Glastonbury

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In a wet winter the Somerset Levels go back to water, and Glastonbury Tor becomes again what its oldest names insist it is: an island. The conical hill with its solitary tower stands up out of moors that were tidal fen before drainage made them fields, visible for many miles. The Britons called the near-island Ynys Witrin, the isle of glass; a charter dated 601, already nearly illegible when the abbey showed it to William of Malmesbury, granted “the isle of Yneswytrin” to the monastery there; the leaden cross lifted from a grave in 1191 named the same ground insula Avallonia. Avalon, on the maps, is a market town in Somerset.

The Old Church

Below the Tor, in thirty-six acres of parkland at the center of town, stand the ruins of the abbey that made the island’s claim for it. At the heart of the precinct stood the vetusta ecclesia, the Old Church of wattled osiers, the earliest church in Britain, raised — in the legend’s developed form — by Joseph of Arimathea, who came from Gaul in the year 63, received the isle from a British king, and built it to the Virgin, carrying two cruets of the blood and sweat of Christ — or, in the romances, the Grail itself. The claim’s paper trail is exact. William of Malmesbury, writing De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesiae about 1129–1135 on the abbey’s commission, made the Old Church the first in Britain, founded perhaps by disciples of Christ; Joseph’s name entered by later interpolation, and the full apostolic foundation belongs to John of Glastonbury’s mid-fourteenth-century chronicle. The legend did real work: a church older than Rome’s mission to the English could argue precedence, and did. Abbot Richard Beere was promoting the Joseph cult in 1520, when Richard Pynson printed the verse Lyfe of Joseph of Armathie — the thorn’s first appearance in print.

Under the legend runs a history that needs no embroidery. The Anglo-Saxon charters put a documented monastery here in the last decades of the seventh century; King Ine of Wessex, counseled by Aldhelm, added a stone church of SS Peter and Paul about 712. Dunstan, schooled in this cloister, became its abbot about 946 and made Glastonbury the seedbed of the English Benedictine reform before going on to Canterbury. At Domesday the house held 442 hides — an eighth of Somerset — and at the Valor of 1535 its income of £3,311 left it richer than every monastery in England save Westminster.

The grave between the pyramids

On 25 May 1184 fire took nearly all of it, the Old Church included; the Lady Chapel consecrated on its footprint in 1186 stands to the walls. In 1191, with the rebuilding hungry for pilgrims, Abbot Henry de Sully’s monks dug between two ancient cross-shafts in their cemetery and found King Arthur. Gerald of Wales set down what he examined in De principis instructione about 1193: a hollowed oak trunk deep in the earth; bones of giant size — the shank-bone reached three inches past the knee of the tallest man present — ten healed wounds and one unhealed; a tress of golden hair — Guinevere’s — that fell to dust when a monk snatched it. Under a stone slab lay the leaden cross, inscribed, as Gerald records, “Hic jacet sepultus inclitus Rex Arturius in insula Avallonia” — here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the isle of Avalon. The find answered every need: the ruined abbey wanted pilgrims’ silver, and the Plantagenets — Henry II is credited with the tip — wanted the once and future king of Welsh hope certifiably dead and in English keeping. At Easter 1278 the bones were translated before Edward I and Eleanor of Castile into a black marble tomb at the high altar; the Dissolution swept tomb and bones away. The cross outlived them — Camden engraved it in his Britannia of 1607 — and was last recorded in the eighteenth century.

The Tor and the last abbot

The Tor kept its own counsel. Excavation on the summit found people there in the fifth and sixth centuries — hearths, a metalworker’s forge, graves, amphorae from the eastern Mediterranean — a chieftain’s stronghold or an early hermitage; the spade leaves it open. Two churches of St Michael followed, the first thrown down by an earthquake in 1275; the lone tower of the rebuild is what crowns the hill now. There the abbey ended. The king’s commissioners seized the house in September 1539; Abbot Richard Whiting, aged, never given an ordinary trial, was condemned at Wells for treasure hidden from the king, and on 15 November 1539 was dragged on a hurdle up the Tor and hanged, drawn, and quartered beside the tower with his monks John Thorne and Roger James. His head was set over his own gateway. The Reformation allowed no return — a petition to Queen Mary failed in 1556 — and the buildings were quarried for centuries, until the ruins were bought at auction in 1907 for a Church of England trust. Rome beatified the three in 1895.

The well, the orchard, and the zodiac

Between Tor and town the Chalice Well runs red. The spring is chalybeate — its iron dyes everything in the channel the color of rust and blood — and it has watered the legend as faithfully as the abbey: the blood spring, where Joseph’s cruets were sunk. The abbey’s Great Chartulary records it in 1210 as “Chalkwell,” a housed water supply; excavation in 1961 found the spring head four meters down, mesolithic flints witnessing how long people have drunk here; in 1751 a publicized dream-cure made the town briefly a spa, thousands coming for the waters.

