I trust that your New Year's celebrations were suitably splendid. After the last post's clamber up the Tor, I think it's time we had a little wander about the Abbey - or at lest what's left of it.
The Abbey is owned by the Bath and Wells Diocesan Trust, which has clearly understood how you make maximum revenue to support your asset - you both enter and leave via the gift shop - but which also does an excellent job us using that revenue to maintain the asset. We like a good ruin, and have visited a good few ruined abbeys in our time. Coming from Yorkshire helps, of course, some of the finest abbey ruins in Europe can be found in that magnificent county. Our expectations are high.
On some scales the remains of Glastonbury Abbey are unimpressive. They lack the towering gothic majesty of North Yorkshire's Fountains Abbey, or the intimate quirkiness of St. Dogmael's Abbey, set as they are in expansive - and largely empty - grounds. So yes, on some scales, not that impressive. Measured by other scales, however, it's a very striking place indeed. Heritage organisations like English Heritate and the National Trust could learn a thing or two from Glastonbury.
You exit the gift shop and are immediately reminded that this place was founded as a site of Christian worship. The little chapel dedicated to St. Patrick is the first thing that you pass, and is still a consecrated place of worship, with services held every week. The interior is beautiful, light, bright and airy, the walls adorned with simple mural depicting the saint driving the snakes out of Ireland. I regret that I took no photographs to show you, but a clearly devout young man was praying in the front pew, and out of deference to his devotions I left the camera in my pocket - after all, he had first call on the place. The chapel was founded in the year 1500 by the Abbot Richard Beere, and so has more than five hundred years of continuous use as a house of worship. We tourists are mere Johnny Come Lateleys, and as such should know our place.
Well, actually, you won't, because the original Glastonbury Thorn was felled and burned during the Civil War by the Puritans, who in their general and joyless fundamentalism regarded it as an object of unholy superstition and so added it to the long list of wonderful things destroyed by their shameful religious vandalism.
The tree that stands in the grounds of the abbey was propagated from that original tree, as was a second thorn that stands in the grounds of the Church of St John the Baptist on the high street.
The story goes that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury and while there thrust his staff into Wearyall Hill (just outside the town) where it grew into the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn. The story is unclear about why he might have done this. The tree was deemed special because it flowered not only in the spring, when one might expect blossom on a thorn tree, but also in the dead of midwinter when no other flower bloomed. This was regarded as a miracle - and as proof that the Cup of Christ had indeed been brought to these shores, for what else could bring life to the dead of winter?
Well, the thorn is in fact a variety of the Common Hawthorn called Crategus monogyna Biflora. A variety which does, in fact, flower twice a year. A more scientific explanation perhaps, but even I - a hardcore exponent of science - would concede that it lacks romance.
The discussion about whether Joseph of Arimathea actually did visit Glastonbury - with or without the Holy Grail - is ongoing. (Rather sweetly Wikipedia describes the issue as "controversial" - by which they mean that for some people it is an absolute article of faith while others regard the very idea as frankly ridiculous.) It's actually not impossible - there was trade between the middle east and the land that would become England at the time of Christ, so it could have happened. Could he have had anything to do with the Thorn, or, as many in medieval Glastonbury would have claimed, did he in fact found the Abbey itself and bring Christianity to these shores years before the Roman conquest?
Well, that seems doubtful, given that the first mention we have for the "miraculous" plant is in an early sixteenth century tome "the Lyfe of Joseph of Arimathea"*, and if he really had been involved in the arrival of the Thorn and founding of the Abbey you'd imagine that somebody might have mentioned it earlier...
Mind you, there might well be something in the idea that the thorn is special. Many people have tried growing new plants in recent years both from seed and from cuttings. Since the fifties however they constantly revert to being common or garden single flowering regular hawthorn bushes. Spooky, eh?
I suppose in a sense it still does, except of course that the Lady Chapel now has no roof. Or floor. Or internal walls. That's sort of what it means to be a ruin, I suppose.
The building is twelfth century, constructed between 1184 and 1187 after a fire ravaged the abbey complex. It's famous for the ornate stone carving and, back in the day, would also have been extravagantly painted. As I said, these days it is lacking both a roof and a floor, but it's still impressive. In its prime it must have been absolutely mind-blowing.
