalesce, but instead died there in October[85]. Fielding's publishers, doubtless concerned for the great man's reputation, deleted his plug for the Glastonbury Waters when they published a second edition of Amelia in 1771[86]. By 1779, John Collinson claimed, the waters had "entirely lost their reputation"^[87]. The following year, Samuel Saunders reported that the "neat and commodious pump-room, built at the expense of a lady" had been converted into a shop[88].

Why did the Spa collapse? The vagaries of fashion had something to do with it. Once visitors had tired of antiquities, and the limited amusements offered by the Pump Room and whatever was available at Chalice Well, there really wasn't very much for them to do in Glastonbury. "There is one Apothecary Shop and one Excise Office, but no Stationer Shop nor Post Office", noted John Jackson. "I am informed one man in the town keeps 50 Cows and makes 50 Hogsheads of Sider every year"[89], he added, confirming that Glastonbury was still a rough-and-ready country town. The Rev. Davies in 1751 intimated that "the Politeness of the Place" might be improved upon, and hoped that "the Dung and the Nuisances will be remov'd from the streets", but nothing much seems to have happened. Nearly five years later Jackson found it hard to get to St Benedict's Church, barely fifty yards from the Market Cross, because there was "a great deal of muck and mire"[90]. The Royal Almshouses, immediately adjacent to the Pump Room, were "decayed and ruinous", their roofs collapsed and the Chapel "so much out of repair that Divine Service cannot be performed with safety"; an eyesore that was not repaired until 1756 [91]. All in all, Glastonbury was a far cry from the Palladian terraces of Bath.

3: Hocus-Pocus

The lack of any scientific evidence for the waters' efficacity didn't help. "[T]he Infatuation is now over, and it is generally thought to be no better than any other common Water", wrote Russel in 1760[92]. Some even thought that it might be dangerous. As early as June 1751 reports were circulating of people actually dying from drinking too much of it, an unfortunate consequence attributed by 'A Physician' to the fact that the first wave of credulous, Dream-inspired curists had pre-empted all advice on dosage. Though the Fieldings responded by querying the credentials of the 'Pipkin Chymist' who dared to make such assertions, such news must have dampened the enthusiasm of more timorous curists[93].

But it was the nature of Matthew Chancellor's claim that really destroyed any chance of the Spa succeeding with polite society. There was all the difference in the world between the discovery of some scientifically-attestable quality in the Waters, and a discovery based on revelation. When news of the Waters first broke in April, the Gloucester Journal called it 'a very providential discovery'[94]; when however Matthew Chancellor made clear the manner in which Providence had been moved to act, support turned to mockery and scorn. As early as May 20, a Jewish contributor to the London Daily Advertiser was wondering whether the waters might, in his case, be more efficacious if taken on a Saturday rather than a Sunday. A wag writing in the General Advertiser for June 5 claimed that the bottomless "Haymarket Quart Bottle" had been sent down to Glastonbury for filling, since according to the "Visionary Prophet" the supply of "that wonderful Water" was as infinite as faith, and London was full of credulous people[95].

Bath, it was said, had been losing custom to the upstart new spa, so it's perhaps not surprising to find the Bath Journal in the vanguard of the mockery. On June 10, a third of the front page was given over to a lengthy poem called 'Superstition, A Tale: Or, The Glastonbury Pilgrimage', which concluded that only "solid Fact and Cure" would guarantee the new Spa's reputation: "all the Rest is - HOCUS-POCUS"[96]. Six weeks later, the same journal published an even more acerbic "sequel to Matthew Chancellor's Dream", in which the Author claimed to be have been anointed by "the Genius of the healing Fount", charged to proclaim that, once all physical infirmities had been cured, "Their wond'rous Virtues next will reach the Mind." All social ills would be righted:

A Pious Fraud?

