King Arthur’s 2nd to 5th Battles – Bulbarrow Hill Site Visit

This month, February 2017, I visited the area I had identified four years ago as where King Arthur fought his second to fifth battles. In my post “King Arthur of Somerset: early battles above the River Divelish”, I explained that the Historia Brittonum “says Arthur’s four battles on the borders of Lindinis were ‘above the river which is called Dubglas’,” and that “linguists inform us that the name Divelish can have derived from Dubglas. The River Divelish rises on the N Dorset Downs south of Ibberton.”

The location is far more spectacularly credible than I had imagined as the site of Arthur’s early skirmishes to prove his worthiness to rule the Kingdom of Lindinis by defending its southern border.

In what is now deeply rural north Dorset, two miles south of Ibberton, the rim of Bulbarrow Hill gives large vistas to southward over the valleys below. Any general who had command of south Somerset but needed to guard against enemies from his south would want to control and defend Bulbarrow Hill. Correspondingly, Bulbarrow defended would be extremely difficult to conquer from the south with anything less than overwhelming force.

Today there is a sign informing us that this scenic location is on the “Wessex Ridgeway” long-distance footpath. The footpath is a recent creation; but the ridge, one can truthfully say, is as old as the hills, and the sign tells us that it was “used by traders and invaders”.

There is even an Iron Age fort on the ridge, called Rawlsbury Camp (a mile west of the sign), about 500 metres from one of the sources of the River Divelish. King Arthur’s base for his second to fifth battles? The pieces of the jigsaw fit together: credible purpose, credible strategically, credible linguistically[1]. One can’t prove it, of course, but it would certainly make sense.

 

[1] Equally so, incidentally, if the anciently Dubglas-named river be the stream flowing from Higher Ansty (below Rawlsbury) southwards through Dewlish, as others have suggested.

 

 

Map of King Arthur’s Lindinis (Somerset) Kingdom

This map is great – except that, the Google I can use obviously takes the line representing KingArthur’s Lindinis kingdom’s boundary along today’s roads rather than along hilltops where in reality it must have been. Also, accuracy is limited by the number of reference points I can use. In particular, the line from Beaminster (marked M on the map) to Iwerne Minster (marked N) should be along the N Dorset Downs watershed, not dipping southwards to Dorchester.

The Real King Arthur

This blog piece has taken five hours / fifty years to make. Five hours to compose – and, behind that, fifty years of study and love, visits and maps, intellect and intuition. I have been in pursuit of the real King Arthur since I first visited Glastonbury, and then South Cadbury, in the 1960s.

As a schoolboy in Taunton, I believed that he was one of ours – a man of what we knew as The Westcountry, a land that included Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. Now I am confident. The pieces fit together. All the indicative evidence points in one direction. Arthur was King of Lindinis Civitas. This was northern Devon, most of Somerset, northern Dorset, and much of western Wiltshire.

Everything, every story or notice that has a geographical element and is maybe derived from a source in the fifth or sixth centuries, has a certain or probable Lindinis provenance. Modern writers placing Arthur in the north, Scotland, Lincolnshire, or the third century, base their thinking on no more than the odd piece of etymology (such as Camboglanna on Hadrian’s Wall as a claimant for Camlan, or Lincoln – Lindum in Latin – as a claimant for Linnuis), and bypass the inconvenient total absence of Arthur’s name from the Bonedd y gwyr gogledd (“Descent of the men of the north”), a document of genuine antiquity in which the names of the actual kings of the various regions of northern Britannia are given in several genealogical compilations; and any connecting of Arthur to Tintagel, Caerleon, Colchester or London is derivative of the fanciful imaginings of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

The earliest historical source on Arthur pointing in part away from Lindinis is the list of twelve battles in the Historia Britonnum, an eighth- or ninth-century compilation; however, all the battles there listed which are identifiably far from Lindinis are also identifiably ones that were unconnected to King Arthur (Chester; Wallop; Armterid – now called Arthuret, north of Carlisle; etc): they were fought by other warriors at dates spread across the quarter of a millennium after the British overthrew their Roman governors.

It is a lost cause to attempt to convince academic historians that there even was a real King Arthur, let alone that anything specific can be said about him. Such historians allow as evidence only documents that are beyond doubt contemporary to the events they attest, or copied unaltered from ones that were so, and physical archaeology and artefacts. In an era when very few people could write, when the main method of culture transmission was oral storytelling – primarily by bards in poetic song – and when even the most imposing residences and strongholds of the social elite were built in wood, evidence that attains academics’ thresholds is virtually non-existent. It is not only for King Arthur that this type of evidence is lacking: even the reality of (piecemeal) conquest of England by Englishmen (the “Anglo-Saxons”) is questioned for lack of such ultra-hard proof.

But the indications for King Arthur are diverse and consistent. What happened has often come down to us as told in allegory and story, a culturally natural form for the fifth and sixth centuries, rather than as the dry facts beloved of modern scholarship.

The one dry source is the Annales Cambriae, which names him as a Christian and as the victor of the Battle of Badon – at a date that has to be corrected to 490 – and as being killed in 538 at the Battle of Camlan. The other sources, which I have discussed in previous posts here, are oral traditions later written down, saints’ Lives, and an eighth-century battle list that straddles the border between eulogy and record-keeping.

In probable chronological sequence, the life of King Arthur thereby conveyed is this:-

• As a youth when Cador was Governor of Lindinis Civitas, Prince Arthur met St. Carantoc at the mouth of the Doniford Brook, near Watchet in Somerset. They travelled to see Cador in his kaer (citadel) at Dundry (Somerset). Cador chose Christianity to be the official religion of Lindinis. He granted St. Carantoc a land charter to build a church at the commercially significant town of Carhampton (Somerset).
• Arthur as the new man in charge of Lindinis had a culturally essential duty to fight and win raids on his borders. He won one such at Glein (possibly Clannaborough, in the Lindinis part of Devon), and four more skirmishes on the hills above the River Divelish (near Ibberton, on the border of the Lindinis part of Dorset).
• He won a battle on the Bristol Channel coast (Somerset); and then another that may have been near Beaminster (on the border of the Lindinis part of Dorset) or near Mere (near the border of the Lindinis part of Wiltshire).
• He was given Divine protection from death by a Christian Mystery initiation at Beckery on what was then the Glastonbury peninsula (Somerset).
• He defeated English aggressors at the stunningly successful Battle of the Badonic Hill near Bath (Somerset) in 490.
• He ruled Lindinis for half a century and became known as King Arthur (rather than Roman-style Governor). During the long peacetime that followed his Badonic victory, his largest citadel which he used often to host feasts for kings of other British kingdoms, was the Cadbury-Camelot hillfort at South Cadbury (Somerset).
• He was killed at the Battle of Camlan at Queen Camel (Somerset) in 538.
• He was buried by monks of Glastonbury Abbey (Somerset), most likely at Nyland, the island in the marshes (now the Somerset Levels) held sacred as the Gate to the Otherworld, rather than by the Old Church at Glastonbury itself.

After his death he was remembered as a great warrior hero by Celtic bards of the later sixth century (Aneurin, Taliesin), and as their own past warrior hero by the bard who eulogised a battle lost in the eighth century at Langport (Somerset). He was remembered in song particularly by minstrels of Brittany (culturally descended from immigrants from the Westcountry).

From them, his fame entered mainstream European literature as the fictionalised hero of “Arthurian legend”. The real King Arthur, successful Brittonic warrior leader, commander of a hillfort in SE Somerset beside the River Cam later known as Camelot, Christian ruler of one of the ten former Roman civitates of Britannia Prima, Lindinis, a name after his time corrupted to Lyonesse…. became transformed into the wizard-guided idealised model English (!) king, born at Tintagel, and governing the whole island of Britain (and then some) with the help of the Knights of the Round Table – voided in the public imagination of all lifetime connection to his true home among the hills, coasts, forests, and extensive brackish marshes of Somerset.

Dating the Battle of Badon

 

The Date of the Battle of Badon Controversy

The The date of the battle of Badon has long been the subject of controversy among students of the period. The uncertainty is due to the ambiguity of Gildas’s words in his book De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. He refers in the context of Badon to “the 44^th year with one month elapsed”, i.e. a period of 43 years and one month. But it is not linguistically clear whether the period was before the Battle of Badon – between a previous event mentioned in his book and the battle – or after it, between the battle and the date of writing.