We moved on, into what would have been the Nave - now essentially part of one exterior wall, and through a very impressive arch into a more well preserved area, with most of the exterior walls still standing . There was a little crowd of people surrounding a man in medieval finery, so we ambled over to see what was going on, and he turned out to be a sort of re-enactor/guide. (He did tell us which historical character he was but I confess I've forgotten.) We'd missed rather a lot of his spiel, but were still regaled by stories of the Abbey's long and occasionally bloody history.
We learned that the origins of the Abbey are most likely to be Saxon, with the base of the west end of the Nave possibly being built on the foundations of a stone church which, it is said** was built there in the seventh century by the Saxon King Ine of Wessex. That sort of suggests that Joseph of Arimathea may not have been involved... Anyway, we can be reasonably sure that the site was enlarged by St Dunstan (although he wasn't actually a saint at the time) in the tenth century, presumably in the 940s or 950s, given that by 960 he had left Glastonbury to become Archbishop of Canterbury.
About a hundred years later the Normans turned up and treated the Saxons of Glastonbury Abbey with the same amount of deference and respect they lavished on Saxons elsewhere in the kingdom - which is to say, none at all. They did do rather a lot for the Abbey's structure though. The Normans were famed architects and builders, and set about enlarging and aggrandising the Saxon buildings.
Let's just say they didn't skimp. By the time the Domesday Book came to record the Abbey's wealth in 1086 it was the richest and most magnificent monastic institution in the country. Not that the money helped a hundredish years later when, in 1184 the place burned down again. The monks were not overly perturbed however - it helps when your outlook is based on eternity, rather than the short of medium term, and of course although they'd lost many of their buildings they still had the cash which probably came in handy too - and set about rebuilding.
It was around this time that the monks set out to find the graves of King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere who, they thought, might be buried in the old Saxon cemetery. History is largely silent about why they thought that although as a cynic I tend to the view that the need to give paying pilgrims a new reason to pay the place a visit may have had something to do with it.
Whatever the motive, they duly dug up two skeletons which were entombed in great splendour. The fancy tomb didn't survive the ravages either of time or King Henry VIII's dissolution***, but the bodies are still buried in rather simpler graves in the Nave to this day:
By the time of the dissolution Glastonbury Abbey was second in power and influence only to the Abbey at Westminster. That still didn't help it when Henry VIII decided he didn't need the Pope's permission to get divorced (a decision that may have had something to do with the fact that the Pope had refused such permission), set up the Church of England with himself at the head (a position still held by the British Monarch) and plundered the considerable wealth of his kingdom's monasteries to fund his wars and pay for his banquets.****
The dissolution was particularly bloody for Glastonbury. The King's men came in September 1539 on the orders of Thomas Cromwell (long famed as one of history's great villains but given some smidgen of sympathy in Hillary Mantell's Booker winning "Wolfe Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies" - which for the record I heartily recommend, but I digress). They began to strip the Abbey of its not inconsiderable horde of silver and gold. The last Abbot, one Richard Whiting - who had sided with Henry over the split with Rome and therefore might reasonably have expected to be cut some slack - attempted to resist, but to no avail.
His attempt to preserve his Abbey failed and he died a traitor's death - hanged, drawn and quartered - at the top of Glastonbury Tor on November 15th 1539.
So ended the greatness of Glastonbury Abbey.
It's history between late 1539 and 1908, when it returned to the bosom of the church in the form of the Bath and Wells Diocesan Trust, is frankly rather depressing. It changed hands many times and seems to have been mostly owned by a long series of people who didn't really care about it as anything other than a quarry.
It's a pattern that repeats itself throughout history. There are after all, two ways of obtaining stone for a new building. You can find a decent lump of rock in the landscape, cut out big chunks, transport them to your building site and then cut those chunks to size, smooth them and dress them at great expense of effort, or you can just find a building nobody wants anymore and nick the already cut and dressed stones from there. Glastonbury Abbey is by no means unique in having suffered this fate. But if you were wondering what had happened to the walls that are no longer standing, the honest truth is that large parts of Glastonbury and it's surroundings are built out of them.
Recycling at it's most brutally efficient, perhaps.
