;THE DESTRUCTION OF GLASTONBURY; 15th NOVEMBER

 ‘IN ACT THY BED-VOW BROKE”

THE DESTRUCTION OF GLASTONBURY

15th NOVEMBER

I have taken today’s commemoration from the Reformation executions at Glastonbury Tor, as related by Claire Asquith in her book, “Shadowplay, the hidden beliefs and coded politics of William Shakespeare”*:

“On 15 November 1539, a procession would its way up Glastonbury Tor, a steep, conical hill overlooking the peatlands of Somerset in the south-west of England. The journey over the windy ridges was arduous, for the crowds struggled to drag with them three men tied to sledge-like wooden frames. On the top of the hill stood a newly constructed gallows; nearby was a fire, knives and a cauldron.

Though some of the spectators would have been jeering, many would have been aghast, not only at the barbarity, but at the sacrilege of what they were witnessing. Glastonbury was the most ancient and sacred Christian site in Britain. Long ago, when it was still surrounded by sea, it was called Yniswitren, the Island of Glass, where Joseph of Arimathea and his eleven companions were believed to have arrived by boat from the Holy Land, bearing with them the Holy Grail containing the blood of Christ. On top of the island they built a small church of willow reeds in honour of the Virgin, a church that would be preserved for centuries. In time the place became known as Avalon, the Isle of Apples, where King Arthur was said to be buried with Guinevere sixteen feet deep under a great stone slab. The first missionaries from Rome came to Glastonbury, repaired the church, and settled there; St Patrick, returning from Ireland, became their abbot and was buried under the church. The learned St Dunstan established a great Benedictine monastery around the Tor, and until the Reformation, the ancient Celtic site remained one of England’s greatest centres of pilgrimage- the burial place of saints and a direct, mysterious link with Christ Himself.

The old man standing under the shadow of the gallows in 1539 taking his final look at the wide stretch of Glastonbury lands spread out below him was Richard Whiting, the monastery’s last abbot, a humanist scholar and respected administrator, condemned to death on the orders of a government determined to appropriate the wealth of the great abbey. Along with his two fellow monks, he uttered a final prayer, asking forgiveness of God and his captors; the cart beneath him jerked and for a moment he dangled from the gallows. Then he was cut down, his chest sliced open, his bowels removed and tossed into the cauldron, and his heart, still beating, torn out and held aloft by the hangman who proclaimed it the “heart of a traitor’. Finally, his body was dismembered and boiled, the head fastened up over the gate of the deserted abbey and the quartered limbs exposed in the cities of Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgewater, a terrible warning to the Westcountry of the price of resistance to the King’s new regime. Meanwhile the monastery went the way of all the other religious houses in England. The monks were evicted, their possessions auctioned, their lands, treasures and buildings seized by the Crown, which sold them off to the highest bidder. The abbey itself was dismantled and sold off to the highest bidder.

No laments survive for the passing of the abbot and his monastery or for the destruction of Avalon, the spiritual heart of England. Yet the assault on shrines like Glastonbury were acts of cultural vandalism as shocking and irrevocable as any in human history. Searching for suitable words, the usually restrained historian David Knowles ends his account of the destruction of Glastonbury by quoting Shakespeare’s description of the death of Duncan in Macbeth, ‘Sacrilegious murder’ has broken open ‘the Lord’s anointed temple’ and stolen thence ‘the life of the building.’”

*Public Affairs, New York, 2005, at pp. 1-2.