Glastonbury

“ Glastonbury,’ added Lady Armine, ‘take pity upon us!’
‘At any rate, it is not so dull as a cloister,’ added Sir Ratcliffe; ‘and say what they like, there is nothing like living among friends.’
‘You would find me very troublesome,’ replied Glastonbury, with a smile; and then, turning the conversation, evidently more from embarrassment than distaste, he remarked the singularity of the purple beeches. ”

“ Our friends had been examining the chambers, and Lady Armine, who was a little wearied by the exertion, stood opposite the building, leaning on her husband and his friend.
‘A man might go far, and find a worse dwelling than that portal,’ said Glastonbury, musingly. ‘Me-thinks life might glide away pleasantly enough in those little rooms, with one’s books and drawings, and this noble avenue for a pensive stroll.’
‘I wish to heaven, my dear Glastonbury, you would try the experiment,’ said Sir Ratcliffe. ”

“ It is strange, and sometimes as profitable as it is singular, to recall our state on the eve of some acquaintance which transfigures our being; with some man whose philosophy revolutionises our mind; with some woman whose charms metamorphose our career. These retrospective meditations are fruitful of self-knowledge.
The visit of Glastonbury was one of those incidents which, from the unexpected results that they occasion, swell into events. ”

“ They are even more majestic in ruin than they could have been in noblest prime, I think, because those broken arches have the splendour of classic tragedy. They are like a poem of which a few immortal lines are lost.
In the warm light of the August afternoon the old stones, pillars, and arches of Glastonbury Abbey seemed to be carved in stained ivory, a bas relief on lapis lazuli. We lingered until our pretty Mrs. Senter got the look in her eyes of one who has stood too long in high-heeled boots, and Emily asked plaintively whether we were not going to see the Glastonbury Thorn. ”

“ And now we bury them in peace, we place the bones of the last Abbot,—and one more worthy has never presided over Glastonbury,—with those of his sainted predecessors: together they sleep after life’s fitful penance, together they shall arise, when the last trump shall echo over the vale of Avalon. ”

“ In the early part of the sixteenth century the ancient abbey of Glastonbury was in the plenitude of its magnificence and power. It had been the cynosure for the devotees of all nations, who, for nearly eleven centuries, flocked in crowds to its fane—to worship at its altars, to venerate its relics, to drink in health at its sacred well, and to gaze in rapt wonder at its holy thorn. ”

“ Unspeakable the charm to my ear of those old names; exquisite the quiet of those little towns, lost amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by the fury of modern life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were, by noble trees and hedges overrun with flowers. In all England there is no sweeter and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells. ”

“ It is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to separate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a man venerating it as a ruin; and I can understand a man despising it as a rubbish-heap. ”

“ Nor was it the menaced disruption of those ties whose consummation was to restore the greatness and splendour of the family, and all the pain and disappointment and mortification and misery that must be its consequence, that alone made him sorrowful. Glastonbury had a reverence for that passion which sheds such a lustre over existence, and is the pure and prolific source of much of our better conduct ”

“ It was for him, and his sake, the generous heart of his cousin had submitted to mortification without a murmur, or indulged her unhappiness only in solitude; and it was for him that Glastonbury exercised a devotion that might alone induce a man to think with complacency both of his species and himself. But the heart, the heart, the jealous and despotic heart! It rejects all substitutes, it spurns all compromise, and it will have its purpose or it will break. ”

“ In the same way some of the best boys I remember at a certain school were conspicuous at football and cricket, the modern equivalents.
It was a fine evening in May, and all the lads of Glastonbury School were in the archery ground. A silver arrow had to be contended for as a prize—the prize of the year—and there were many competitors.
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All Glastonbury looked on at the sport; many were there who had been great archers themselves in their youth, and who, like Nestor of old, were never tired of talking of the great things that had been done when they were young. ”

“ There is another road by which we may approach our problem. Hearne has printed in the appendix to his John of Glastonbury a list of charters existing among the abbey muniments in 1247. [23] He has on p. 378 a heading which runs thus: 'Days of Indulgence for Glastonbury, of which we have not the charters, though we once had them '. This list is just what is needed to tell us what undoubted privileges Glastonbury claimed in the middle of the thirteenth century, a hundred years after William of Malmesbury's death. ”

“ Nicholas, I wish thee to go out on the western road which leads from Glastonbury to Exeter, and thou mayst pass the night at the ‘Robin Hood;’ I have a strange impression our mutual friends will stop there to-morrow night. If thou meetest them stick to them like a leech, and follow them, thyself unseen, if possible, to Glastonbury; [208] then join me in the Abbey, and we will await them there ”

“ You know how the glamour of Glastonbury lies over all that land and the lost tomb of King Arthur and time when he shall return and the prophecies of Merlin and all the rest. To begin with, the village they call Ponder’s End ought to be called World’s End; it gives one the impression of being somewhere west of the sunset. ”

“ Even now, the queer conical, isolated hills of the neighbourhood are called islands, and it is easy to picture Glastonbury as an isle rising among lesser ones out of a bright, azure estuary stretching away and away to the Bristol Channel. The Saxon king, Edgar, whose royal castle has given the name to the town of Edgarly, must have had a fine view in his day. ”

“ Between 1129 and 1139 at latest, probably not later than 1135, he wrote a treatise on the history of Glastonbury, and the lives of four saints connected with that house. In one of these lives he speaks of Glastonbury as the minster ‘wherein I am a professed soldier of heaven,’ and, addressing its monks, he calls himself ‘your servant by devotion, your brother in the fellowship of God's soldiery, your son by affection.’ This may mean that he had letters of confraternity with the Glastonbury monks ”

