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 47th 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 50th 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 12th-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-5th 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 4th 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 12th 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 50th 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.
[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.
[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.
[14] ibid, pp71-73 and 78
[15] and maybe into the 16th 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.
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