CHAPTER 6
In the early 20th century, the Glastonbury legends were finally put to the ultimate test by using the then rather novel science of archaeology. Between 1908 and 1919, a series of digs was carried out at the abbey ruins by the Somerset Archaeological Society. This was done under the guidance of a ‘Director of Excavations’ called Frederick Bligh Bond. He was a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and also the Diocesan Architect for Bath and Wells. He was also well read on the subject of the Abbey’s history, knowing what traditional historians such as the 12th-century William of Malmesbury and the 15th-century John of Glastonbury had written. He was therefore as well qualified as anyone at the time to interpret the meaning of what was found.
Bligh Bond knew all about the Glastonbury legends and repeated some of them in An Architectural Handbook of Glastonbury Abbey, the book he subsequently published detailing his findings. In this book we can sense his excitement at being given the task of carrying out an archaeological dig on such hallowed turf. However, without the knowledge of the church authorities, he also engaged the help of the spirit world in his quest. To this end, he made use of the services of a friend, John Alleyne, who was adept at ‘spirit writing’. What this meant in practice was that Alleyne would hold a pen or pencil in one hand, while Bond placed one of his own hands on top. In a process somewhat similar to the better-known Ouija board, they would ask questions of the spirit world, and the pen, presumably directed by their unconscious minds, would draw random marks on the paper. They would then think and talk about other things, while the pen, guided by their hands, would move randomly on the paper.
Sometimes it would draw pictures, while at other occasions it would spell out words or even whole sentences. Using this method, they were able to communicate with a group of spirits, mostly former monks, who called themselves ‘the Company’. They told Bond stories from their lives and, more importantly from an architectural point of view, gave him instructions as to where to dig for evidence of certain former chapels.
The story of how he had used spiritualism as an aid in his work was eventually revealed in a book Bligh Bond wrote entitled The Gate of Remembrance, which was first published in 1918. Needless to say, the Church authorities were not pleased with this revelation, and, in 1921, he was stripped of his post as Diocesan Architect. The reason for his loss of favour, however, was probably only in part because he dabbled in spiritualism. After all, the Bishop must have known that Bond was a Freemason and a member of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research).
What probably upset him rather more was that, in the course of his archaeological digs, which were extensive, Bond found no evidence at all for any buildings on the site that predated a small, memorial chapel built by Dunstan in c.AD 975 to receive the remains of King Edgar. Of theVetusta Ecclesia, supposedly built by the Saxon King Ine in the 7th century, or the even older wattle-and-daub church built by Joseph of Arimathea, restored at the time of Pope Eleutherius and allegedly visited by saints such as Gildas, David and Patrick, there were absolutely no traces whatsoever – not even foundations. Although Bond was loathed to admit it openly, the evidence on the ground indicated that Glastonbury Abbey was no older than the 10th century and had clearly been founded by Dunstan on a virgin site. This was in accord with what Osbern, a Canterbury monk, had written in 1070 in his Life of St Dunstan. Here, he actually writes that Dunstan was the first Abbott of Glastonbury, but because nobody wanted to believe this, his work is ignored.
I have written before about the ‘Glastonbury Hoax’ in The Holy Kingdom, the book I co-authored with Wilson and Blackett. It was they who first suggested to me that the Glastonbury legends were, for the most part, forgeries. At first I did not want to believe this. The ruins of this great abbey were a favourite haunt of my wife and myself, and we had even been married in the Catholic church of St Mary that faces them on the opposite side of the road. Sure, there was plenty about modern-day Glastonbury that I found repugnant – in particular, the way its alleged spirituality was being used by cranks and fraudsters as a justification for extorting money from the sick. However, it was one thing to dismiss the faux prophets and magicians who haunt the town today, and quite something else to declare that even the medieval abbey was founded on a deception. I decided, therefore, to take a long, hard but dispassionate look at the known history of not just the abbey itself but the whole area. In doing so, I discovered some further uncomfortable truths that were being studiously ignored by those who claimed to be experts on Glastonbury’s Arthurian connections.
The first thing I discovered was the remarkable omission of any mention of either Glastonbury or the Island of Avalon in Asser’s biography of Alfred the Great. This King who truly deserves the title of ‘Great’, was to all intents and purposes the founder of Saxon England. The youngest of four brothers, he was a hero in every sense of the word. During his reign, what is now England was very nearly conquered entirely by the Vikings, and they, at that time, were pagans. The climax of the Viking invasion occurred in AD 878. By then, they had already overrun the rest of England and either driven into exile or martyred the rulers of its various petty kingdoms – Northumbria, East Anglia, etcetera – and now it was to be the turn of Wessex.