 

How to Interpret Gildas

A major difficulty with interpreting this as the period between the battle and the time of writing is: how could Gildas while he was still writing have known to the month at what date his work would be finished? The alternative that the 43 years and one month ended with the battle (which of course did have an exact date) leads to the question: which of three events Gildas discussed in the preceding chapters of De Excidio he intended as the starting point. It could reasonably be any of: the letter to Aetius (Chapter 20); the council of Britain deciding to invite some Saxons to fight for Britain (Chapter 23); or the coming to power of Ambrosius (Chapter 25).

Gildas could reasonably have known the month and year of any of these. But the coming to power of Ambrosius should be ruled out, because Gildas indicates that it happened after and in consequence of the Great Raid of 473. This would require the date of Badon to be 516 or up to a few years later. A date as late as this is inconsistent with Gildas’s saying that the people who were in positions of responsibility during the warring that culminated at Badon, including kings, officials and priests, had all died by the time of writing. De Excidio was published during the lifetime of King Maelgwn (Mailcun in the older spelling used in the Annales Cambriae [AC]), so not later than 548CE.[1] A period of thirty years or so is not sufficient for this to be true. Fifty years at least would be necessary.

Also, Gildas records that he was born in the year of the battle of Badon. Hagiographical writings record that he gave or sent a bell to St. Bride. (It is presumed that he was a bell-maker.) If true, this has to have been before her death in 524, and therefore Gildas’s birth can hardly have been later than, at a squeeze, 510. There is also the tradition that he founded Rhuys Abbey in the 520s. This date is not as assured as that of St. Bride’s death – but even if the foundation date were in the 530s it would speak in favour of a date of Gildas’s birth earlier than 516.

 

43 Years after Aetius or Hengist

It is much more probable therefore that Gildas intended us to understand his period of 43 years and 1 month to begin with one of the other two seminal events he reports, the letter to Aetius or the invitation to Hengist. The letter to Aetius is the most probable, as it is the only one of the three events in writing, and therefore with an exact date on its face. It is figured to have been sent in 446 because that was the year of his third consulship, to which the letter refers.

In any case though, if the council of Britain was meant it makes little difference to the calculation for the date of Badon. The council cannot have been long after the letter, for response to the emergency prompting the request to Aetius for military aid was urgent. It makes logical sense to postulate that the council convened late in 446 or early in 447, the year when according to Mageoghagan’s Irish annals Hengist actually arrived with his English warriors in response to that council’s request. On either basis, the resulting calculation is that the Battle of Badon was fought in 489 or 490.

 

Badon in 490 CE Makes Sense

This date for Badon and therefore for Gildas’s birth fits the information about Gildas’s life excellently. It is also fully consistent with the archaeological record, which shows a break in the English penetration of Britain approximately comprising the first half of the sixth century; and with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which gives no battles other than in Wessex between 490 and 550. Its supposed battles in Wessex have been interpreted as an ‘origin myth’ for the Gewissae dynasty, rather than factual truth.

 

The Annales Cambriae Date for Badon can be Amended to 490

It can be reconciled with the AC on a straightforward hypothesis: that the original Christian source said the Battle of Badon was “490 years after the Incarnation of Christ”, and that an early copyist mis-transcribed that as “490 years after the Passion of Christ’. Scribes before the introduction of the AD calendar sometimes expressed dates anno passio, and 27 needs to be subtracted from the number thus given to give the corresponding CE year.[2] The AC date for the Battle of Badon on a +445 calibration is 517CE, and 517 minus 27 is 490.

490CE as the date of the Battle of Badon fits well with all the evidence. It does not require the AC compilers to have made a complex derivation of the date of Badon, such as by interpreting De Excidio and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle while not using other dates also found in the same sources. It is compatible with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede, the archaeological evidence, the floruit of Ambrosius, the Irish annals, De Excidio, the events of Gildas’s life, and the other entries in the AC.

The 27-year Passion/Incarnation mistake does nothing to diminish the likelihood of authenticity of the AC entry. On the contrary, it enhances it, for the error is much more probable with a source that was originally written before the invention of the AD calendar in 529.

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[1] On the calibration of the AC to the CE calendar by adding 445 to the AC’s internal year ticker count, which I advocate for its pre-565 entries (see my previous post here of 21 September 2013).

[2] The Historia Brittonum demonstrates that such mistakes happened: Chapters 16 and 66 show a similar mistake in reverse, 405 and 400 years after the Incarnation, respectively, being written when “years after the Passion” should have been written.

King Arthur: Buried at Glastonbury Abbey?

The Fiction Show of c1191

In c1191, monks of Glastonbury Abbey dug up remains purporting to be the earthly remains of King Arthur and his wife Guinevere. Experts on the twelfth century are, I understand, agreed that the dig happened alright, but that the connection between what was dug up and King Arthur was wholly fictional.

For one thing, Guinevere was invented in the twelfth century: no early source about Arthur names his wife. Besides, the story put out in the 1190s was that the woman’s body was seen with a lock of golden hair – as might have been on the head of an English queen; but not one of sixth-century Celtic Britain. Thirdly, the inscribed cross found in 1191 below ground at a layer above the bones asserted that there lay King Arthur “in insula avalonis” – on the Isle of Avalon. The Isle of Avalon was also invented in the twelfth century: it was one of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s realms of fable.[1] Besides, there is no basis for supposing that anyone of the sixth century was buried with an inscribed cross; no other such crosses have turned up despite the considerable number of sixth-century graves that have been discovered.

Until recently, historians thought that the inscription was tenth century, and that it might have been added when the Abbey cemetery was raised by Abbot St. Dunstan. They now say that the appearance of tenth-century writing is itself phoney; the inscription was recent at the time it was “found”.[2]

 

Signs and Wonders: Not Disbarred

The next question, though, is: however phoney the show in c1191, why King Arthur there – Glastonbury? Certainly, the fact that the monks said that King Arthur was buried there does not, in its cultural context, mean by itself that there was any factual basis for their so saying. They said that Joseph of Arimathea came to live and die at Glastonbury, and this has zero basis in fact.

In what James Carley calls the official version of the events of c1191, Geraldus Cambrensis said that the site of King Arthur’s burial was “revealed by strange and almost miraculous signs…. Certain indications in their [the Abbey’s] writings, and others in the letters engraven on the pyramids…. Others again were given in visions and relations vouchsafed to good men and religious, yet it was above all King Henry II of England that most clearly informed the monks, as he himself heard from an ancient Welsh bard”.[3]

Carley’s own close review of William of Malmesbury’s record of what was on the Abbey’s pyramids is sufficient to show that this element of Geraldus’s “signs” adds up to nothing. Like the “Artognou” stone inscription excavated at Tintagel, Glastonbury Abbey’s pyramids are, in the story of Arthur, a red herring.

Geraldus’s reference to “indications in the… writings” can be set alongside William of Malmesbury’s words of c1125 in his book “The Deeds of the Kings of England”, where he calls Arthur “a man clearly worthy not to be dreamed of in fallacious fables, but to be proclaimed in veracious histories as one who long sustained his tottering country and gave the shattered minds of his fellow citizens an edge for war”[4]. The implication is that something about a real Arthur was recorded in the Abbey library, but not much – not at any rate, anything William found substantial enough to write up in either of his books. This record could well have included the words which formed the Battle of Badon entry in the Annales Cambriae, telling of Arthur’s victory and his the carrying the image of the Cross on his shoulders; and maybe little, perhaps nothing, more. William’s words after “histories” are a paraphrase of the words of praise that Gildas gave to Ambrosius Aurelianus in his book “De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae”, immediately prior to his report of the Battle of Badon that, infamously, does not name its victor. Perhaps William read both Gildas and the Annales Cambriae words and deduced, not without good cause, that in regional military resistance to English advances, Arthur successfully carried on where Ambrosius left off. All of which is relevant to an understanding of who the real King Arthur was, but says nothing about whether he was buried at Glastonbury.  

It is the “Welsh bard” component of the “signs” that makes political sense. King Henry had a clear political motivation to “prove” to the Welsh that King Arthur was dead, because the “once and future king” legend had by this time become attached to his name and Henry wished to curb its risk of fomenting rebellion. Henry would therefore have had motivation to bribe, cajole, threaten or force anyone his informants led him to believe knew the truth to reveal the whereabouts of King Arthur’s grave. But he would have cared little where the answer was. What mattered was that the Welsh would believe it to be genuine. If there had been any counter-tradition in circulation, this could have been hard to squash. There are only two credible possibilities for Geraldus saying that a bard named Glastonbury as the burial site. One is that it was, behind the vows of bardic secrecy, the true answer. The other is that nobody knew, that the answer (and maybe the bard, too) were fictitious, and that Glastonbury was picked out of thin air – one might imagine, by Abbot Blois, as a favour to King Henry II. It at least had the merits of being a Christian site of great, but unknown, antiquity; and with a cemetery to match.

