A Grave Found at a Useful Moment

In 1184 fire destroyed the abbey buildings at Glastonbury, and rebuilding on that scale needed money that a house of that period raised largely from pilgrims. In 1191 the monks announced that they had dug between two ancient pillars in the cemetery and found a hollowed log containing two bodies, with a lead cross identifying one of them as Arthur, king of the Britons. Donations and visitors followed, and the remains were later moved into a marble tomb before the high altar.

Historians have treated the timing with suspicion for a very long time. Diana Webb, writing on English pilgrimage, sets the episode inside a competitive economy in which shrines needed relics and relics needed publicity, and Glastonbury was not the only house to make a well timed discovery. The claim also served interests outside the abbey, since an Arthur who was demonstrably dead and buried in England was politically more convenient than an Arthur waiting to return. The atlas records the discovery as reported and its authenticity as unresolved rather than debunked, because the evidence to settle it no longer exists: the tomb was destroyed at the dissolution of the monasteries and the cross has been lost since the seventeenth century. What survives is the account of men who had a reason to write it.