CHAPTER 5
In the popular imagination, the story of King Arthur is inextricably bound up with the ancient town of Glastonbury in the Somerset Levels. Accordingly, at first sight, the idea that he might actually have been Welsh and a King of Glamorgan seems ludicrous. Yet as I began to dig a little deeper below the surface of the Glastonbury/Arthur legend, it became clearer and clearer that it was an elaborate hoax. In this chapter we shall examine this hoax in detail. I ask the reader to be patient and open-minded about this as I attempt to put the claims of Glastonbury into context. I do not do this from any sense of spite or desire to undermine the status of the town. As a matter of fact, I am very fond of its abbey ruins and chose to be married in the Catholic church across the road. Nevertheless, what matters much more than sentiment is the truth. To reach this sometimes requires painful sacrifices and the slaughter of sacred cows. Alas, the Glastonbury legends form a whole herd of these that, if not removed, will continue to block any further progress down this chosen road. They must be slain without sentiment or remorse. Then not only are we able to make further progress towards unravelling the true mysteries of Britain, but we can form a truer appreciation of Glastonbury’s real marvel: its one-time Abbey.
Glastonbury Abbey was once an incredibly rich institution: so much so that it was said that if the Abbott of Glastonbury married the Abbess of Shaftesbury Convent (also a very wealthy institution), they would be the richest couple in all of England. That may have been so in their heyday, but like so many other religious houses, both fell prey to the Reformation. Today, Glastonbury Abbey is a romantic ruin set in parkland behind high walls. There is hardly a trace to be seen of its supposed early history. Stripped bare of anything valuable, with the bones of its stonework left open to the elements, it looks, in fact, much like any other Benedictine abbey of the era. What we see now, however, is only the physical remains of this once great abbey. During the Middle Ages, it had unique pretensions that went far beyond the Benedictine order. Notwithstanding its out-of-the-way location, it claimed to be of apostolic foundation. As we have seen, it also claimed that, in the company of many illustrious saints, King Arthur was buried in its churchyard. In short, it claimed to be the most sanctified spot in all of Britain if not, indeed, in the whole of Europe.
These claims went back to before the Norman invasion of England, but in the early 12th century nobody was really quite sure exactly how old they were. In 1125, William of Malmesbury, probably the most famous historian of the period, spent some months in Glastonbury. He stayed as a guest at the Abbey, making use of its extensive library while researching his magnum opus Gesta regum Anglorum – ‘Deeds of the kings of the English’. While there, he was happy to repay the monks’ hospitality by carrying out some researches on the history of their church. He subsequently published his findings in a shorter work entitled De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae or ‘Concerning the Antiquity of Glastonbury Church’. Documentary evidence, however, for the church’s great antiquity turned out to be elusive even in his day. Consequently, he was forced to resort to generalizations and rumours instead of chapter-and-verse quotations. Thus he writes:
‘I shall trace from its very origin the rise and progress of that church [Glastonbury] as far as I am able to discover it from the mass of evidence. It is related in annals of good credit that Lucius, King of the Britons, sent to Pope Eleutherius, thirteenth in succession from St Peter, to entreat that he would dispel the darkness of Britain by the splendour of Christian instruction.’
Exactly what these ‘annals of good credit’ were he doesn’t say, but the story of Eleutherius’ mission is also contained in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which tells us, in the year AD 167, ‘Eleutherius received the bishopric in Rome, and held it worthily for fifteen years. To him Lucius, King of the Britons, sent men with letters, asking that he be baptized, and he soon sent back to him; after this they remained in the true faith until Diocletian’s time (viz 284–305).’
We can deduce the hand of a later scribe when William reveals his knowledge of the devastating fire that destroyed the old church (vetusta ecclesia) at Glastonbury. In actuality this occurred in 1184 – some 40 years after his death.
In his book Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the Kings of the English), which was completed in 1125, William also includes a section that brings together many tidbits concerning the legends of the Abbey’s foundation. As we have seen, he was of the opinion that the church of St Mary at Glastonbury had been founded by missionaries sent to Britain by Pope Eleutherius (c.AD 175–189) on the invitation of a British king called Lucius. Again, what seems to have been a later hand (perhaps the same one) tells us, in great detail, that these missionaries were St Phagan and St Deruvian. Pseudo William informs us that they didn’t so much found the church of St Mary as restore it; it had, in fact, been built over 100 years earlier. Disciples of Christ had been sent to Britain from Gaul by St Philip, one of the Twelve Apostles. These disciples are not named, but we are told they were led by St Joseph of Arimathea, the wealthy man who, the Bible informs us, took the body of Jesus down from the cross and laid it in his own tomb. Joseph and his companions then arrived in Britain in AD 62–63 and ‘preached the faith of Christ in all confidence’. The story continues:
‘The King [unnamed] gave them an island on the borders of his country, surrounded by woods and thickets and marshes, called Yniswitrin. Two other kings in succession, though pagans, granted to each of them a portion of land: hence the Twelve Hides have their name to the present day. These saints were admonished by the archangel Gabriel to build a church in the honour of the Blessed Virgin. They made it of twisted wattles, in the thirty-first year after the Lord’s Passion and the fifteenth after the Assumption of the glorious Virgin. Since it was the first in that land, the Son of God honoured it by dedicating it to His Mother.’