“Visions and relations vouchsafed to good men and religious” is, as in other Abbey contexts, code for “the oral knowledge within the Abbey secretly passed down the generations”.

The combination of the “bard”, the “visions and relations vouchsafed”, and the “indications in the writings”, while not to the modern mind proof of anything, is stronger than the components individually in indicating that the burial of Arthur at Glastonbury, in contrast to the identification therewith of the bones and inscription that were dug up in c1191, is genuine. It is also to be noted that, in the age of veneration of relics, disputes arose about Glastonbury’s claims to those of St. Patrick, St. Dunstan, Sts. Aidan, Bede, Hilda and other Northumbrian saints,[5] but no other claimants ever came forward asserting that they and not Glastonbury had King Arthur.

I offer a basis for the claim that the Abbey buried King Arthur to have been true and yet for the man’s bones not to have been there in 1191. The most sacred thing to have done in 538 if the Abbey did bury King Arthur would not have been to sink his coffin to the south of the Old Church.[6] It would have been to take it by silent water craft through the meres that are now the drained Somerset levels[7], to a final resting place at Nyland, one of the Abbey’s “Seven Holy Islands” – Nyland’s other name is Andrewsey, a portmanteau word meaning “the isle (ey) of the door (drws) of the Queen of Heaven (An)”, i.e. the door to the Otherworld (Annwn).[8]

 

 

 

 

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[1] As with so many of his imaginative creations, Geoffrey did not invent Avalon out of totally thin air. There is a poem titled Avallenau attributed to Myrddin, a bard who lived about 100 years after Arthur. (Geoffrey Latinised his name to Merlinus and used it for a major character in his story.) The author indicates within the Avallenau poem that he composed it in c620. The English for avallenau is “apple trees”. The poem is an esoteric work delighting in the chakras. For Geoffrey to use the word for an imaginary otherworldly place of healing, filled with apple trees, was therefore far from silly.

[2] Rahtz and Watts, Glastonbury, 2009: p 59 report the similarity of the inscription writing to one of known twelfth century date at Stoke-sub-Hamdon.

[3] James Carley, Glastonbury Abbey, 1996: p148.

[4] ibid, p154.

[5] ibid, Chapter 5

[6] The earliest person named on the Abbey cemetery’s pyramids is Abbot Bregored, the last Celtic British abbot, who died in c670. All the names on the pyramids other than Bregored appear to be English. (ibid, pp150-151). Archaeologists found evidence of “two mausolea dating from the Celtic period” (ibid, p150; Rahtz and Watts, Glastonbury: 2009, p111). Despite these, however, Rahtz and Watts (p109) date the origin of the cemetery to “the seventh to eighth centuries”. The burial of kings and abbots there may not pre-date Bregored.

[7] Tennyson, author of the imaginative and beautiful fiction poem Morte d’Arthur,  presumably knew this.

[8] See previous blog post (26 July 2013) on the Seven Holy Islands.

Glastonbury’s Seven Holy Islands

Seven Holy Islands

The “Isle” of Glastonbury and the hills (or rises) Bride’s Mound at Beckery, Meare (also called Ferramere), Godney, Barrow Hill (between Panborough and Bleadney), Marchey (also called Martinsey), Nyland (also called Andersey or Andrewsey) since Saxon times belonged to Glastonbury Abbey and, along with the “Glastonbury 12 hides” were named as exempt from taxation in Magna Carta. These are the “seven holy islands”. From the fifth to the tenth century, the five other than Glastonbury and Beckery probably were true islands wholly surrounded by the Brue and Axe rivers and their channels, tributaries and distributaries in a marshy landscape. All five are surrounded by land below today’s 10 metre contour above mean sea level, “which indicates the approximate extent of former periodic flooding”[1]; much of it below the 5 metre contour. The Beckery-Glastonbury peninsula is similarly surrounded except along the Edgarley Road ridge to its east which at its lowest is 13 metres above sea level. According to Professor Stephen Rippon (http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/title_90439_en.html ), works to control water flow into the Axe and Brue valleys from the east (thus beginning their journey to their present state of dry land) were undertaken from the tenth century onwards.

 

Spiritual Progress Through the Islands of Somerset Summerland

A straight (ley?) line runs from Nyland through Barrow and Godney to the Old Church of Glastonbury Abbey. According to the esotericist author John Michell, the pattern of the seven holy islands mirrors that of the stars of the Great Bear. It can be speculated that the Abbey valued the seven islands in sacred trust because they were previously held sacred by the Druids; and indeed that they, the holy rivers Brue and Axe which surround them (nominally equivalent to, and perhaps derived from, the holy rivers Varuna and Asi at India’s Varanasi), and the holy City of Light (glas), were the original Summerland, the earthly symbolic representation of the heavenly Otherworld, from which Somerset got its name. [2]

It is possible that each of the islands symbolises an aspect of the initiate’s spiritual journey to enlightenment. Some islands offer a clear suggestion of such symbolic meaning: Meare, once famous for its now-drained Meare Pool, for stilling the mind as in meditation; Andrewsey, for the  “third eye” which yogis say is the door to an inner world where you experience transcendent love, light, and joy; Martinsey, named for St. Martin the West’s pioneer of withdrawal from the world like the Desert Fathers of Egypt, for renunciation; Beckery, which means “beekeepers’ island”, for the sweet honeyed “taste” of the nectar of divine bliss as the devotee crosses Pomparles Bridge, the “perilous” bridge (also known to all fairytale heroines) of letting go of all vestiges of ego, entering oneness with Spirit – and advances to full enlightenment, symbolically the city of light, Glas[ton]bury. Possibly Godney, God’s isle, was the symbolic island for devotion and prayer; and Barrow, alone of the seven set in a narrow water- channel between two proper hills (Wedmore and Wookey), the symbol for the self-discipline needed to overcome all barriers to spiritual attainment.

It may be no coincidence on this basis that if the Seven Holy Islands mirror the Great Bear constellation, Andrewey corresponds to the only star that can fairly be called the beginning of the constellation, and the line from Beckery to Glastonbury corresponds to the line that points to the Polestar.

 

Glastonbury’s Seven Holy Islands and the Seven Kaers of Preiddeu Annwn

It is possible to find a correspondence between these putative identifications of the symbols of the Seven Holy Islands and the seven “kaers” (royal citadels) in the poem attributed to Taliesin, Preiddeu Annwn.  The poem in masked language expresses the initiate’s spiritual journey to find “the treasures of heaven, hidden within” (which is what I see as the true meaning of the title).

Kaer Sidi (line 10 of Preiddeu Annwn) is the ultimate spiritual destination, the state of enlightenment, corresponding to the Isle of Glastonbury. Nyland, considering its shape, could be Kaer Pedryuan, the “four-cornered” kaer (line 12). Kaer Vedwit (line 22), the citadel of wisdom, is on this schema Meare, the pool of stillness centred in meditation which enables the devotee to contact wisdom. Kaer Rigor (line 28) is the very highly spiritually advanced state of stillness in which the body is literally absolutely immovable and as if non-functioning (c.f. rigor mortis), known to yogis as sabikalpa samadhi, in which yogis say the pure bliss of God is felt, the last step on the initiate’s spiritual ascent before achieving enlightenment, so by both location and symbolic meaning this has to be Beckery. Barrow might symbolically be Kaer Golud (line 34), one translation of which is the citadel of “hindrance or impediment”, with Godney being Kaer Vandwy (line 42), the citadel of prayer. Finally, Kaer ochren (line 48), the “ochre-coloured” citadel has to be Martinsey, the isle of renunciation, for which the colour ochre, in which swamis are robed, is anciently the symbol.

 

[1] Rahtz and Watts, Glastonbury: 2009, p29.

[2] I have seen no evidence that the modern Welsh name for Somerset, gwlad yr haf, meaning “the summer land”, has any deep antiquity. But to the east of Glastonbury, cut by Edgarley Road less than half a mile from its lowest point, is Ponter’s Ball, a human-made earthwork obstacle that could have been used as a checkpoint to island Glastonbury from outsiders. Rahtz and Watts (ibid, p30) mention the possibility “that it was the eastern boundary of a great Celtic sanctuary around the Tor”. The road cuts Ponter’s Ball at a hamlet called Havyatt, which means “summer gate”.