To many contemporaries, Matthew Chancellor's vision was not only daft, but dangerous. The seven Sundays, the bones of saints and martyrs, the dream itself, all smacked of Papistry - and Glastonbury, despite its Protestant present, was mostly renowned for its Catholic past[98]. The anonymous author of 'Superstition, a Tale' (who later turned out to be Samuel Bowden, a physician of Frome[99]), suggested that Abbot Whiting would have been delighted to see "this deluded rabble", squabbling "for this Holy Water"

People were prone to asking Matthew Chancellor directly about his religious habits, and he was forthright in his replies. He was "no Roman Catholic", he declared to the Rev. Davies. He told the 'Inhabitant of Bath' that he professed the religion of the Church of England - "adding, he was baptized, educated, and hath trained up his Family in it" a statement which, as we have seen, is borne out by the parish registers[100]. But although Chancellor himself might have been innocent of all Papistry, it is possible that those around him were less so. Glastonbury Spa was quite consciously vying for Bath's clientele, and Bath was notoriously soft on Catholics[101]. As Phyllis Hembry observed, this may explain why Anne Galloway's Pump Room was in 1755 advertised as being closed "on days of abstinence"[102]. Richard Russel, writing in 1760, did indeed believe that Chancellor's story had brought the Catholics to Glastonbury, at least initially[103], a claim supported by the survival of copies of Chancellor's testimony in the archives of at least two Catholic gentry families[104].

It is just possible that the Chalice Well really might have been a discrete meeting-place for Catholics before 1751. There's the name, to begin with. Some suggest that it may be no older than the late nineteenth century, cooked up by the lively imaginations of the Catholic community that then owned the site[105]. A legal document dated 1716, however, describes part of present-day Chalice Hill as "a ground called Challice", and the same term crops up in rate-books from the 1730s[106]. 'Challice' could be a corrupt form of another word; it could even have been someone's surname; but it could also be recalling the medieval prophecy which claimed that Joseph of Arimathea had been buried at Glastonbury with

Late-medieval Glastonbury images of Joseph show him holding these two precious containers, which were even incorporated into a coat-of-arms[107]. If Joseph's staff were to be found on Wearyall Hill, why should his chalice(s) not be found at the foot of the Tor?

Catholics were certainly involved in the post-Reformation development of the Glastonbury legend. Alex Walsham has shown that the recusant priest Richard Broughton, writing in 1633, was the first to link Joseph and the flowering staff[108]; the same Broughton, quoting from Dr Montague's "Panegiricall entertainement" for Queen Anne, claims that Joseph had been sent "to bring the waters of life into this isle of Britayne", and was buried in the Isle of Avalon after he "had planted and watered"[109]. It may be reading too much into these allusions to suggest that the source of these "waters of life" was already being identified with the Chalice Well, but it is interesting that the 'Oak of Avalon' makes its first appearance in the records at around the same time. Walsham suggests that "there are reasons for believing that the seminary priests and Jesuits sent back to England after 1574 sometimes quite deliberately harnessed natural features of the landscape as arenas for their evangelical activities"[110]. It is possible, therefore, that all three features - the Thorn, the Oak, and Chalice Well - had become such Catholic 'arenas'; but of hard evidence is there none. There was a 'holy well', or at least the memory of one, in mid-eighteenth century Glastonbury, but it was a mile away to the north, off what's now the Old Wells Road[111]. And if Chalice Well was thought to have special properties, it is odd that it was not on the tourist itineraries dished out to Eyston and Defoe. However, 'Avalon's Oak', noted by Eyston in 1712 and recorded in the dry pages of the Overseer's Rate Books for 1736 and probably later[112], went completely unmentioned by the 1751 observers. If one element in the legendary landscape could so easily be forgotten or dropped, then another might be too. In the absence of any good evidence, all that can reasonably be said is that the association between Joseph and the Chalice Well, whether propagated by Catholics or otherwise, must date at least from the first reference to the Well, in the summer of 1751.