The twentieth century arrived at Glastonbury early. In 1906 Wellesley Tudor Pole drew a blue glass bowl from Bride’s Well at Beckery, a vessel his circle kept as Grail-kind; in 1913 the mystic-educator Alice Buckton bought the Chalice Well and kept it as a women’s college and house of sacred drama until her death in 1944; in 1959 Tudor Pole founded the Chalice Well Trust that holds the gardens today. Rutland Boughton planted an English Bayreuth here: his Glastonbury Festivals (1914–1926) opened with The Immortal Hour in August 1914 and ran to over three hundred performances. Dion Fortune made Glastonbury one pole of her magical England: her first trance sessions here, with C. T. Loveday in August 1922, produced The Cosmic Doctrine; from 1924 her community held Chalice Orchard at the foot of the Tor; Avalon of the Heart (1934) names Glastonbury the holiest earth in England; in the war her meditations set the Tor among the inner fortresses of Britain. She died on 6 January 1946 and lies in Glastonbury cemetery, buried by the vicar of St John’s; her grave is a pilgrimage station in its own right.

Katharine Maltwood, sculptor and Theosophically minded, was mapping the Grail quest of the High History of the Holy Grail in 1925 when the country around Glastonbury resolved under her pen into a ring of colossal effigies ten miles across: a zodiac traced in streams, roads, and field boundaries — the Temple of the Stars, laid out, she concluded, by Sumerians about 2700 BC. Her Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars appeared anonymously in 1929, expanded with air photographs in 1934. Landscape historians took the figures apart in 1975 and 1983 — the defining boundaries are post-medieval drainage and modern roads — so the zodiac belongs to Glastonbury’s history of vision rather than its prehistory; pilgrims walk it anyway.

The town those visions made is now the capital of Britain’s alternative spirituality. Kathy Jones and Tyna Redpath convened the first Glastonbury Goddess Conference in 1996; its procession has gone through the streets each summer since; a permanent Goddess Temple opened at Imbolc 2002, registered in 2003 as the first of its kind in England, training priestesses and priests of Avalon, for whom Tor and red spring are the body of the Lady of Avalon herself. The Anglican and Catholic pilgrimages, revived in the twentieth century, process to the abbey ruins along the same streets — modern paganism and Christianity walking one sacred ground in turn.

Thirty-six seasons and the Company of Avalon

Thirty-six excavation seasons ran at the abbey between 1904 and 1979 under eight directors — and the strangest archive of any English dig belongs to the second of them. Frederick Bligh Bond, ecclesiastical architect, led the work from 1908 and disclosed in The Gate of Remembrance (B. H. Blackwell, 1918; full text on the Internet Archive) that it had been “an extended experiment in psychical research”: from late 1907 he and John Allan Bartlett had taken automatic scripts — the spiritualists’ instrument turned to psychical research — from the Company of Avalon, a fellowship of the abbey’s dead monks whose directions sent his trenches onto the lost Edgar Chapel. The chapel was there. The apse the monks promised was not; Bond published it on his plans anyway; the controversy, which reached Parliament, cost him the dig in 1921 and his post the year after. Ralegh Radford, director from 1951 to 1964, announced that he had located the monks’ 1191 grave-pit, dated by Doulting-stone chippings in the fill; Philip Rahtz’s report, “Excavations on Glastonbury Tor, Somerset, 1964–6,” Archaeological Journal 127 (1970), supplied the Tor’s dark-age phase. The whole record met its reckoning in Roberta Gilchrist’s University of Reading archive project (2006–2015), published as Gilchrist and Green, Glastonbury Abbey: Archaeological Investigations 1904–79 (Society of Antiquaries, 2015), its open archive at the Archaeology Data Service. Radiocarbon, glass chemistry, and re-plotting showed that the site’s best-known archaeological facts had themselves been shaped by the legends: no pre-Conquest cloister, and Radford’s grave-pit undatable — Doulting chippings occur in every phase, and beneath the pit lay a tenth- or eleventh-century stone cist. The same project gave the island something older than any charter: eastern-Mediterranean amphorae of about 450–550 among timber structures, and late-seventh-century glass furnaces, among the earliest glassworking in Saxon England. Antonia Gransden’s “The Growth of the Glastonbury Traditions and Legends in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976) anatomizes how the medieval claims were assembled; Marion Bowman’s “Procession and Possession in Glastonbury,” Folklore 115 (2004) does the same for the living town, reading its rival processions as competing ritual claims to one holy place.

The thorn

The thorn outlasted everything that planted it. The Glastonbury thorn is a hawthorn that flowers twice, in May and again at Christmas; it enters print in Pynson’s verse life of 1520; the staff Joseph struck into Wearyall Hill came into the story afterward, the way everything at Glastonbury grows backward toward Joseph. A Civil War-era soldier felled the original as a superstition; the stock survived him in cuttings about the town. Sprigs went to Charles I and Charles II; since 1929, when the vicar Lionel Smithett Lewis sent a flowering branch to Queen Mary and George V, a budded sprig from the St John’s churchyard thorn has gone to the monarch every Christmas. In December 2010 vandals cut the Wearyall Hill tree to a stump. The flowering did not stop. Each December, while the Levels stand in water and the Tor goes back to being an island, the thorn opens white and out of season — Joseph’s staff still blossoming for Christmas on the isle of Avalon.

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