Camlan (Camlann) and Camelot

Camlan

King Arthur was killed at the Battle of Camlan (sometimes spelt Camlann). This bare fact is stated in the Annales Cambriae in its entry for 538CE.  Commentators have for decades searched the length and breadth of Britain for the location of Camlan, striving to decipher at which enclosure or church (lan) on which bend (cam) Arthur fell.

All the while they have missed what is hidden in the open. Re-parse the name from Cam lan to Caml an; recall that, for the Druid faith, “An” is a name of the Supreme Being, the Goddess, the Queen of Heaven; then all that remains is the translation into English: Queen Camel.

 

Queen Camel

Queen Camel is at the foot of Camel Hill; two miles to the west, encouragingly for this connection, is Annis Hill. The River Cam, which flows through Queen Camel, rises a few miles to the north-east on God’s Hill (the only place so named in Britain).

Queen Camel is also just two miles west of Cadbury Castle, the hillfort proved by Alcock’s archaeologists to have been a major timber-built kaer (royal banqueting centre and defensive citadel) during the late fifth and/or the sixth centuries, its principal hall twice the size of any other in Britain known for this period. Its name is indicative of it having been built or rebuilt by Cador (the Governor of Lindinis in the third quarter of the fifth century – see my post here of 9^th March 2013). If Arthur was King of Lindinis, Cadbury Castle would certainly have been one of his residences, and quite possibly the most sumptuous one at which he fulfilled his political/diplomatic responsibilities to other kings of Britons as a giver of feasts[1]. Cadbury Castle is only six miles from Ilchester and therefore can be reckoned to have been the place to which the greatest proportion of Lindinis’s ruling class decamped when they vacated the Roman city during Cador’s governorship. If the battle of Camlan was indeed, as legend portrays it, an internal struggle in which somebody (Medraut?) challenged Arthur, by then an old man, for his kingship, the Queen Camel area below Cadbury Castle is a most rational location for such a battle.

 

Camelot – South Cadbury

There is, of course, no solid proof that King Arthur lived at Cadbury Castle. It is, though, most curious that in the earliest “Arthurian” tale to name a castle, by Chrétien de Troyes written in c1170, it is called Camaalot. Close variants of this name have been used in many later Arthurian tales. Perhaps Chrétien drew the name, along with some of the rest of his storylines, from Breton minstrels who sang of the achievements of Arthur and kept a true tradition of the Camel name from this district of south Somerset. And there is no other genuine contender for the location of King Arthur’s primary residence – the only other place so designated in medieval story, Caerleon in Monmouthshire where he is placed in other legends, is wholly spurious.

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[1] There is a poem attributed to Taliesin, but known only from a text 1000 years later than Taliesin’s time, in which Arthur the victor of Badon is referred to as “Chief giver of feasts”, a praise totally apposite to a successful sixth-century British ruler.

On the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury Abbey

Glastonbury Abbey: Legends and Truths

The story of Glastonbury Abbey is coloured by forged charters, muddled by rival propagandists, amplified by legends (some invented by its own monks and others seized upon by them to add to its air of mystique and sanctity), threaded through by arcane societies, honoured by modern esotericists; its origins but dimly perceivable through the mists of antiquity.

Thus for example there is a charter attributed to St. Patrick, which historians are sure was not his. There is another, dated to 601, purporting a land grant to an otherwise unknown Abbot Worgret from an unnamed king of Dumnonia. The most instructive aspect of this is that the Abbey under Saxon rule acknowledged that it had existed in 601 under British Celtic rule. There is the “finding” in 1190 of the tomb of “King Arthur and Guinevere” on the Abbey grounds, marked by an inscription telling us that this was on “the Isle of Avalon”. Another piece of legendary Arthuriana is the fable in which a King Melwas of Somerset abducted Guinevere and held her until she was released after mediation involving an unnamed Abbot of Glastonbury.[1]

Most widely known of the legends that convey/conceal precious esoteric wisdom but which, unlike the Melwas fable (see footnote), are void of all linkage to historical veracity, is the tale of the coming to Glastonbury of Joseph of Arimathea leading a company of twelve monks in 63CE. Joseph’s party supposedly stopped on arriving in the holy Glastonian precincts at Wearyall Hill because they were “weary, all”, and stabbed his saint’s staff (an emblem of holy renunciation of Hindu origin – in medieval stories, every Christian saint has one) in the ground where it took root (a sure sign that he was a true saint!) and became the Glastonbury Thorn Tree. (Levantine thorn trees really do grow around Glastonbury; no-one knows how they came to be there or why the location is favourable for them: perhaps their seeds arrived on the Byzantine ships that brought olive oil and eastern wines and spices to the prosperous monks on the Tor in the fifth and sixth centuries.) After his rest, Joseph is said to have buried two cruets containing the blood and sweat of Christ in Chalice Well, to have built the first church (yes, the Old Church, the vetusta ecclesia) at Glastonbury, and to have lived and died on the site with his twelve good men of God and true.

John Scott, the historian who shares a name with a Celtic deeply wise ninth-century philosopher[2], has thoroughly proved the non-historicity of this tale, and generally with great skill and scholarship sieved ‘the wheat from the chaff’ in the content of Glastonbury’s manuscripts from the high Middle Ages.

William of Malmesbury: De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie

The primary sources of information on the early centuries of Glastonbury Abbey include various references in saints’ lives, and substantial archaeological examination; the principal primary documentary source, however, is the book whose title I have imitated for this post, “On the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury” (De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie), written by the monk William of Malmesbury in c1130.

William strove to serve two masters, truth and the Roman Catholic Church – as ever, an impossible task. He used ambiguous language when recording tales that he did not trust for accuracy, thus retaining sufficient goodwill from the Abbey for them to publish his book (if I may be permitted such anachronistic language), tales which someone less diplomatic might have brazenly described as poppycock.

William recorded oral tradition faithfully transmitted in secret within the Abbey from generation to generation and revealed to him, a source worthy to be highly regarded (as Scott himself substantially indicates) bearing in mind the continuity of the Abbey through and despite the Wessaxen English conquest of central Somerset, the Viking wars, and the Norman conquest – and also the relative unreliability of written sources, vulnerable as they were in the age of handwritten manuscripts and a Roman Church monopoly on learning, both to deliberate forgery and to unintentional copying errors.

Here, in summary, are the stages of the early history of Glastonbury Abbey as told by William (and, mostly, as translated by Scott), shorn of the sections of “his” book that Scott identified as later additions and not his work:-

(Chapter 2) Lucius, King of the Britons, asked Pope Eleutherius to send Christian preachers, which he did. They restored the old church of St. Mary at Glastonbury.

There are letters worthy of belief to be found at St. Edmund’s that the church at Glastonbury was built by the very disciples of Christ, sent by St. Philip the apostle. This is not inconsistent with the truth because if Philip preached to the Gauls, (Freculph, Book 2, Ch 4) it can be believed that he also cast the seeds of the Word across the ocean.

(Ch 19) birth of St. Patrick in 361AD…

(Ch 8) St. Patrick returned to Britain in his old age, rejecting his former dignity and popular acclaim. He landed in Cornwall [Cornubia] on his altar. Then coming to Glastonbury, he was made monk and abbot; and after several years he died of natural causes.

(Ch 11) [I paraphrase] As confirmed by a monk in a dream, he [Patrick] was a bishop, and later he became a monk and abbot.

(Ch 10) Patrick died aged 111 in 472AD, the 47^th year after he’d been sent into Ireland. He reposes on the right side of the altar in the old church in a stone pyramid, later carefully covered in silver.

(Ch 13) In 460AD, St Benignus came to Glastonbury. He was a disciple of St. Patrick and the third to succeed him in his Irish see. Admonished by an angel, he forsook his homeland and undertook a voluntary pilgrimage which led him, under God’s guidance, to Glastonbury where he found St. Patrick. [There are] marks of his presence still at Meare.

(Ch 12) They say that after St Brigid, who had come there in 488AD, had tarried for some time on the island called Beckery [Beokery] she returned home but left behind a bag, a necklace, a small bell, and weaving implements, which are still preserved there in memory of her.

(Ch 7) As we have heard from our forefathers, Gildas the historian passed many years there [Glastonbury], captivated by the holiness of the spot.

(Ch 6) The Old Church [vetusta ecclesia = Ealdechirche] was at first made of brushwood [virgea].

(Ch 19) The traditions of our fathers maintain that…. Paulinus, Bishop of Rochester and earlier Archbishop of York, had strengthened the structure of the church, previously made of wattle as we said [virgee], with a layer of wooden boards [ligneo tabulatu], and had covered it from the top down with lead. It was managed with such skill by this ingenious man that the church lost none of its sanctity, and its beauty was much increased.