The refrectory, the long hall where the monks would have eaten their meals, survives only as foundations, as you can see from the picture to the left.
In the background of that picture however, you can see the bell shaped structure that housed the kitchen, and that is very much all there!
 |
| Well,
alright. The roof is octagonal. I'm going to call it conical
later because this isn't a geometry class. |
Whatever it's status as "the best example of a thing", the
Abbot's Kitchen is an impressive building. I have been unable to find any
explanation as to why this particular building survived the dissolution and
subsequent plundering of he Abbey complex for building materials, but survive
it did.
It even found new uses, at least for a while. In the seventeenth century
local Quakers adopted the structure and it became the "Friend's Meeting
House" for a while, although the non-conformists were eventually forced
out. I've not been able to find details regarding the hows and the whys, but it
seems a shame. After all, the site was developed as a place of Christian
worship. True, it was developed as a Catholic site, but the Quakers were at
least putting it to the use it was originally intended for - and of course the
people who forced them out wouldn't have been Catholic in any case...
Anyway. Somehow this one building did manage to resist the ravages of
time and construction. Given that Christ taught that "the meek shall
inherit the Earth" it does seem fitting that the only part of the complex
to survive is not the extravagant ecclesiastical buildings with all their
finery, but the kitchen - a simple place of work.
And it has to be said, it's pretty impressive. Somehow, the building looks bigger on the inside. I'm fairly sure there
is no Galifreyan technology involved,
but you never know...
The ceiling is high, rising to a point far, far above your head. The
walls are whitewashed, and this amplifies the impression of space and light. A
fireplace (or at least a collection of wood and charcoal artfully lit by read
and orange lights to look like fire - the
place burned down in 1184 don't forget, the Abbey has never forgotten that
lesson...) occupies each corner, as it would have in the kitchen's prime. Smoke
would have escaped through a hole in the ceiling immediately above the fire,
and also through the top of the building's more or less conical roof.
The space is laid out exactly as they think it would have been when the
kitchen was supplying the Abbot's Hall (the regular monks got their food from a
much humbler kitchen - it would seem that, in monasteries at least, not all men
were equal before God...) with a large table in the centre, and roasting spits
over each fire. It is of course a static and somewhat sterile exhibit, lacking
the heat, noise, smoke, dirt and smells that would have defined it during its
working life, but even so it is fascinating to imagine what the lives of the
cooks would have been like.
Stepping out of the kitchen into the uncharacteristically bright August
sunshine we contemplated a stroll around the Abbey's rather extensive grounds.
There are thirty six acres to explore, mostly parkland with a duck pond, a fish
pond, a "wildlife area" and of course a cider orchard, because we're
in Somerset and growing apples is essentially compulsory.
However, it was heading for lunch o'clock, and neither of us fancied a
walk, so we turned and headed back towards the building that housed the gift
shop - not because we fancied doing some shopping, but because the gift
shop building also houses the excellent little museum which explains the
history of the Abbey - and from which I gleaned much of the information
presented in this post.
The museum isn't big, but does house a number of fascinating exhibits.
For a start, there's a detailed (and huge) scale model of the
Abbey complex as it may have looked at its height back in 1539. There is also a
covered display case to house a single piece of parchment taken from a hand written (because that
was the only way to produce these things back in the day...) copy of Pliny's
"Historia Naturalis". The case is covered by a large felt flap, which
protects this mid twelfth century artefact from the fading influence of the sun
- and you may rest assured that this picture was taken without flash.
On its own of course, a singly page from an eight hundred year old book
is of little use. But it is representative of the work which
monks of the Abbey may well have produced. And it might only be one page - but
it's an eight hundred year old hand written document. A tangible link between
your twenty first century eyes and the twelfth century hand which held the pen
and wrote these words.
Call me an old romantic if you like, but I find that remarkable.
You should probably go and have a look for yourself...
Join us next time - when we will visit another museum, but one
considerably more up to date...
*It was the 1500s, people didn't really do spelling...
**Although they might be wrong when they say it...
***A bit of ecclesiastical vandalism we can't blame on Cromwell and his cronies...
****Yes, I know there was more to it than that,
but what do you expect? I write a caravan blog for goodness sake -
if you want minute historical detail you need to be reading AJP Taylor!
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