To explain how it was that the church of St Mary at Glastonbury required refounding, William (or more likely his later impersonator) tells us that, after the death of these first settlers, it became derelict. As we have seen, he claims that it was restored by saints Phagan and Deruvian at the time of Pope Eleutherius. According to him, the restored church then became a magnet for such important Celtic saints as Patrick, Gildas and David. The first two, he says, were buried there, while relics of the last, along with those of St Columkill (a Scots-Irish saint who converted the Picts and died on the Island of Iona), St Benignus (an Irish disciple of St Patrick), plus the remains of numerous other saints, were supposedly taken and reburied at Glastonbury. We don’t know what the source of this information was as, if it existed at all, it perished in the fire.
Moving from the Celtic to the Saxon period, William of Malmesbury records that King Ina of Wessex, who reigned from AD 688–726, gave various land donations to the church at Glastonbury while, at the same time, exempting it from all taxes. Ina’s gift is described in great detail, so it is rather surprising that there is absolutely no mention of his benefactions towards Glastonbury in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or, indeed, in any other writing prior to 1125. However, the Domesday Book, which was compiled in 1085 and published the following year, does say that the Manor of Glastonbury was free of taxes, so this was presumably still the case when William was writing nearly 40 years later. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that it was Ina, who exempted the Abbey from taxation. It is much more probable that it was King Edgar.
William also writes of ‘warlike Arthur’. He calls him ‘a man worthy to be celebrated not by idle fictions, but by authentic history’. He tells us that:
‘He long upheld the sinking state, and roused the broken spirit of his countrymen to war. Finally, at the siege of Mount Badon, relying on the image of the Virgin which he had affixed to his armour, he engaged nine hundred of the enemy, single-handed, and dispersed them with incredible slaughter.’
Later on he informs us:
‘The sepulchre of Arthur is nowhere to be seen, whence ancient ballads fable that he is still to come.’
This evidence at least seems unequivocal: in 1125, the whereabouts of Arthur’s grave was unknown, although it was generally assumed he was buried at Glastonbury.
William of Malmesbury makes no mention of the Holy Grail, but John of Glastonbury, another monk writing some three centuries later, informs us that, on his mother’s side, King Arthur was descended from none other than Joseph of Arimathea himself. Indeed, he gives us what is clearly a bogus genealogy to this effect. As for the derivations of the various names for Glastonbury, according to William, ‘Avalon’ comes either from the Welsh word aval, meaning ‘apple’ coupled with on (a corruption of ynys, meaning ‘island’) – hence ‘Island of apples’. Alternatively, he says, it is derived from someone’s name, although he doesn’t tell us whose. An alternative name for Avalon is apparently Ineswitrin. This again is supposed to derive from ynys, the Welsh for ‘island’, this time coupled with witrin, deriving from either the Latin vitrum, meaning ‘glass’, or the Welshgwydr, with the same meaning. Translated into vernacular English, this would become glass-(t)on-bury, or Glastonbury.
As we will see later, the derivation from someone’s name is the truth. These other supposed derivations are inventions: in reality, there is no connection with either glass or apples. William of Malmesbury’s explanations for these names are clearly inventions after the fact and not genuine etymologies. They have, nevertheless, successfully confused the issue for the best part of 1,000 years, thereby obscuring the real mystery concerning Glastonbury: that it was somewhere else entirely.
Meanwhile, the monks of Glastonbury, who had everything to gain from linking the hitherto modest Abbey with the illustrious King Arthur of legend (and thereby making it a major place of pilgrimage), were all too keen to exploit matters further. Following the disastrous fire of 1184, they conveniently discovered the alleged bones of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in their graveyard. These ‘Arthurian’ relics subsequently received the approval of none other than King Edward I himself – the same King who had brought Wales under his own crown. In 1278, not long back from his first invasion of north Wales, he visited Glastonbury to see the bones for himself. He knew all about King Arthur, of course, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famous book The History of the Kings of Britain, which was first published in 1135. Geoffrey concludes his account of Arthur by saying that he was taken to the Island of Avalon to have his wounds attended to. There is no mention of Arthur’s actual death, so a legend developed that he was not dead but sleeping and would one day return to lead the Britons in a great rebellion against their English overlords. When that happened, they would re-establish the true bloodline of the Kings of Britain as rulers over the whole island.
Edward I was keen to scotch such rumours. It suited his purposes, therefore, to declare that the bones found by the monks were genuinely King Arthur’s and to order the building of a special shrine in which they should be housed. After all, having an Arthur who was safely dead and buried, with his acknowledged remains under the control of friendly monks, reduced the chances of any future Welsh leader being able to claim his mantle as the ‘Once and Future King’. As it suited his purposes, he was also happy to go along with the monks’ claim that Glastonbury Abbey was founded by Joseph of Arimathea in the 1st century AD. If this were true, then it would certainly be the oldest church in Britain – if not in the whole world. The question we have to ask ourselves is: does this legend stand up to scientific analysis or is it a hoax as well? In the 20th century, this was put to the test by an unlikely examiner, an architect with a penchant for spiritualism.