(Ch 14) In 504AD, St Columba [Kolumkilla] came to Glastonbury.

(Ch 15) The great David of Menevia, the famous archbishop….. approved of the antiquity and sanctitude of the divine church, and he came to this place intending to dedicate it with seven bishops of whom he was the prime. He slept the night before the planned festivities. Lord Jesus came to him and said it had already been dedicated in honour of his mother, and a human iteration of this sacrament was not seemly. But so that something would be seen, he quickly took action to get another church built, and dedicated that construction.

(Ch 18) The church at Glastonbury is therefore the oldest that I know of in England.

Most of these statements by William of Malmesbury require some commentary.

Scott convinces that the story of King Lucius and Pope Eleutherius “arose from a misreading of the Liber Pontificalis” and is therefore false. As for the putative side-visit from St. Philip’s mission to Gaul, William’s own language makes clear that this is speculation, and there is no evidence for it. St. Gildas states in his book De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae that Christianity first reached Britain towards the end of Emperor Tiberius’s reign, i.e. in 46 or 47CE; one tradition has it that it was brought by St. Aristobulus, brother of the apostle Barnabas and one of “the seventy” missionaries whose first training mission work is mentioned in the Gospel. In any case, there is no Glastonbury connection to any of these attested, possible, and putative, missions to Britain by very early Christians.

St. Patrick, Abbot of Glastonbury

St. Patrick was not born in 361AD. Much more possible is that he was born in 388AD, which was 361 ad passionem. Prior to the church’s publication of a definitive AD calendar in 529CE, Christians calculated dates sometimes from the Passion (deemed to be 28CE) and sometimes from the Incarnation (1CE); a muddling between the two was possible.

The only substantial clue to St. Patrick’s date of birth is that he was captured in a raid and taken to Ireland as a slave when he was 16. There was a particularly destructive raid on Lindinis in 398 during which several villas in the Avon and Cam valleys of northern Somerset were destroyed by fire, which makes 382CE the hot favourite for St. Patrick’s birth year. But this was not the only Irish raid on Lindinis; a nearby year for his capture, such as 404, which would be correct if he was born in 388, is also possible.

William’s Chapter 8 (and 11) statement about St. Patrick returning to Britain in his old age and becoming a monk and abbot at Glastonbury must have been based on a strong Abbey tradition. William’s statement that “all doubt of the truth of this assertion is removed by the vision of a certain brother… when asleep” can be understood as code for it being a truth secretly held that the Patrick who became Abbot of Glastonbury was indeed the Apostle of Ireland. Such language from William is in sharp contrast to his comments about the possibilities of Sts Bridget or David having died there, which leave an apparent loophole for the possibility while making it all but blatant that he gives it no credibility.

There is, however, nothing in William’s words which says that the abbey was then on its present site. Nor does William say that Patrick was Glastonbury’s first abbot.  [3]  However, this will only have been because he allows the possibility that the abbey was founded earlier by Philip the apostle or by emissaries of Pope Eleutherius – neither of which is in fact true.

What William does say is “St. Patrick, from whom the series of our records dawns”.

The monastic community has to have been founded by someone who knew how to create and organise a monastery. There seems to be a pattern by which monasteries were created. An upper-class person with the ear of the local ruler (king, warlord, etc) secures authority to found a monastic church at a chosen location. He first builds two structures on the site: a small church, and a hut where they live as a hermit.

Soon enough, the saintly hermit attracts a few other Christians to build their own huts, and a monastic community emerges. This is how the first monastery of St. Martin of Tours, the pioneer of monastic Christianity in NW Europe, started at Legugé, a place-name which means ‘small huts’.

When the founder dies, the monastics put his body in a coffin. People believe its vibrations have healing power, so this attracts pilgrims. So they now build a third structure: a chapel over the coffin, and a viewing platform for pilgrims to see it – connected by some steps. The founder is counted a saint, and his name is clearly remembered and honoured by later generations of monks.

There is archaeological evidence for this having happened at Marmoutier, St. Martin’s second (larger) foundation near Tours, where he died; and at Britain’s first abbey, St. Ninian’s Whithorn in Galloway.

If the sequence of events was similar at Glastonbury (and there is no obvious reason why it wouldn’t have been), William of Malmesbury is very clear that the person whom the monks recorded and remembered as their founder, their equivalent of St. Martin at Tours and St. Ninian at Whithorn, was St. Patrick of Ireland. This dates the founding of the abbey to before Patrick’s death in 458: so, c450.

It seems far more reasonable to figure that the abbey was founded by this Somerset-born nobleman, as the monks said it was, its church built only in wattle-and-daub because it was at a time when even the elite could not afford anything better, than the alternative hypothesis that there was a founder whose name is unknown, establishing it either later in the fifth century – before the first fairly firmly dateable event in the abbey’s story after the death of St. Patrick, the visit of St. Bride in her 50^th year, 503 or 504 – or even later, implying that St. Bride visited only a hermit and not a community, not long before St. Pol strengthened the church with brushwood no later than about 530.

There cannot be archaeological evidence to date the original church, the vetusta ecclesia, because of its replacement by the 12^th-century rebuild; but Rahtz’s dig did identify a chapel for coffins and steps for viewing them, which he called a ‘hypogeum’, dated to “seventh century or older” (Rahtz and Watts, p99). It is a rational conjecture that St. Patrick built the original church in around 450, and that Rahtz’s hypogeum was built by his successors in the 460s or soon after.

There are signs however of one difference from practice elsewhere, in the century after St. Patrick’s time. It seems that some monks of the abbey monastic community lived within reasonable walking distance of its church but not within its precincts. William tells us that the second abbot, Beonna, lived at Meare, three miles away. A man’s grave of late-5^th century date, considered to be that of a hermit, has been identified at Beckery, nearly a mile away. Archaeology on the tor indicates that, in the late fifth or early sixth century, two or a few monks lived on the top, a mile and a quarter away. And evidence points to St. Gildas – whom William says ‘stayed here’, meaning in the abbey – having dwelled across the river at Street, nearly two miles away, in the second quarter of the sixth century.

Somerset-born St. Patrick is associated with Glastonbury. There is no other person known to history who would have had the knowhow to found an abbey before the time of St. Pol de Leon, whom William actively tells us strengthened the Old Church with brushwood, not built it. And Patrick would have had the motivation to create a Christian shrine there because of both its general location – Patrick’s Somerset homeland – and its specific location, Glas(tonbury), the ‘City of Light’, stealing from the Druids their sacred Summerland and Christianising it just as he stole the Hill of Tara from the Druids in Leinster.

In the major work of St. Patrick that exists in manuscript in his own handwriting, his Confessio, a document which William had read, St. Patrick states a longing to return to Britain, but a willingness to do so only if God consents. It would be natural to put St. Patrick’s and William’s words together and infer that God did indeed grant St. Patrick his wish, and that he spent his last few years as Abbot of Glastonbury. Most of the Irish annals, as restored by D.P. McCarthy (https://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/kronos/chronology/synchronisms/Edition_4/K_trad/Synch_tables/s0425-0487.htm ), record Patrick’s death as in 458CE (not 472 as stated by William[4]), as also does the Annales Cambriae.

That William is not taken at face value on Patrick’s return to and abbacy of Glastonbury is a mystery, for the only obstacle (other than the ultra-scepticism of some historians about the veracity of anything not proven to have been contemporaneously written down, or else archaeologically dug up and radio-carbon dated) is the perception created by Armagh sources that St. Patrick died there and was buried at nearby Downpatrick, when it is well attested that Armagh developed an effective propaganda machine in the seventh century to assert its claim to primacy as the archiepiscopal see of all Ireland, and that avowing St. Patrick’s loyalty to Ireland until his death was an aspect of that propaganda. Also, other sources say there was a second Christian leader in northern Ireland called Patricius (which, after all, was a title fairly widely used in the fifth century, not a given-name) and that “the Patrick who died in Ireland was born there”.

St. Bride and other Celtic Saints

The Annales Cambriae record St. Benignus as having died in 469.