If there was any kind of 'papist plot' behind the Waters phenomenon, it was certainly unknown to the town's leaders, tied in by Statute to the promotion of the Church of England. What is interesting is the Church of England's own role in the whole affair, since it is clear that some Anglican clergy were decidedly 'enthusiastical' about Glastonbury Waters. They deputised for the civil authorities in taking testimonials from parishioners outside the town;[113] they brought parishioners' cures to the notice of the compilers of testimonials[114]; they compiled testimonials themselves (the Rev. Davies, the 'Ingenious Clergyman', the Rev. Gould). Glastonbury's own Minister offered lodgings to curists; Grace Clement, his Clerk's daughter, was cured of consumption by the waters and James Bartlet, the 80-year old sexton, "after many Years' Infirmity, is, without any Manner of Doubt, recovered to a good State of Health"[115]. Matthew Chancellor himself, as we have seen, was a regular member of the congregation.

Why were these High Church folk so keen? The identity of the bookseller who published the testimonials of the 'Inhabitant of Bath' may provide a clue. This was Benjamin Matthews of Bath, whose other publications were exclusively in support of High Church themes. His authors included the Bishop of Exeter, George Lavington, who in 1749 had published (elsewhere) a vitriolic best-seller called The enthusiasm of Methodists and papists compared. His central argument was that there was little to choose between Wesley's followers and the mendicant friars, who feigned poverty the better to take control of people's hearts and minds.

Might the Methodist threat help to explain the provocative, almost evangelical, title of the Inhabitant's pamphlet (John v.6. Wilt thou be made whole?)? Methodism was particularly strong in Somerset. John Wesley was based in Bristol, and was very active in its hinterland. The first groups to describe themselves as 'Methodists' were established on the Somerset levels in the 1740s, and Wesley had a strong following amongst the Mendip miners and the cloth-workers to the east. Anglican antipathy was extreme, with anti-Methodist riots orchestrated in many places[116].

It seems possible that Anglican support for the Waters represented yet another twist in the tale of accommodation and adaptation that the Church of England was playing with its competitors. They were endorsing a certain sort of mysterious agency, one with more than a whiff of Rome to it and yet derived from the kind of direct personal revelation that Wesley was incarnating. In their support for Chancellor's revelation, the Church of England was perhaps trying to assert that the direct encounter with the works of the Almighty which people were seeking outside the Church could also be found within it.

Insidious Craft

Papists and Methodists; both equally subversive, equally mischevious. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the Papist threat was tiny, but in the 1750s it seemed real enough. Catholicism was a political position, with treasonable connotations. As recently as 1745 Charles Stuart had invaded Scotland with the hopes of restoring a Catholic monarchy, and there were repercussions in Somerset. During the '45, the Bath-based vicar apostolic of the western district, William Laurence York, was denounced as a collaborator. The charges were probably false, but he was forced into hiding for a couple of years, part of which was spent somewhere not so far from Glastonbury "in a rural recusant enclave in the Mendips"[117] .

The patriotic leader-writer for the Gloucester Journal certainly took the threat seriously. He suggested that Chancellor's dream had either been "procur'd by the insidious Craft of a subtle and inveterate Enemy, who hopes to serve a Cause by the Ignorance of Superstition of the Common People", or else had been "improved by them, to serve their Ends". The aim of this "Pious Fraud" was to "destroy our Religious Protestant Principles" and so make it easier to impose "their Popish Yoke"; and he urged Enquiry to see "whether some Popish Emissaries have not been concern'd in promoting this Opinion"[118].

It seems significant that Anne Galloway, who in 1754 had wooed the Catholics by promising to observe the days of abstinence, a year later announced her intention "to be careful in having the Poor well instructed in their Duties, by lending them proper Books, as are recommended by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge", an anti-Catholic organisation[119]: she clearly felt the need to placate Protestant concerns. The Gloucester Journal writer may have represented an extreme position, but his views were reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine[120], and must have made the civic leaders feel more than a little uncomfortable, not least because the creation of the very Corporation they served had been justified, a generation earlier, on grounds of the better maintenance of law and order: "the morall of the inhabitants are corrupt, and cavill and breach of the peace very frequent"[121]. Just six years after the defeat of the Young Pretender, Mayor White and the town's Protestant leaders were actively endorsing a phenomenon that polite society was denouncing as Papist.