“ I went along down the Edgware Road, eating my brown bread and dates with some cheerfulness. Then I had a refreshing glass of milk. And, by the time I was half way across the Park by the path that leads from the Marble Arch up to the Gates at Hyde Park Corner, I seemed to have regained something of my former self: something of my Glastonbury character of will and self-reliance. The last three weeks seemed a dream; almost a bad dream, a nightmare, for a little: then only a dream, save for something of the Rosebud that seemed to reach out half-weakly into the present light. ”

“ The account which William of Malmesbury, in the great insertion in the third edition of his Gesta Regum, has given us of the earliest history of Glastonbury is exceedingly cautious. 'Annals of good authority' tell of missionaries sent into Britain by Pope Eleutherus at the request of K. Lucius. Their names we do not know, but tradition assures us that they built the Old Church of St Mary at Glastonbury. There are indeed writings which take it back still further to actual disciples of Christ: and this is not impossible ”

“ And at Glastonbury also there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of Europe right up to Reformation times.
“That will be a good day for us,” said Sir Richmond. “It will be like turning over the pages of the history of our family, to and fro. There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be something from almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge. ”

“ The most interesting, however, of all the Late Celtic settlements is the far-famed marsh-village of Glastonbury. Besides those of Holderness, which have been already mentioned, there are several lake-dwellings in Great Britain which belonged to the Early Iron Age; but almost all seem to have been built after the commencement of the Christian era.1091 Glastonbury, on the other hand, was first inhabited more than two centuries before the Roman conquest. ”

“ But not all these are market crosses. The south-west district of England is particularly rich in these relics of ancient piety, but many have been allowed to disappear. Glastonbury market cross, a fine Perpendicular structure with a roof, was taken down in 1808, and a new one with no surrounding arcade was erected in 1846. The old one bore the arms of Richard Bere, abbot of Glastonbury, who died in 1524. The wall of an adjacent house has a piece of stone carving representing a man and a woman clasping hands, and tradition asserts that this formed part of the original cross. ”

“ But perhaps the most curious experience of our stay was an attendance upon a political meeting at Glastonbury, in the Gladstonian interest. The first speech was made by the candidate, Sir Hugh Davey; and in his anxiety to propitiate his hearers he began by addressing them as men whose ancestors had for centuries shown their devotion to free principles, and had especially given proof of this by hanging the last Abbot of Glastonbury at the old tower above the town. ”

“ Who were the earliest settlers and inhabitants of London?
Those who have seen the lake-dwellings of Glastonbury—to take a familiar illustration—and have considered the conditions necessary to such a colony, will come to the conclusion that there, at all events, lake-dwellers would find everything that Nature could give them. Thus, at Glastonbury the huts of the inhabitants were planted on wooden foundations in a marshy place, covered with water at high tide, perhaps at low tide as well. There was land within reach where the people could keep cattle, or could plough and sow and reap. ”

“ For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedgemoor, drained by straight sedgy watercourses, along which grow lines of elm, willow, [251] or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before me, like a huge tumulus, almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s tower. Soon the ground began to rise on my left, and the crooked apple orchards of Avalon came down to the roadside, their turf starred by innumerable daisies and gilt celandines. Winding round the base of the Tor, I rode into Glastonbury, and down its broad, straight hill past St. ”

“ Thus, at Glastonbury, at Salisbury, in the choir of Westminster, in the naves of York and Winchester, and in the Chapels of King’s College and of Henry VII. we have a series of works, all belonging to the same general type of architecture, yet presenting diversities the most marked and beauties the most varied. ”

“ But more especially shall the town of Glastonbury, in which is situated that most ancient church of the holy mother of God, together with its bounds, be more free than other places. The abbat of this place, alone, shall have power, as well in causes known as unknown; in small and in great; and even in those which are above, and under the earth ”

“ And now we will discard the cumbersome old coaches and even the "Flying Machines," and travel by another flying machine, an airship, landing where we will, wherever a pleasing inn attracts us. At Glastonbury is the famous "George," which has hardly changed its exterior since it was built by Abbot Selwood in 1475 for the accommodation of middle-class pilgrims, those of high degree being entertained at the abbot's lodgings. At Gloucester we find ourselves in the midst of memories of Roman, Saxon, and monastic days. ”

“ King Arthur and Guinevere his queen, they say, were buried within the walls of the ancient abbey over which, as the old tale tells, St. Patrick and St. Benedict once presided as Abbots.
And, should you weary of history, there are all the natural beauties of the Mendip hills for you to explore; for both Wells and Glastonbury lie on the slopes of this beautiful range.
Few places in Europe have so much of interest to offer the visitor as Wells and Glastonbury and that pleasing country all around, over which, in the dark ages, the Witch of Wookey wielded her gruesome sway. ”

“ DUNSTAN, Saint (924–988) , archbishop of Canterbury, the son of Heorstan, a West-Saxon noble, whose estate lay near Glastonbury, and his wife Cynethryth, both persons of holy life, was born in the first year of the reign of Æthelstan, 924–5, and was sent in his childhood to the abbey of Glastonbury for education. At Glastonbury, as at most of the ancient monasteries of England, the monastic life had become extinct, and secular clerks had taken the place of monks. ”

“ Nor were they idle, these monks of Glastonbury—some taught in the abbey school, others toiled in the orchards, and the beauty of the stained glass, designed within the abbey walls, found fame far and wide.
Richard Whiting was Abbot of Glastonbury when, in 1539, Henry VIII. ordered inquiries to be made into the condition and property of the abbey. Altho he recognized the monarch as supreme head of the church, he respected the Glastonbury traditions and met the "visitors" in a spirit of passive resistance. ”