As noted in my post here of 4^th July 2013, tradition says that in the late fifth century a Christian hermit lived at the place now called Bride’s Mound, and it is credible to suppose that when St. Bride visited Glastonbury in 488 she stayed at his house. Archaeology has found a grave of a man “of exceptional importance” at the Beckery location where evidence of a chapel and a male monastic community and cemetery were also found. He could have lived in the sixth century….. but could also have been centuries later. Rahtz, the archaeologist, suggests that “the community may have begun as the abode of a hermit, whose reputation attracted others to join him”.[5]

There is a charter saying land at Beckery was given to Abbot Berthwald in 670. The extant charter was probably written much later than 670, but its purported land grant and date may well nevertheless be genuine. Rahtz reckons Beckery’s monastic community existed from the “eighth or ninth century”, which makes sense if the Abbey began to build the chapel there (the monks’ central focus) fairly soon after 670.

St. Gildas is believed to have lived at Street, just across the Pomparles Bridge over the River Brue from Beckery; most probably at what is now Holy Trinity church, where the shape of the grounds has been identified as typical for a sixth-century Celtic lan (church enclosure).

St. Pol de Léon

In Chapter 19, William made the mistake of assuming that the “Bishop Paulinus” who was the first to upgrade the Old Church was the Papal emissary Paulinus who was the first Archbishop of York. In fact, this was the Celtic British Christian leader St. Paulinus Aurelianus, better known as St. Pol de Léon, one of the “seven founding saints of Brittany”.

The Life of St. Pol written by Wrmonoc in 884 (therefore pre-dating the start of the main, more propagandistic, era of Saints’ Lives by two centuries) is consistent with the Lives of St Samson and St. Illtyd in the key facts for dating him. He was a pupil of St. Illtyd[6]; a contemporary of St. Gildas [lived 490-568/9], St. Samson [b.486, d. after 556], St. Brendan [d. 572/574], and St. David [c508-587]; met King Childebert of Paris [reigned 511-558]; and took part in the Synod of Llandewi Brefi [dated by the B script of the Annales Cambriae to 567]. According to a website on the Seven Founding Saints, http://www.le-petit-manchot.fr/les-saints-fondateurs-de-bretagne/les-chroniques/, his birth was either in 480 or 492 and his working life in Brittany was from 517 to 553.[7] His death is commemorated as having been on 12^th March, in c575. (A little earleir would be more credible; other Breton sources imply that Pol was elderly but alive when St. Jaoua died in 554; and that he had been living in Brittany for at least two decades by then.)  [8]

His father was Porphyrius, which means “clad in purple”. Curiously, this is exactly the exceptionally noble status with which Gildas dignifies the father of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the general whom he praises for leading partially-effective British military resistance to English raiders after the Great Raid of 473. This suggests the possibility that St. Pol was the younger brother of Ambrosius in the Aurelian family; or, perhaps more likely, that Ambrosius himself inherited the title “clad in purple” and St. Pol was Ambrosius’s son.

If, as seems true, St. Pol left Britain for Brittany permanently in the early 530s, his strengthening of the Old Church at Glastonbury with brushwood would have been before that; given his being a contemporary at St. Illtyd’s school of Gildas and Samson, a date in the 510s or 520s is indicated.

In turn, it follows that the original wattle-and-daub church, must have been built appreciably before then. This evidence, on its own, points to a fifth century date; it is St. Patrick that hones the probable date to the 450s, or, less likely, the 440s.

St. Columba and St. David (Dewi Sant)

St. Columba could not have visited Glastonbury in 504: he was born in 521. The year is much more credible for a second visit to Glastonbury by St. Bride. A visit by her at that date would make possible the story that St. Gildas made and gave her a bell, for by then he was 14, in those days a credible age for a youth to be working as a craftsman.[9] If the source of the early Annales Cambriae entries has a Glastonbury origin, it would also explain the mistaken date of 455 there for St. Bride’s birth, which was actually in 439. Tradition says St. Bride was in her 50^th year of age when she visited Glastonbury, a statement which was true of her visit in 488, but which could have been mistakenly figured as true of her visit in 504 by the writer of the source used by the compilers of the Annales Cambriae.

William’s confusion of St. Columba’s visit date may be due to a copying error from 553 (in Roman numerals DLIII) to 504 (DIIII).

William’s brief note is the only record of St. Columba having ever been anywhere outside Ireland, other than in connection with his work in Dalriada in what is now Scotland. That this prince of Ulster (a great-great grandson of the famous Niall of the Nine Hostages) visited Glastonbury and nowhere else in what are now England and Wales implied that there was some unique attraction for him at Glastonbury. The obvious explanation is that he believed that St. Patrick died there and his relics were enshrined in the Abbey.

Archaeology has verified the existence and the dimensions of the extension to the Old Church attributed to St. David. This could have been either side of the middle of the sixth century. The Irish annals as calibrated by McCarthy all record St. David’s death as in 587.[10]

Culturally, the story as reported by William has the feel of William’s time rather than David’s: it is hard to credit that any church would have been dedicated with pomp and ceremony in the presence of seven bishops in the sixth century, let alone an Abbey church in that age when Celtic abbots could be in authority at monasteries as superiors over bishops.

In recording St. David’s contribution to the history of the Abbey, William knew he was handling a politically hot potato. David had been made a saint by the pope just ten years before William compiled his book De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie. Rhygyfarch’s Life of St. David had been in circulation for about forty years. Rhygyfarch had there said that David had founded the monastery of Glastonbury. Without mentioning Rhygyfarch, William actively refutes this, firstly by naming St. Patrick as an abbot from well before St. David’s time, and secondly with the story of St. David’s visit to the Abbey that he wrote in Chapter 15. This story skilfully combines the purposes of shining a holy light on St. David sufficiently bright to deter his See of St. David’s in Pembrokeshire from challenging it, adding a visit from Christ himself to the aura of mystique and religious prestige with which Glastonbury Abbey was investing itself, as well as embroidering St. David’s halo with it, and conveying the plain truth that what St. David had actually done for Glastonbury was build the first eastward extension (of several, some already built by William’s time) to the Old Church.

And Did Those Feet?

The story continues to resonate, for it evoked Blake’s famous poem Jerusalem, set to music by Parry, “And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green / And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?”[11]

The answer to Blake’s questions is “yes – symbolically, not literally”. The symbolism will be better understood by Glastonbury-loving mystics than by me. South of Street, just 4 miles from the Abbey, is a hill called Dundon, which means “Don’s Fort”. Don is a name of the Queen of Heaven, the Supreme Mother Goddess in the Celts’ Druidic faith. In the Glastonbury Zodiac, Dundon Hill embraces the child part of Gemini’s Mother-and-child / Mary-and-Christ symbol. So the Celtic Mother Goddess becomes the Catholic Mother of God on Dundon Hill.

The connection with St David is that the Zodiac balances (in Libra, naturally) around his name, Libra being represented by a Dove (c.f. Christ’s baptism by John, possibly across the Jordan from Jericho) at Barton St. David, whose church is on a straight (ley?) line from the River Tone at Athelney  – the tone, aum, being the Holy Sound or iera echo (> Jericho) – via Littleton where the other twin of Gemini is, a place at Bruton called Dovecote, and Monkton Deverill (Dove-rill??), to Stonehenge.

“And did the countenance divine / Shine forth upon our clouded hills?” Blake asks next. The name Glastonbury has the English words ‘ton’ (settlement), and later ‘burgh’ (citadel), added to an original British ‘Glas’, a word that denotes purity, Light, transparency, blue as in the blue of infinite sky – surely, characteristics of the shining ‘countenance divine’. Esoterically, Glas(tonbury) can be seen as Britain’s equivalent of India’s Kashi (the City of Light), also known as Varanasi because it is bounded by two rivers, the Varuna (c.f. the Brue at Glastonbury) and Asi (c.f. the Axe at Glastonbury).

Blake’s last question is “And was Jerusalem builded here?” to which the Templars, of whom William of Malmesbury may well have been one, presumably the creators of the Glastonbury Zodiac, who derived their sacred geometry and architectural inspiration from Solomon’s Temple, the spiritual pinnacle of Jerusalem, would surely say “yes – we did our Level best”.

Rahtz

Turning now from William of Malmesbury to archaeology, the good news is that a lot of excavation has been done both among the Abbey ruins and around the top of the Tor.

The bad news is that the building of a new church to replace the Old Church after it was utterly destroyed by fire in 1184 was sufficiently exact in location to wholly preclude the possibility of archaeology contributing anything to the question of when the Old Church was built. Excavation of the original boundary ditch of the Abbey, its vallum monasterii, also discovered no dateable evidence, neither in nor under the bank.

