Motor Tours in the West Country. Rodolph Mrs. Stawell
It was Selwood’s successor, Abbot Bere, “a grave, wise, and discreet man, just and upright in all his ways,” who raised the grey Tribunal that has been in turn an abbot’s court-house, a boys’ school, and a lawyer’s office. Exactly opposite this house is the passage that leads to the abbey.
It is not in the stones of Glastonbury that we shall find her history; not in this soaring broken arch that leads our eyes and our hearts upwards; nor even in the splendours of arcading and moulding that are the glory of the Ealde Chirche, the chapel usually called St. Joseph’s, though it is really St. Mary’s. Many centuries before these walls were raised, many centuries before Norman hands ever laid one English stone upon another, the soil beneath our feet—this dust that is the dust of saints and kings—was held sacred by Saxon and Celt. “This place,” says Camden, “was by our Ancestors call’d the first ground of God, the first ground of the Saints in England, the rise and fountain of all religion in England, the burying-place of the Saints, the mother of the Saints.”
ST. MARY’S CHAPEL (OFTEN CALLED ST. JOSEPH’S), GLASTONBURY.
The mind loses itself here in a cloud of legend. Dim forms of early saint and holy grail give place to visions, almost as dim, of St. Patrick and St. David and St. Bridget. Every holy man and woman came to Glastonbury, according to the chroniclers, sooner or later, alive or dead; so that the very floor, says William of Malmesbury, and the sides of the altar, and even the altar itself above and beneath, were laden with the multitude of relics. From Northumbria, from Ireland, from Wales, came the bones of the saints in search of safety: Paulinus and Aidan and Bede, and Hilda from her wild cliff by the North Sea, and David from his Rosy Valley in the west. How much of this is true we not know and need not greatly care, seeing that in any case the fact that gives interest and beauty to these stories is the fact of Glastonbury’s immense age and sanctity, the undoubted fact that it was “the first ground of the Saints in England, the burying-place of Saints, the mother of Saints.” We may even be informed by some officious person that the real name of the Glastonbury Thorn is Cratægus oxycantha præcox, and that it will blossom at Christmas elsewhere; yet nothing can rob us of the picture of Henry VIII.’s lying and thieving commissioner, when he came hither to despoil and desecrate, carefully wrapping up two sprigs of the sacred thorn in a piece of white sarcenet, and sending them as a present to Thomas Cromwell; nor of that other picture of the zealous puritan, solemnly hacking the thorn-tree to death for the good of his soul.
When St. Dunstan was a boy, living here in the primitive monastery founded by King Ina, he dreamt that he saw, on this spot where we are standing among the ruins, a glorious fabric of “fair alleys and comely cloisters.” The splendours of his vision have come and gone, but we too may see them in dream: the mighty church with its towering arches, its many chapels, its marble floors and sapphire altar; the enclosing wall with the two great entrances; the acres of domestic buildings—cloisters and dormitories, library and refectory, and the abbot’s stately lodging. Over there among the trees his kitchen still stands. The steam of much good cheer rose to its quaint octagonal roof when Henry VII. was here as the guest of that wise and discreet man, Abbot Bere; and when Leland visited his “especial friend,” Richard Whiting; and when Henry VIII.’s commissioner came on his mean errand, and found to his annoyance that the brethren were “so straight kept that they could not offend.”
It was not the magnificent building of Dunstan’s dream, but the simple church he knew, that was the burial-place of kings. He himself, as abbot, laid Edmund the Elder in his grave; and here in the monastery “which he ever loved beyond all others” lies Edgar the Pacific, “the flower and pride of all kings, the honour and glory of England,” and near him his grandson Edmund Ironside, who was merciful and kind, says Matthew of Westminster, “to the just persons in his kingdom, and terrible to the unjust.… And all England mourned for him exceedingly.” And somewhere deep beneath the turf, near the spot where the high altar used to stand, is the dust of those bones and that golden tress of hair that some would have us believe were the actual remains of Arthur and Guinevere. Edward I. and his Eleanor believed it, and came to the great church here when it was new to gaze, adoring and credulous, at the skulls of their predecessors. But now our minds—like that of the blameless king himself—are “clouded with a doubt”: for the historic Arthur, we are told, died almost certainly in Scotland, and never came to the Island Valley of Avilion to heal him of his grievous wound.
The first Norman abbot of Glastonbury, Thurstan, set to work at once to improve the old building, and would have done more if his abbacy had not suddenly ended in an unseemly skirmish on the very steps of the altar. “He would have taught the monks amiss,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle severely. In point of fact he was resolved to abolish the use of Gregorian chants, to the great scandal of the monks, and, like many another, thought that the introduction of the soldiery would have a convincing effect. “Rueful things happened there on that day,” says the chronicler, “for the French broke into the choir and threw darts towards the altar where the monks were collected, and some of their servants went upon the upper floor and shot down arrows towards the chancel, so that many arrows stuck in the crucifix which stood above the altar, and the wretched monks lay around the altar, and some crept under it … and they slew some of the monks and wounded many, so that the blood ran down from the altar on the steps.” Rueful things indeed!
The dogmatic Thurstan was removed, and a year later the monastery was burnt to the ground. It was then that this beautiful chapel began to rise, with all its profusion of ornament; and round it for hundreds of years the great abbey continued to grow slowly into the perfection of Dunstan’s dream. How great was the magnificence of it we may judge from the “dyverse parcells” that were ultimately “delyvered until his Majestie”—the spoils of many shrines, gold and silver vessels, jewelled altars, and “the great saphire of Glastonburg.” Poor Abbot Whiting did his best to save them before he went to his death on Glastonbury Tor.
THE CHOIR, GLASTONBURY.
There is Glastonbury Tor before us, framed in the piers of the broken chancel-arch. It was to the summit of that hill that Richard Whiting, last Abbot of Glastonbury, who had been wont to travel in all the pomp of a prince, was dragged upon a hurdle to the gallows. Over the great gate through which his guests had so often crowded—sometimes five hundred in a day, they say—his head was set up, lest men should forget that the King loved “parcells of gilte plate” more than justice. For there was hardly a pretence of justice in the trial of Richard Whiting. Like the Abbot of Fountains, he hid the treasures of his abbey from the King’s commissioners, and, since he must be proved a traitor before these riches could be wrung from him, this act was called high treason. Neither his immense charities, nor his simple, saintly life, nor even his submission to the Act of Supremacy could save him. It was with “businesslike brevity,” says Green the historian, that Thomas Cromwell “ticked off human lives.” “Item,” he wrote among his memoranda, “the abbot of Glaston to be tryed at Glaston and also executyd there.” So Richard Whiting was hanged and quartered at the foot of that tower that still stands upon the hill, and serves him for a monument.
I am not sure whether the main entrance to the abbey, over which Whiting’s head was set, was the vanished gateway on the north side, or the still existing entrance in Magdalen Street. We pass the latter as we drive out of the town. Its newly restored archway stands on the left, beside the house that was once the “Red Lion” Inn, and quite close to the modern market-cross that is so unusually graceful. Our road skirts the foot of Wearyall Hill, where once the sacred thorn-tree grew—the miraculous tree that had been, said the monks of Glastonbury, the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.
After a few minutes of level running we climb the Polden Hills—no very arduous work—and look down upon the wide green plain of Sedgemoor. It lies on our right as we glide down the hill, and stretches far away from us to Bridgwater. It was from some spot in that blue distance that “a volley of shot and huzzas” rang out into the night, when Monmouth and his peasant army made their futile attempt to “vindicate