Glastonbury Abbey

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.

Glastonbury today carries at least two religious populations who visit the same ground for different reasons. The abbey ruins are held by a charitable trust and are used by the Church of England and other churches for pilgrimages, open air services and an annual gathering. The town has also become a centre for modern pagan, Goddess and New Age practice, drawn by the Tor, the Chalice Well and a body of claims about ancient sanctity at the site.

Ronald Hutton has traced how that second layer was assembled, largely across the twentieth century, from Victorian antiquarian speculation, from the writings of a small number of influential authors, and from the general modern search for a pre Christian Britain. He is careful about what this does and does not mean. That a tradition is recent does not make it insincere, and Glastonbury is a working religious centre for people whose practice began in living memory. It does mean the atlas cannot present the site's pagan significance as continuous from antiquity, because the evidence for that continuity is not there. The medieval abbey's own claim to be the oldest Christian foundation in Britain, said to have been established by Joseph of Arimathea, is likewise a claim the house made about itself and not one that can be independently checked.