The archaeologist Rahtz therefore said “there is no evidence that it [the Abbey] was earlier than the seventh century”.[12] However, Rahtz did identify a well only four metres from the Old Church of which “the overall appearance was very similar to that of Roman wells excavated in the area”.[13]

Rather than on the present Abbey site, archaeologists found the earliest high-status settlement in Glastonbury on the Tor. They unearthed remains of meat joints that people had eaten, of graves, and of Byzantine amphorae (storage jars for wine, olive oil, spices, etc) that could “be matched from dated fifth- or sixth-century levels” in the Mediterranean, similar to ones found within Lindinis at South Cadbury, Cadbury-Congresbury and Cannington, and at Tintagel and other sites in Dumnonia. Rahtz allows therefore that the Tor may have been “in the later fifth or early sixth century, a monastic site”.[14]

Conclusion

In conclusion, the pattern by which events evolved that seems most probable, considering all the evidence, is that in around 450, two or a few monks led by St. Patrick set up a hermitage on the top of the Tor, which continued as a monastic settlement into at least the seventh century[15]. In the seventh century, the principal residential site became the more-practically located present Abbey. Their church, though, was from the beginning the Old Church, built close to the Roman well on the Abbey site. This church was the place of worship on high holy days also for other local monks who lived in isolation as hermits, for example at Beckery, Meare, and Street.

So, what is the antiquity of the Old Church of Glastonbury? Clearly, no totally definitive answer can be given beyond the wide window of “almost certainly after 392,[16] certainly considerably before 550, and very likely at least several decades before 530”. But the answer “c450” can be advanced as the most probable.

This timing is consistent with the condition of the elite being so impoverished that they could build only a wattle church. In the first few decades after independence in 409, the British economy went into a deep depression barely comprehensible to the modern mind – except possibly to someone who knew Maputo, Mozambique, during Portuguese rule and also during and just after the civil war. [17]  Following the overthrow of Roman imperial governors and the withdrawal of the Roman army, there was no work for mosaicists and stonemasons. The official postal service, the cursus publicus, stopped running, so the roadside shops went out of business.[18] Elegant town-houses, expensive villas, and baths with hypocausts were no longer assets. The socio-political culture and military needs of the indigenous ruling class called for timber feasting-halls and hill-fort defences; during Cador’s time as Governor of Lindinis, building them would have had priority call on the precious resources for construction of durable wooden structures.

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[1] The origin of the fable may be the genuine historical story (mentoned by James Carley, Glastonbury Abbey: 1996, p6) that in c708 a (presumably royal, or at least noble) Kentish woman was a hostage held by Abbot Beorhtwald at Glastonbury Abbey, and the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to Bishop Forthere of Sherborne (the diocese that in 708 included Glastonbury) asking him to intervene to procure her release.

[2] John Scottus Eriugena (meaning ‘Irish-born’), c815-c880, who taught the primacy of reason over religious dogma, that humans have free will, and that all creatures and things came from God and ultimately return to God – a combination of understandings even now more likely to find favour with Unitarians and Hindus than with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church.

[3] Interpolated text presents Patrick as having gathered hermits and taught them the cenobitic life; no such idea appears in the words Scott identifies as genuinely William’s.

[4] It is conceivable that 72 (LXXII) was a copying error for 58 (LVIII).

These annals also concur that Patrick arrived in Ireland in 432, not 425. The annals which McCarthy designates “Mageoghagan’s Book” includes the phrase “425AD” in its recording of Patrick’s arrival, but, on McCarthy’s calculations, this entry actually also belongs to 432CE.

[5] Rahtz and Watts, Glastonbury: 2009, pp149-153.

[6] St. Illtyd founded a training institution at the place west of Cardiff now named after him, Llan Illtyd Fawr, in the mid-fifth century. Modelled on Druid and bard training, it was a Christian school for princely children, some of whom as adults became known to history as Christian leaders.

[7] St. David was younger than St. Gildas. Lives say that St. Gildas preached to St. Non, St. David’s mother, when she was pregnant with him. Of the two birth dates given for St. Pol, 480 and 492, the latter seems more probable for a man who lived to attend Llandewi Brefi.

[8] http://home.scarlet.be/amdg/oldies/sankt/mar12.html gives other details from St. Pol’s life, including giving his name to the village Paul, a mile and a half south of Penzance in Cornwall, where his sister had founded a convent.

[9] Based on a birth year for St. Gildas of 489/490, derived from a sensible, but controversial, interpretation of the period of “43 years and one month” connected to his birth which Gildas wrote of in his book De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae.

[10] His reported life events imply a date of birth probably around 508.

[11] It is a neat link that this “Jerusalem” is sung at sporting events as England’s unofficial national anthem and that, in the Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012, pre-industrial England was expressed by a visual representation of Glastonbury Tor.

[12] Rahtz and Watts, Glastonbury: 2009, p91.

[13] ibid, pp108-9

[14] ibid, pp71-73 and 78

[15] and maybe into the 16^th century. Continuity between the seventh and tenth centuries was not confirmed: ibid, p78ff.

[16] The Roman Emperor Theodosius I decreed that Christianity would be the only permitted religion in the Empire. 392 is the year in which he gained sovereignty over the Western Empire. To find a blatantly purpose-built church such as the Old Church before this date would be most unlikely.

[17] White, Britannia Prima: 2007, plate 51 (p134), gives a graphic visual example of the effects of this economic decline at Whitley Grange, even in a part of western Britain where destruction and theft by English raiders did not add to the economic disaster.

[18] St. Patrick in his Confessio says he was born in a small town of this kind, a place with shops and somewhere to stay the night, Bannaventa berniae. It has not been identified. The size and function of such a place suggests to me that it would have been at a significant road junction. The status of St. Patrick’s father Calpornius suggests that it would not have been very far from a civitas capital such as Lindinis’s at Ilchester. My speculative fancy is that Bannaventa berniae lost the second part of its name and became shortened to Benter. Benter is a quarter of a mile from the Fosse Way, just over 3 miles from its junction with the road from the Roman mining town Charterhouse to Winchester. Nettlebridge on the Fosse and nearby Benter have a reliable water supply, whereas the junction itself is on a hill.

Llongborth, Pencon, and the Partition of Somerset

The Marwnat Geraint [1] (Elegy for Geraint) is a poem commemorating a King Geraint who was slain at a Battle of Llongborth. In the poem, the place name is spelt Llogborth and Llogporth in the dative. Its greatest value nowadays is that even the most Arthur-disbelieving historians accept it as evidence of the honouring by Celtic Britons in the eighth century of a past warrior leader called Arthur.

A coherent interpretation is that Llongborth is Langport in Somerset; that the battle is the one the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records as having been fought by King Ine of Wessex against a British King Geraint in 710; and that this Geraint is the same man as the King Geraint of Dumnonia known to history from correspondence with Aldhelm, the first bishop of Sherborne, dated to 705. (Ultra-sceptics, of course, regard none of these points as certain facts.)

The poem describes Geraint as a “brave man of the region of Devon” (guir deur o odir diwneint), and warriors who fought for him are called “Arthur’s brave men” (y Arthur guir deur). This need not mean that Arthur was present at the battle! Rather, it is saying that men who were heirs to Arthur’s knights fought for Geraint, in much the same way as warriors of Gwynedd might be called ‘Cunedda’s men’ in honour of their kingdom’s founder.

So how might it be that warriors fighting for a king from Devon were called “Arthur’s braves” if Arthur was King of Lindinis? Firstly, it is appropriate to equate Diwneint with Dumnonia. In Roman times Dumnonia was the civitas to the west of Lindinis. It included all of Cornwall and all of modern Devon except the northern part that was in Lindinis. Diwneint (also spelt Dyvneint), the British name that became anglicised to Devon, is the word that was previously Latinised into Dumnonia. The civitas and later kingdom is more commonly called Kernow in its own language, Kernyw in Welsh, Cornwall in English.

The probable explanation is that by the turn of the eighth century much of Arthur’s Lindinis had fallen under English rule. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle boasts of a West Saxon victory in 658 in which the British were “driven to the Parrett”; and in 661 of the West Saxon king fighting a battle at Posbury, near Crediton. It, significantly, does not say that Kenwal won. But Hoskins (in The Westward Expansion of Wessex) indicates that the “misdating” of charters for church land at Crediton to 680 implies that he did not lose it either. Hoskins shows that by 680 Wessex appears to have gained sovereignty over the southeast corner of Devon and a salient through Pinhoe to Crediton. Glastonbury Abbey records give strong indications that the Abbey came under English control in the late seventh century, also probably during the reign of Kenwal (d. 685).