4: A Thorn in their side

'Jacobite' defiance

Whether the political threat was real or not - and it was probably not - the sort of visceral 'folk-papistry' that brought large numbers of people to Glastonbury in pursuit of a miracle cure spelt defiance of the values of the established order. Such phenomena were a fairly common form of popular disapprobation at this time: as E P Thompson remarked, "we can certainly say that the plebs on many occasions employed Jacobite symbolism successfully as theatre, knowing well that it was the script most calculated to enrage and alarm their Hanoverian rulers"[122].

The crowds that flocked to Glastonbury were certainly dominated by the "plebs" (Fielding called them "the lower Sort of People"[123]), and from the start they were a major source of discomfiture for the town's rulers. They did not seek to be boarded "in a genteel Manner", but instead camped out in the fields, to the annoyance of at least one 'surly Peasant' who threatened to poison the waters[124]. They lived how they could; already in June Davies was hoping that "the Poor that resort hither will soon be put under proper Regulations", to discourage "Mumpers and such sturdy Beggars as are no probable Objects of Cure, to the great Detriment of others that are real Objects of Cure and Compassion"[125].

On June 18 the following Notice was issued, presumably by the Glastonbury overseers of the poor:

"NOTICE is hereby given, THAT no poor Persons will be admitted into this Town to take the Benefit of the Mineral Waters, without bringing a proper Certificate from the Church-wardens and Overseers of their respective Parishes, that they will defray all the Expenses that may be occasioned by any Sickness or Casualty that may befall them during their Residence here".

The notice was repeated in three consecutive issues of the Sherborne Mercury during July[126], but doesn't seem to achieved much since the feckless poor were still coming three-and-a-half years later, when the same requirement was repeated[127]. To react more punitively might have undermined the ambiance of healing and goodwill upon which the miracle was based, and also the townsfolk's hopes of it. It might also have led to disorder, and even riot, that great bugbear of eighteenth-century administrators. In 1749, 500 Somerset labourers with blackened faces had destroyed turnpikes and property around Bristol and the authorities had thought it best to keep a low profile; similarly the Somerset magistrates' response to a series of riots in 1753 was "to let the spirit subside & not to provoke them for fear of the consequences"[128].

Thompson's concept of 'Jacobite theatre' as a form of protest by the ruled against their rulers seems very applicable to the case of Glastonbury. Even the ailments themselves for which people sought cures could be seen in this way. Of those testifying to cures, Matthew Chancellor's complaint (asthma) shared top billing with scrofula, known as "the King's Evil" since it was thought that the touch of a king could cure it. The Stuarts had made much of this power, including the two Jacobite Pretenders. The Hanoverians, however, scoffed at it, and refused to touch their scrofulitic subjects. Glastonbury Waters appeared to succeed where monarchs failed.

More examples of 'Jacobite theatre' might be found in the town's "Miracle-Mongers" whose activities caused the Gloucester Journal's anti-Catholic leader-writer much anguish. They accosted visitors with details of Chancellor's dream and "make it their Business to inform Strangers of this Affair on the Spot"; and they supplemented their accounts with anecdotes "in favour of their Legendary Miracles" - disastrous miracles, like those of Spelman, that demonstrated how things went wrong when profane folk meddled with the relics of holy antiquity. There was the oven, built of stone from the Abbey, that collapsed three times; and there was the Market House, also built from Abbey remains, whose building had led to the loss of the Market[129].

This last is particularly interesting since the Market House was also the seat of civic government and perhaps of civic pride. A large two-storey building, dominating (and eventually blocking) Magdalene Street, it was built, if not by the Corporation, then probably with the creation of the Corporation in mind. There was nothing new about the imputations of the "Miracle-Mongers". Eyston, who visited the town in 1712, had been "informed by a Man of Credit, living in the Neighbourhood of Glastonbury, that the Town hath lost, in great Measure, their Market since its Building", and referred specifically to Spelman by way of explanation. Stukeley, who visited soon afterwards, thought that building "a sorry mercat house" had contributed "to the ruin of the sacred fabric and to their own", explaining that the town "is in a most miserable decaying condition"[130]. What is interesting is that the same sentiments were being expressed on the streets of Glastonbury almost forty years later. Since the Corporation was set up primarily to enforce order, it may be that popular concern at the sacrilegious nature of the new civic construction actually reflected dislike at the new order which it represented.