Alfred was peacefully celebrating Christmas at his palace of Chippenham when they attacked. Taken by surprise, his forces were routed, and he himself was forced to flee for his life to the Fenlands of Somerset. Here, on the marshy island of Athelney (where he famously burned some cakes), he planned his fight-back. He sent out word to the men of his kingdom that they should meet him at Egbert’s Stone, a monolith near Shaft esbury. His new army then won a great victory over the Vikings in what became known as the Battle of Edington, a hilltop near Westbury in Wiltshire.
This was not the end of the war, but it did provide the turning point. Alfred succeeded in hanging on to his kingdom and in later years even extended it to include Kent, London and Essex. His successors – notably Athelstan and Edgar – extended the rule of the Wessex kings to include nearly all of the rest of England. Alfred’s legacy therefore was a powerful, Christian kingdom that, having resisted invasion, was to become a centre of learning, too.
Asser, Alfred’s biographer, was Welsh and perhaps the most learned man in Britain in his day. He divided his time between helping Alfred raise the standard of education in Wessex and his own duties as Bishop of St David’s in West Wales. In the biography he tells us how, following Edington, Alfred signed a peace treaty with Godrum, the leader of the Vikings, at Wedmore. As part of the agreement, Godrum agreed to be baptized, with Alfred standing in as his godfather. Anxious to give thanks to God for his deliverance, Alfred then founded a convent at Shaftesbury and a monastery at Athelney – the marshy outpost where he had hidden during the winter of AD 878. While the convent, which had his daughter Aethelgifu as its first Abbess, prospered, the monastery failed and was soon abandoned. Few men, it seems, wanted to live in such an inhospitable place. Other projects, however, were more successful. Alfred learned Latin and translated several books, including St Augustine’s Soliloquies. He also commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first part of which mainly concerned the semi-legendary founding of the Kingdom of Wessex, extending to his own times. This project was undoubtedly inspired by Asser, who as Bishop of St David’s would have been only too aware that the Welsh had been keeping equivalent chronicles of their own for centuries.
Now what is very odd about all of this is that both Wedmore (to the northwest) and Athelney (to the south) are less than ten miles from Glastonbury. However, a monastery at Glastonbury is not even mentioned by Asser, although it would surely have been the most obvious place to hold Godrum’s baptism. Even more curiously, there is no record of Alfred showing the slightest interest in Glastonbury, which seems strange behaviour given that it was in his Kingdom of Wessex and he was an extremely devout Christian. If Asser had known anything of any legends linking Glastonbury with Joseph of Arimathea or such Welsh saints as David, Patrick and Gildas, he was remarkably silent on this subject, too. In fact, Glastonbury Abbey doesn’t even get a mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle until over a century after Alfred’s death (in AD 906). The entry for 1016 includes the following: ‘Then on St Andrew’s Day King Edmund passed away, and is buried with his paternal ancestor Edgar in Glastonbury.’ There is, however, a brief mention in the entry for year AD 956 that ‘…Abbot Dunstan was driven over the sea’. Again, it doesn’t mention Glastonbury Abbey, but if Dunstan was an Abbott at this time, this would have been his monastery. Taken together, all the evidence points to Glastonbury Abbey having been founded by Dunstan in about AD 940, and therefore some 50 years after Alfred’s victory at the Battle of Edington.
This conclusion raises further questions. If Dunstan were the true founder of Glastonbury, what then, one might ask, of the earlier legends connecting it with King Lucius and the mission of Saints Phagan and Deruvian? What, too, of Joseph of Arimathea? For the moment, I had no firm answer to these questions. Nevertheless, I had my suspicions, and, in due course, I discovered that the real story of ‘Glastonbury’ was much more interesting and better documented than William of Malmesbury realized. His problem was simply that he had been looking in the wrong place. If he knew that Glastonbury was a fraud (and I rather think he did), he also knew that for political and ecclesiastical reasons it was expedient for him to hold his tongue. For this reason, his history of Glastonbury, though recording the most extraordinary and unlikely legends, was unable to provide documentary proof for a foundation prior to c.AD 940. The downside was that, unwittingly, he had placed a huge block in the way of genuine Arthurian research, and had obscured the story of the Joseph of Arimathea mission to the point where it was now regarded as no more than a myth. Rescuing the real history from these events would prove to be a Herculean task, but first I needed to investigate the story of King Arthur’s Camelot.