It is therefore a conjecture consistent with what is known and what is probable that at the turn of the 700s the part of Lindinis which remained in British control was only its districts to the west of the Parrett – in modern terms, approximately the western half of South Somerset, Taunton Deane, Exmoor, and northern Devon north of the River Taw. Somerset was divided between a British-ruled west and an English-ruled east. The remnant of Linidinis, even if it retained its own sub-king, provided its warriors, “Arthur’s braves”, as fighting men arm in arm with the kingdom of King Geraint of Dumnonia. The Marwnaw Geraint poem does not indicate if its author regarded Geraint himself as among Arthur’s brave men.

It is not that the partition of Somerset was negotiated as a treaty or upheld as an agreed border by either side. It is to be thought of as more like a, forever temporary, de-facto ceasefire line which held for about a century after 661 because both kingdoms, British Kernow/Dumnonia and English Wessex/Gewissae, successfully defended their territories when attacked.

On both sides, the balance of military capacity was in favour of the defenders. The location of the battle of Llongborth suggests that King Geraint and “Arthur’s brave men” tried to regain part of the lost kingdom of Lindinis (later dimly remembered as Lyonesse), crossing the River Parrett – the presumed pre-battle boundary – which flows immediately to the west and south of Langport. The Parrett is separated from the town by a now-tranquil meadow, on which it is easy to imagine the battle was fought. Despite their eulogised valour, they lost.

A generation later in 733 (at Battle Farm?), Wessex defeated British forces at Somerton who were attempting to wrest from them control of eastern Somerset in what historical hindsight tells us was their last ever (known) incursion across the Parrett frontier. Equally, though, the English were unable to advance. The alliance or union between Lindinis and Kernow must have been effectively sustained. In the early 700s, Wessex’s attempt to hold a fort west of the Parrett at Taunton failed; and in 722 its attempt to advance westwards along the north coast was defeated at the Battle of Pencon, which I figure was at Quantoxhead (see note 11 of my 9^th March 2013 post). As I noted also in an earlier post, according to the Watchet historical website http://www.watchetmuseum.co.uk/saxons_vikings.php, the English only conquered this last part of Lindinis in 815.

[1] http://gorddcymru.org/twilight/camelot/poetry/taliesin/elegy_geraint.htm

Beckery – Another King Arthur : Somerset Link

An ancient and symbolic story links King Arthur to Beckery, which is one mile west of Glastonbury Abbey.

The story is that King Arthur visited Beckery and there was granted a vision of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. She presented him with a crystal equal-armed cross. This experience led Arthur to adopt a new coat-of-arms replacing the Red Dragon with a crystal cross on a green background and an image of the Virgin and Child in the top left hand corner.

Several other strands are sometimes included in the story. One is that King Arthur first sees a dead body in a bier, and when he asks who it is he sees an old priest from Nyland, who then dies. Another is that all this occurred in the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene. It is sometimes further said that the king arrived at dawn one Ash Wednesday, to find the door guarded by fiery swords so that no-one unworthy could enter. Another strand is that, Mary having appeared with the baby Jesus in Her arms, the child is taken as the sacrament and his flesh is eaten, but afterwards he reappears whole and unharmed. Another strand is that King Arthur visited as part of his preparation for the Battle of Badon.

Rahtz’s archaeological dig in 1969 found proof of a male monastic community having lived at the Beckery location long held sacred and known as Bride’s Mound. However, he dated it as early Anglo-Saxon, i.e. seventh or eighth century. He also found evidence of Roman occupation on the site – but nothing in-between. Rahtz’s date is strikingly consistent with the notice in William of Malmesbury that a charter gave land at Beckery to Glastonbury Abbey in 670. The charter itself is regarded as dubious; but the acquisition of the land at that time by the Abbey may nevertheless be genuine.

William of Malmesbury also recorded an oral tradition sacredly transmitted at Glastonbury Abbey that St. Bride, Ireland’s greatest early Christian woman leader, visited Glastonbury in 488 and again in 504. She too is said to have stayed at Bride’s Mound.

The website http://arthurianadventure.com/bride%27s_mound.htm tells that a Christian hermit lived on Bride’s Mound in the fifth century. This points to a basis on which all the stories and the archaeology can be reconciled. A hermit lived on Bride’s Mound (which could easily have happened without archaeological trace, especially not trace that would have been noticed in the 1960s, which is when this location was excavated): a site spiritually favourable, for a straight (ley?) line drawn from the Abbey to the Beckery location marked on the O.S. map “chapel remains” continues to the church at Greinton (= Grian’s settlement (ton), Grian being the Sun (god) in Druidic Britain), and thence to other churches in Westonzoyland, North Petherton, and Broomfield (and in the other direction, to Pilton); St. Bride stayed with this hermit in 488; a couple of years afterwards, King Arthur visited him and had his vision; nearly a couple of centuries later, soon after 670, a small monastic community gathered there and built a chapel; the chapel presently became known as St. Mary Magdalene’s.

What matters in the story is its symbolic elements. First a dead body. Then the dying priest from Nyland which is itself the abode of the dead – in the Celtic British Brythonic language “ny” means “not” so Nyland is “the land of those who are not”, as is also shown by its alternative name Andrewsey, “ey” in old English meaning “island” (because it was an island in the marshes) and “Andrews” being just an English spelling of “an drws”, “the door of An”, An being the Goddess of the Otherworld. (c.f. Camlan, Caml an…. of which more another day.) Then, filtered through church-tidied hands, the dying and restored god Jesus.

Brought back into a fifth-century cultural context, these images tell primarily that Arthur was being given a talismanic symbolic protection against death – clearly something he needed as the warrior leader before going into what was to be his greatest battle – and secondly that this magical protection was Christian. The crystal cross given by Mary, the one element common to all versions of the story, is a Christian symbol for the essential elements of purity and of victory over death. Heraldry, of course, did not exist in the fifth century; but the symbol of replacing the dragon with the cross conveys the message that Arthur, ruler of a Celtic kingdom (red dragon) though he was, relied on the Christian God for his protection. The act of Mary giving it to him represents his being accepted by her and Christ. Arthur is shown to have divine legitimacy in the Christian order. It all happening at the dawn of Ash Wednesday is a way of saying symbolically that Arthur underwent a ritual penance or spiritual purification – an obvious cultural necessity before gaining the right to this divine protection. Even the attribution of all this to a chapel of St. Mary Magdalene is not casual, anachronistic though it be if viewed literally: for this Mary was, in the Gospel, the first witness to Jesus’s resurrection. She too is therefore a symbol of victory over the danger of death.

The flaming sword, a symbol not otherwise associated with Beckery and not a normal theme in Christianity either, compares directly with the bright flashing sword of light in lines 18 and 19 of Taliesin’s esoteric poem Preiddeu Annwn. In the poem, this is a symbol for the light of the third or spiritual eye of wisdom in the forehead (and also of the energy of prana in the ida channel in the spine) which can only be penetrated by a “worthy” person (and not, as line 17 of that poem assures, by a “timid person who is not initiated”).

The overall message is that Arthur is worthy, wise, and spiritually purified and divinely accepted. He is the right ruler, and is therefore magically protected from death.

And all this has nothing at all to do with “Arthurian” romance and the lays of Breton minstrels, nor with the fantastic “history” created by Geoffrey of Monmouth that elevated Arthur to ruler of vast lands. It is a simple oral tradition with credibility (though, of course, no certainty) as a story of genuinely fifth-century origin, and one that places King Arthur in Somerset.

To be sure, since all the individual components of the story are symbolic, it is rational to suspect that its being located at Bride’s Mound may also be symbolic. Kathy Jones – http://www.kathyjones.co.uk/glastonburygoddess.html – says that Bride’s “symbol is a White Swan”. White is, naturally, the colour of purification; and of the star at the centre of the spiritual eye through which the successful initiate’s mind will travel after crossing the bar of the flaming sword and entering that door (Taliesin’s drws porth vffern). The swan is a symbol of advanced spirituality: plainly, for its famed habit of seeming serene on the surface while working vigorously out of sight; and esoterically as a symbol that Celtic Britain imported from ancient India where the white swan (hansa) is the vehicle of the Supreme Being (Brahma) and of the goddess of wisdom and learning Saraswati, and is the symbol of spiritual discrimination. The location of Mary’s gift to Arthur may be all about his having, being given, or the story’s creator asserting that he had been given, the quality of spiritual discrimination.

But, all that said, Bride has numerous sites in her name in Britain from the He-brides Islands to St. Bride’s Bay in Pembrokeshire to St. Bride’s church below Ludgate in London, yet this Arthur story is sourced only in Somerset. The story tells us that King Arthur wins his spiritual spurs in Somerset. It does so because this is where his kingdom lay.