Profaning the Sabbath

The ritual of the 'Seven Sundays' was a form of 'Jacobite theatre' that really wound up the authorities. Sound commercial sense suggested some advantage to spreading the spa's effects over the whole week, and indeed there was a growing tendency to treat the waters as medicinal rather than miraculous: all four testimonial-collectors had felt it necessary to distance themselves from the more miraculous aspects of Chancellor's account. Like many visionaries, however, Matthew Chancellor was a bit of a loose cannon; and on May 31 he went back to Mayor White and Justice Blake, and swore another affidavit in which he insisted that his cure was the result of "drinking a quarter of a Pint of the Waters from the Chain Gate, every Sunday Morning (and at no other Time) seven succeeding Sundays"[131].

The consequence of this was to turn Sunday in Glastonbury into something of a funfair. According to Andrew Brice,

"a Concourse of 10,000 ON A SUNDAY was very common, some to drink this holy Water, some to drink Ale and other prophane Liquors, some to bathe, some to stare and wonder, some to laugh, some to court, and others probably to be courted, some to sell Cakes, Gingerbread, Drams, Cherries, Appls, Nuts, some with other Fruit to sell, all blessed Consequences of the Dream's or Dreamer's thus pitching upon the Lord's Holy Day, in Effect, to be thus shockingly prophan'd"[132].

The Gloucester Journal writer, inevitably, saw in such profanation a sign of Papist subversion, designed to "destroy our Religious Protestant Principles"[133]. This was perhaps unlikely, but there is no doubt that the Sunday hordes soon began to test the patience of the civic leaders. In May 1752 the Minister, the Rev. Richard Prat, charged eighteen boys with playing on the Sabbath. The older ones were fined a shilling, "but the Ringleaders and most notorious offenders were ordered to the Stocks for three hours the next Market day which tis hoped will put a check to this open prophanation of the Lord's day"[134].

Old Christmas Past

The Rev. Prat found himself – reluctantly - at the heart of an even bigger bit of 'Jacobite theatre': resistance to Calendar reform. On May 22 in that fateful year of 1751 the Calendar Act was passed. Eleven days were to be dropped from the month of September 1752, in order to bring Britain into line with the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of Europe. Robert Poole's inspirational work has demonstrated that, contrary to previous speculation, the calendar change was not in itself the cause of widespread rioting, but it certainly caused a considerable amount of unease. Reform amounted to "an unintended piece of cultural engineering... the calendar was the spine of the year, and to reposition it was as messy as trying to bone a fish: flesh and vital organs remained attached"[135].

No event was more controversial than the rescheduling of Christmas. Dire predictions were rife; new carols were composed, including one in which the Lord threatened to level the walls of Jerusalem

Re-enter the Glastonbury Thorn, whose Christmas-flowering properties suddenly acquired a whole new significance. Would the holy plant observe the new regime, or would it defy Parliament and continue to blossom on the old day? "A vast concourse" of people came to Glastonbury for that Christmas of 1752-3 to find out. They "attended the Thorn on Christmas-Eve, New-Stile", claimed a report submitted to the Public Advertiser,

"but, to their great Disappointment, there was no Appearance of its blowing, which made them watch it narrowly the 5^th of January, the Christmas-Day, Old-Stile, when it blowed as usual, and in one Day's Time was as white as a Sheet, to the great Mortification of many Families in that Neighbourhood, who had tapp'd their Ale eleven Days too soon"[137].

It is possible that the same would-be entrepreneurs who had brought the Waters phenomenon into the national limelight also saw the tourist potential of the Christmas-flowering Thorn. Some visitors certainly travelled to Glastonbury for both: John Jackson journeyed not just to see the Thorn but also "to drink and bath at the Chaingate Waters", and he returned to Yorkshire with blossom "in two vials of Chaingate water"[138] It was certainly a profitable wheeze, as the Gloucester Journal noted, claiming unconvincingly that the Thorn and the town were "utter Strangers" to each other, yet "as these religious or curious People always spend some Money in the Town, they may depend upon being always welcome"[139].

