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2 Architecture of Glastonbury Abbey 3 The Glastonbury Thorn 4 External reference 5 See also |
Abbey History
A community of monks were already established at Glastonbury when King Ine of Wessex enriched their endowment. He is said to have directed that a stone church be built in 712, the foundations of which now form the west end of the nave. In the 9th century, the reformed soldier Saint Neot was sacristan at Glastonbury before he went to found his own establishment in Somerset. The abbey church was enlarged in the 10th century by the Abbot of Glastonbury, Saint Dunstan, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 960. Dunstan built new cloisters as well. In 967, King Edmund was laid to rest at Glastonbury. In 1016, Edmund "Ironsides who had retired to the west country as "king of Wessex" was buried there too.
At the Norman conquest in 1066, the wealth of Glastonbury made it a prime prize. The new Norman abbot Turstin added to the church, unusually building to the east of the older Saxon church and away from the ancient cemetery, thus shifting the sanctified site. Not all the new Normans were suitable heads of religious communities. In 1077 Thurstin was dismissed after his armed retainers killed monks right by the High Altar. In 1086, when the census reported in Domesday Book was commissioned, Glastonbury Abbey was the richest monastery in the country. Abbot Henry of Blois commissioned a history of Glastonbury, ca 1125, from the chronicler William of Malmesbury, whose De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie is our source for the early recorded history, and much awe-inspiring legend as well. Then as now, legend worked more strongly than raw history to bring the pilgrims who sustained the Abbey's reputation and contributed to its upkeep.
In 1184 a great fire at Glastonbury destroyed monastic buildings. There is evidence that in the 12th century the ruined nave was renovated enough for services while the great new church was being constructed. If pilgrim visits had fallen, the discovery of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere's tombs in the cemetery in 1191 provided fresh spurs for visiting Glastonbury. According to Giraldus Cambrensis and other chroniclers, the abbot Henry de Blois commissioned a search, discovering at the depth of 16 feet a massive oak trunk with an inscription Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia. King Edward I and Queen Eleanor attended the magnificent service at the reburial of King Arthur's remains at the foot of the High Altar. Services in the reconsecrated Great Church had begun on Christmas Day, 1213, most likely before it was entirely completed.
In the 14th century only Westminster Abbey was more richly endowed and appointed than Glastonbury. The abbot of Glastonbury kept great state, now attested to simply by the ruins of the abbey kitchen, with four huge fireplaces at its corners. The kitchen was part of the magnificent Abbot's house begun under Abbot John de Breynton (1334-42). Archaeological excavations have revealed a special apartment erected at the south end of the Abbot's house for a visit from Henry VII, who visited the Abbot in a royal progress, as he visited any other great territorial magnate. The conditions of life in England during the Wars of the Roses become so unsettled that a wall is built around the Abbey's precincts.
At the start of the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, there were over 800 monasteries, nunneries and friaries in Britain. By 1541, there were none. More than 10,000 monks and nuns had been dispersed and the buildings had been seized by the Crown to be sold off or leased to new lay occupiers. Glastonbury Abbey was once more a rich plum. In September 1539 the Abbey was stripped of its valuables and Abbot Stephen Whiting, who had been a signer of the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VII the head of the church, resisted and was hanged as a traitor on Glastonbury Tor (see links).
By Shakespeare's time, two generations later, Glastonbury was one of the "bare ruin'd choirs Where late the sweet birds sang."
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The flowering of the Glastonbury Thorn in mild weather just past midwinter, was accounted miraculous.
The present "sacred thorn tree - dating from the Abbacy of Richard Beere in 1500" might be grown from a local cutting: the ancient Glastonbury Thorn itself was cut down and burned as a relic of superstition by Cromwellian troops during the English Civil War, in an unconscious reenactment of the joyous and triumphal cutting down and burning of the sacred groves, from Dodona in Greece to England, that was enacted by Christians throughout Europe in the 4th century.
A pilgrimage to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, the second Saturday and Sunday of July, was begun by a few local churches in 1924 and now attracts visitors from all over Western Europe. Services are celebrated in the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communions.
Architecture of Glastonbury Abbey
The Glastonbury Thorn
The hawthorn found at Glastonbury and round the area is a natural hybrid of the highly variable hawthorn, Crataegus species. It flowers twice in a year, once on "old wood" and once on "new wood" the current season's matured new growth. Hawthorns are in the large Rose family, where seasonal re-flowering is a feature, and some Raspberries will also bear twice, once on canes of the previous season and once more on the new season's canes.External reference
See also