Glastonbury, place of myth and legend

To Somerset, the ancient ‘Summer Land’ in the West Country and a county of endless fascination to historians. This was where Alfred the Great hid out in the marshes in early 878 after the Vikings had taken him by surprise and raided his stronghold at Chipenham; he took refuge in an old woman’s hut and, so legend has it, forgot to keep his eye on the cakes while thinking about how he could overcome his enemies (which he did, triumphing over them at Ethandun – modern-day Edington in Wiltshire – later that same year). This was also where the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion against James II came to an end in 1685 at the battle of Sedgemoor (an illegitimate son of Charles II and an experienced military leader, Monmouth knew that his peasant rabble was no match for the regular army and so went for a night attack, which failed). In the far north-east of the county, there’s the old Roman spa of Aquae Sulis (modern-day Bath).

And then there is Glastonbury.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the landmark that can be seen for miles around. Glastonbury Tor, the hill just outside the modern town, is topped by a distinctive tower that is all that’s left of a fourteenth-century church (itself built on the site of an earlier church). It’s dedicated to St Michael and it can be reached after a half-hour walk from the town. The Tor appears to have been called Ynys Afalon by the Ancient Britons, a name which translates as the Isle of Avalon which has led many to associate it with the mythical island of that name; certainly there was a time when the Tor was indeed an island, or at least high ground surrounded by marshland. “At the beginning of the Christian era”, writes Geoffrey Ashe in Mythology of the British Isles, “the Glastonbury hill-cluster was almost an island in times of high tide and flooding. Vessels could reach it from the Bristol Channel.” The views from the top are quite spectacular.

Down in the town, there’s the ruins of the monastery. Glastonbury Abbey dates back to at least the early eighth century, although in Medieval times it claimed to be much, much older. What can be in no doubt is that it produced one of the great English statesmen of the Dark Ages, St Dunstan, who was the Abbot of Glastonbury before becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which capacity he served under King Edgar whom he crowned at Bath Abbey in 973. Glastonbury, then, was clearly an important place and it was a major destination for pilgrims before the Reformation; even now it retains a reputation as a place of great spirituality steeped in myth and legend (appropriately, Glastonbury is twinned with Lalibela in Ethiopia, a fascinating place which I will write about one day). The abbey ruins themselves are quite majestic, giving visitors a very good idea of just how imposing the abbey would have been in its Medieval heyday.

Glastonbury Abbey grew rich on the wool trade, that staple of the Medieval English economy, after the monks drained the surrounding marshland in order to create grazing-land for sheep. The earliest actual date for which we have documentary evidence about Glastonbury Abbey is 712, when King Ine of Wessex endowed a community of monks there, although some would have it that the abbey had been established prior to this royal endowment. The stories about Glastonbury Abbey’s origins certainly go back further than the conversion of the English in the late sixth and early seventh centuries; there were places on the island of Britain, especially in the West Country, where Christianity existed before St Augustine landed in Kent in 597. Christianity had originally come to these isles in Roman times, and when they left some traces of it stayed here (Bede, for example, refers to the post-Roman British leader Ambrosius beating the Anglo-Saxons at Badon Hill “with God’s help”, as well as noting that the “Pelagian heresy” had “seriously infected the faith of the British church”). St Patrick, who lived in the fifth century, is said to have become the leader of a group of hermits in Glastonbury after returning from Ireland. According to the plaque at the ruined St Michael’s Tower atop the Tor, he “discovered an ancient ruined oratory on the summit after climbing through a dense wood”.

The monks of Glastonbury, though, claimed a much older foundation for their monastery. They propagated a quite extraordinary legend, involving a person from the Bible. Christianity at Glastonbury, so the story goes, went right back to the origins of Christianity itself. Joseph of Arimathea is the man in the Gospels who convinces Pontius Pilate to let him take care of Jesus’s body after the Crucifixion; it was in the sepulchre (rock-cut tomb) that was presumably meant for Joseph that Jesus’s body was placed, and from which it had vanished by the time Mary Magdalen went there on the third day.

After the Resurrection, so the Glastonbury legend goes, Joseph travelled to Britain, to the Isle of Avalon to be exact, bringing with him the cup used at the Last Supper and his staff which had been cut from the same thorn bush which had provided the Crown of Thorns. At Avalon he founded and built a Christian church; if true, this would make Glastonbury the location of not just the first Christian church in Britain but the location of one of the first anywhere. It’s said that when he planted his staff in the ground, it flowered, and there are to this day various thorn bushes in the vicinity that are off-shoots of the original Glastonbury Thorn (which is said to have been destroyed by the Puritans in the seventeenth century). 

The cup – the Holy Grail – he buried, and in time the place where he apparently buried it would come to be called the Chalice Well (so maybe Indiana Jones was looking in the wrong place for the Holy Grail as well as the Ark of the Covenant).

The full story goes even further back, for as an addendum to this we have the notion, not mentioned in the Bible, that Joseph of Arimathea was related to Jesus – specifically, he was the Virgin Mary’s uncle and thus Jesus’s great-uncle (the notion of his being related to Jesus is not inconceivable, offering at the very least an explanation as to how he was able to persuade Pilate to give him the body after the Crucifixion). He was a merchant – evidently a successful one, since he was rich – who travelled to Britain on business. This too is not inconceivable, for it is a matter of historical record that, even though Britain didn’t become a Roman colony until 43 AD (a decade or so after the Crucifixion), merchants and traders from the Eastern Mediterranean had for some time been coming to Britain to buy local products, most notably the tin which has been mined in the West Country for millennia (it is under the name of the ‘Tin Isles’ that the British Isles crop up in Herodotus’s The Histories). And on one of his trips to pre-Roman Britain, he took his great-nephew with him.

This would have been at some point during the big gap in Jesus’s life between when he went to the Temple at the age of 12 and when he started his ministry at around 30, a period of some eighteen years in the life of the Son of God about which the Bible tells us nothing. As well as Glastonbury, which would have been an island (Avalon) back then, there are also a couple of places in Cornwall that claim to have been visited by a young Jesus. They’re not alone, for there are quite a few other places in the world that have been suggested as places which Jesus travelled to during this time (evidently there is an urge for him to have been doing something a bit more interesting than the obvious explanation, that he was working as a carpenter in the Nazareth area). The Glastonbury legend has even inspired a famous song – the hymn ‘Jerusalem’.

But is this true? There are many, drawn to the myths of Glastonbury, who would happily believe it. It’s telling, though, that Bede, who is happy to mention the battle of Badon Hill (an event so shrouded in myth and mystery that no-one can say with absolute certainty where it was fought, with that British victory usually being attributed to King Arthur – of whom more shortly), doesn’t mention anything in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Joseph of Arimathea bringing a young Jesus to Britain, or of the former coming back after the latter’s death and resurrection. In fact, he doesn’t even mention Glastonbury (which, if we accept the 712 date, was founded in his lifetime) at all. “As to the actual date of Glastonbury's first Christian presence,” writes Ashe, “it remains a mystery. There may have been individual residents, or scattered hermits, before there was anything like a monastery. The monastic legends, however, grew around a material fact. While Joseph himself could hardly have built a church as such – buildings for Christian worship were unknown till much later – the church which he was alleged to have built did exist. Fire destroyed it in 1184; the Lady Chapel today marks the site. Before that it had stood within the precinct from time immemorial, so long that there was no written record of its foundation. It was a simple structure of wattle-work, twigs bound with clay, plus reinforcements of timber and lead. Understandably it was known as the Old Church ... Its dedication, unparalleled in Britain till long after, was to the Virgin Mary, a fact that may hint at pre-Christian Glastonbury having been a goddess sanctuary.”

Finally, no account of Glastonbury can be complete without mentioning the once and future King of the Britons, for the Isle of Avalon is indelibly associated with the legends of King Arthur. And, since his knights were involved in various quests to find the Holy Grail, it make senses (sort of) for Glastonbury to have a legend about that too (see above). One of the places you can see from the top of the Tor is Cadbury Castle, an Iron Age hill-fort which some reckon to have been the location of Arthur’s court, Camelot. Avalon’s main Arthurian association, though, comes with the final part of Arthur’s story. When Arthur was wounded at the battle of Camlann (the one in which he defeated the treacherous Sir Mordred), he was taken to Avalon, an island that was said to have healing properties.  

The association of Avalon with Glastonbury was cemented in the year 1191. In that year, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey were digging in an old cemetery during the rebuilding of their monastery (following the afore-mentioned fire of 1184) when they unearthed a lead cross. The Latin inscription on it read Hie Jacet Sepultus Inclytus Rex Arthurus In Insula Avalonia, which is translated into English as ‘here lies interred in the Isle of Avalon the renowned King Arthur’. The monks, so the story goes, dug deeper and found two human skeletons, one male and one female, which they assumed to be those of Arthur and Guinevere. This may have a dubious ring to it, especially when one takes into consideration that this was the same monastery that claimed to have been founded by someone from the Bible, but what’s evidently important here is not necessarily what the remains were but what they were believed to be. The historical record shows that in 1278 these remains were reburied amid much pomp and circumstance (and in the presence of King Edward I and his queen, Eleanor of Castile) close to the high alter of the abbey church; Glastonbury Abbey’s status as a major pilgrimage venue was assured. The tomb survived until the abbey’s dissolution in 1539, and to this day the site of it can still be seen amid the majestic ruins of this once-great monastic establishment.

Kentish landings

To Kent, where on a twenty-mile stretch of coastline you can find the locations of not one but four sites commemorating famous landings in England, all of which have played a key role in shaping the world in which we live today.

The first one is in the woods near Dover Castle, that fortress atop the White Cliffs that overlooks the UK’s busiest port. The castle, said to be England’s largest, has for centuries existed with the purpose of preventing hostile forces from landing on our shores; it was used by the military until the 1980s, and not for nothing has it been called the ‘Key to England’! Dover, of course, was part of the Medieval confederation known as the Cinque Ports, established to ensure that men and ships were available to defend that part of our coast that was closest to Europe in the event of an invasion. Dover is of course older – its status as the gateway to Britain goes back to Roman times, when it was called Portus Dubris and was the principal means by which Roman troops and traders arrived in the province of Britannia.

Anyway, somewhere in the woods just to the east of the castle is the concrete outline of an old aeroplane. This commemorates the first (and historically the most recent) of our landing-spots, the place where Louis Blériot landed in July 1909, having completed the first flight over the English Channel. Actually, it wasn’t the first flight, for a Frenchman and an American had crossed the Channel in a hot-air balloon in 1785, but it was the first flight in an aeroplane. This was just six years after the Wright brothers had done the first powered flight, and public interest in who would be the first to fly across the Channel was high thanks to the Daily Mail which had in 1908 offered a prize of £500 to anyone who could complete the feat. When 1908 ended with the money unclaimed, the paper upped the prize to £1000. Apparently the paper’s owner reckoned that one the Wright brothers – Wilbur – would be the first, but in the event he had already amassed a fortune from prize money from duration and altitude flights, as well as from sales contracts, and thought the cash on offer to be not worth the risk. Several days before Blériot took off, a rival had attempted the crossing, only to become not the first person to fly an aeroplane across the Channel but the first person to a crash-land an aeroplane on water (he survived).

Blériot flew without a compass, planning instead to take his course from a French destroyer which was sailing across the Channel as his escort, however he hit low cloud and the wind blew him off course; when he did land, it was a crash-landing which damaged his craft’s undercarriage and propeller. But he had successfully flown across the Channel all the same, even though the Mail’s correspondent didn’t witness the landing (he’d been expecting Blériot to land on the beach, and on being told that the intrepid aviator had actually landed above the cliffs near the castle he quickly got hold of a motor-car and headed up there). Louis Blériot’s place in history was assured, and today he is commemorated by the concrete outline of his aeroplane – his own design, called the Blériot XI – on the spot where he landed, which is a few minutes’ walk through the trees from Upper Road (just off the A258); there were no trees there when he landed, which just goes to show how landscapes can change over time.

Along the coast in a northerly direction there are castles – Walmer, which to this day is the home of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (now entirely ceremonial but the position does still come with a castle!), and Deal, built as a defensive fortification by Henry VIII (it’s got round walls, thus eliminating the corners of square keeps which were the most vulnerable points once cannons started to be used, and has three levels from which cannons faced out to sea). Between the two is a plaque commemorating the oldest of our landing-sites, that of Julius Caesar in 55 BC.

This is the event that is often said to mark the beginning of British history – although the Romans and others had certainly traded with Britain before (the Phoenicians are known to have bought tin from the West Country for centuries before 55 BC), the British Isles were very much on the edge of the known world and Julius Caesar’s visit was the first time anyone had come over in a military capacity. He’d just conquered Gaul, and his invasion of Britain was, according to Winston Churchill in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, “an integral part of his task of subjugating the Northern barbarians to the rule and system of Rome.” Caesar, who suspected the Britons of having aided their fellow-Celts the Gauls in their struggle against Rome, regarded the people of the south-eastern corner of the island (modern-day Kent) as being the most civilised on said island on account of their being the closest to mainland Europe.  Not that that was saying much, for they were nevertheless “a tougher and coarser branch of the Celtic tribes whom he was subduing in Gaul” (Churchill again), and he appears to have regarded their pre-battle preparations, which consisted of taking their clothes off and painting themselves blue, with some distaste (he was even less keen on their priests, the Druids, who he’d heard performed human sacrifices).

Caesar judged Dover to be unsuitable for a landing (those blue-painted warriors standing on top of the cliffs must have been off-putting), so he opted to land on the beach between Walmer and Deal instead. His troops were able to fight off the natives and establish a beach-head but they were beset by bad weather and the tides, not something they’d ever had to worry about in the Mediterranean. Unable to advance further inland, he returned to Europe after a couple of weeks. He was back a year later, better prepared and with a larger force, and this time he was able to advance inland and indulge in a bit of dividing and conquering by setting one of the British tribes against another, but when he heard of a revolt in Gaul Caesar left once again, never to return. The Roman conquest of Britain would not happen until 43 AD, when Emperor Claudius sent Vespasian over with an army (which, interestingly, included elephants) to subjugate the Britons and establish a new Roman colony, Britannia.

Further along the coast, beyond Sandwich but not quite as far as Ramsgate, is Pegwell Bay, once the location of a major hoverport from where big vehicle-carrying hovercraft departed for Calais. The hovercraft have long gone (the hoverport closed in 1982), but there is one very large piece of evidence that points to an older sea-crossing. Back in 1949, a group of intrepid Danes sailed a life-size replica of a Viking longship from Denmark to Kent. They actually landed at Broadstairs, but the ship, called the Hugin, was put on display at Pegwell Bay to commemorate a landing which took place at Ebbsfleet, a hamlet at the head of Pegwell Bay marking the eastern end of the channel which once separated the Isle of Thanet from the Kentish mainland, in the year 449. This arrival would have a profound effect on the course of our history; indeed, the island of Britain would never be the same again.

Although a Viking longship commemorates this landing, those who landed weren’t Vikings. The arrivals of 449 were two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, warriors apparently invited over as mercenaries by a warlord known as King Vortigern. They brought with them a motley crew of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who hailed from what’s now Denmark and northern Germany; in due course, more of them followed. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede records that they “were granted lands in the eastern part of the island on the condition that they protected the country: nevertheless, their real intention was to subdue it.” This they did, becoming the ancestors of the English, for as Bede continues: “From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent and the Isle of Wight … From the Saxons … came the East, South and West Saxons. And from the Angles … are descended the East and Middle Angles, the Mercians, all the Northumbrian stock … and the other English peoples.” A plaque close to the Hugin thus commemorates this landing as the ‘beginning of English history’.

Not far inland, there is commemorated an arrival of a more spiritual kind which also changed Britain for ever.  Over a century after the arrival of Hengist and Horsa, the Anglo-Saxons (as they became known) had come to dominate much of the island of Britain, establishing several kingdoms – an arrangement known to historians as the Heptarchy. By the 590s, the kingdom of Kent was ruled by one Ethelbert (sometimes referred to as Æthelberht), who according to Bede was a descendant of the afore-mentioned Hengist. In the year 597, a missionary arrived from Rome. Christianity had come to Britain before, when the Romans had converted to it, but the Anglo-Saxons had arrived after the Romans had left and were very much a pagan people.

That changed with the arrival on the Isle of Thanet of St Augustine, the missionary sent by Pope Gregory to convert the heathen Anglo-Saxons to the true faith, starting with the ones in Kent since they were the closest to Europe (like Caesar before him, Gregory appears to have regarded the people who lived in Kent as the most civilised in Britain, probably for the same reason). Ethelbert, who according to Bede “had already heard of the Christian religion, having a Christian wife of the Frankish royal house called Bertha, whom he had received from her parents on condition that she should have freedom to hold and practice her faith unhindered”, went out to meet him. He listened to Augustine preach a sermon, following which he allowed him to establish a base in Canterbury (which is why to this day the most senior Anglican clergyman is the archbishop of that fine city). He even converted to Christianity himself, which gave Augustine “greater freedom to preach and to build and restore churches everywhere”; thus did the English become a Christian people. The spot where Augustine preached his first sermon on English soil is, therefore, of great historical importance, and it is today commemorated by a cross – St Augustine’s Cross, the last of our Kentish landing commemorations.