Once again, however, publicising Glastonbury's miraculous attributes brought rather more interest than the town's leaders really wanted. A few weeks into the New Year, a "Paper" was printed at Hull and widely distributed around Yorkshire, and it caused much consternation and anxiety in that very far-flung region by publicising the Thorn's rebellious nature[140]. The "Paper" in question was a little eight-page chapbook entitled (or, more accurately, beginning with the words) The Wonderful Works of God, shewing the Difference between the Old Cdristmas [sic] and the New.

The Wonderful Works tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea; his presence at the Crucifixion, his arduous journey to Britain, the planting of his staff on Wearyall Hill, the building of the Old Church, how he baptised "above 5000 Persons in one Day" at Wells. Its real purpose, however, is to confirm that the Thorn did blossom on Old Christmas Day 1753, and in a paragraph repeated twice the author tells us that

"there was a great many Gentleman and Ladies from all Parts of England to see ihat [sic] beautiful Thorn where Joseph of Arimathea pitched his Staff, within two Miles of Glastonbury, to the great surprise of the Spectators, to see it bud, blossom, and fade, at the Hour of twelve, on Old Christmas Day, where a Sermon was preached at the same time, by one Mr. Smith".[141]

One John Sherwood, of Warter, near Pocklington in the East Riding, observing that these claims were "very much taken Notice of, and believed to be true by a great many People amongst us," resolved to write to the Vicar of Glastonbury and to ask him to confirm or deny the story. The Rev. Prat duly responded, dismissing the account in The Wonderful Works as "ridiculously stupid and egregiously false". He declared that the Thorn that year had blossomed at Christmas New-Stile "or rather sooner", and - even more devastatingly - reminded Sherwood that Bishop Stillingfleet "has plainly prov'd that Joseph of Arimathea never was here"[142].

It is necessary here to take a step back, and pursue the collapse of Joseph's academic career in the seventeenth century. Perhaps because English Protestants no longer felt the need to justify the precedence of the English Church, perhaps because a new style of critical scholarship was emerging, the Joseph legend steadily lost credibility during the seventeenth century. Already in 1653 Bishop Goodman, for want of early evidence, was treating the miraculous Thorn as a modern phenomenon[143]; and in 1685 Edward Stillingfleet, then Dean of St Paul's, published his Origines Britannicæ, or, The antiquities of the British churches, in which he painstakingly analysed the sources on which the legend was based and concluded that it was a forgery. His work was supplemented and repeated by other influential scholars, for instance Jeremy Collier in his An ecclesiastical history of Great Britain (1708), and Edmund Gibson in his 1722 revision of William Camden's famous Britannia, then the 'bible' of English history[144].

After Stillingfleet, to credit the Joseph story was to defy orthodox wisdom. It remained important to Catholics such as Charles Eyston or John Stevens, who in his 1718 update of Dugdale's Monasticon, declared a touch disingenuously that "two such great Men as Archbishop Usher and Bishop Godwin, are of Weight enough to oppose against such as have endeavour'd to discredit this, 'till of late uncontroverted Tradition"; his own History of the antient abbeys, published five years later, simply repeats the legend without comment. It remained important to Welsh historians, who were able to claim that they were the true inheritors of pure Protestant Christianity, untainted by the Catholicism that St Augustine had inflicted on the Anglo-Saxons; it remained important to Somerset patriots and Glastonbury publicists, and to those with unusual axes to grind - such as John Wood's zealous efforts to establish the Druidic foundations of Bath[145].

This places The Wonderful Works of God in interesting company. Alex Walsham has demonstrated how at this period "the Thorn and other winter-flowering plants were subtly being transmuted from sacred relics into wonders of nature"[146]. The Wonderful Works quite clearly has such scientific attitudes in its sights: