GLASTONBURY, a market town and municipal borough of Somerset, England, 6 m. S. of Wells, on the main road from Lon don to Exeter, and on the Somerset and Dorset railway. Pop. The town lies in the midst of orchards and water meadows reclaimed from the fens which surround the Tor, a conical height of some 50o ft., which rises abruptly from the moor and is crowned by the ruins of St. Michael's chapel. The chief buildings, apart from the abbey, are the churches of St. John the Baptist, Perpendicular in style, with a fine tower and some 15th century monuments; and St. Benignus, commonly called St. Benedict's, dating from ; St. John's hospital, founded 1246 ; the Tribunal, and the George inn. The Antiquarian museum, in Magdalene street has a good collection of objects from the Glastonbury lake village, discovered in 1892 and consisting of sixty mounds within a space of five acres. There is a Roman Cath olic missionaries' college. In the i 6th century the woollen indus try was introduced by the duke of Somerset ; and silk manufacture was carried on in the i8th century. Tanning and tile-making, and the manufacture of boots and sheep-skin rugs are practised. The town is governed by a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. Near the museum is the Abbey gateway, the restored Gatehouse of which was until lately the Red Lion inn.
A very considerable collection of fibulae is made up entirely of late Celtic types, they were probably made on the spot as crucibles, bronze wire, dross, slag, etc., have been found. They almost all belong to the La Tene III. type, though two are earlier. Ten penannular brooches, very late Celtic or almost Romano British, were also found, as was a fine bronze bowl. Thirty-five finger rings have been collected as well as various other orna ments and a bronze mirror. Three bronze terret-rings or loops for harness have been recovered, as well as a large variety of other bronze objects; 32 objects in lead and 18 in tin are accounted for by Gray and armlets and other objects in Kim meridge shale are a feature, as in many other places in the west of England. Long-handled weaving-combs are specially impor tant finds, and 89 have been found in the lake village, nearly all made of red-deer antler, with a few of bone. The situation of the village has led to the preservation of a number of wooden objects which give many clues to the skill of the people. Remains of two boats, a loom, an axle-box and a ladder, etc., have been identified.
Of iron objects, io9, some with wooden handles, have been catalogued. One piece of tin-money of the earlier part of the first century A.D. and a number of currency-bars are a further link between Glastonbury and the La Tene III. civilization of the regions further north-east and south-east. The quantity of pottery discovered was very large, but only a very few fragments, on the flood soil above the village, could be conjecturally connected with Roman influence. The pottery obviously belongs to the Late Celtic period, but is mostly of rather coarse paste. Reid found remains of peas, beans, wheat, barley, etc., while the domestic animals included a small breed of horse, an ox (Bos longifrons), two breeds of sheep, a goat, a small type of pig and a dog. Forty f our human remains have been found, and are thought by Boyd Dawkins to indicate a massacre. The crania which could be ex amined had breadth-length indices about 76.5 to 78. The general conclusion is that the village was the abode of cultivators and craftsmen, probably not entirely cut off from the sea via the meres, and that the place was occupied in the last century B.C. and part of the 1st century A.D. This valuable work furnishes the best indication so far available of the life of the British people at the time of the Roman invasion. British earthworks and Roman roads and relics prove later occupation. The name of Glaston bury, however, is of much later origin, being a corruption of the Saxon Glæstyngabyrig. By the Britons the spot seems to have been called Ynys yr Afalon (latinized as Avallonia) or Ynysvitrin (see AVALON), and it became the local habitation of various fragments of Celtic romance.
See Arthur Bulleid and H. St. George Gray, The Glastonbury Lake Village (1911 and 1917).
Ina's church, which may have been partly ruinous, St. Dunstan restored. He lengthened it considerably by the addition of a tower and made it square with its length by adding aisles. That this church was standing while Malmesbury was at Glastonbury would appear to be certain from the careful description he gives of the position of certain tombs of Saxon abbots and bishops within it. The first Norman abbot, Turstin, had begun a new church on Norman lines, probably leaving the Saxon church of Dunstan alone. His successor, Herlewin, pulled down all that Turstin had put up, and started afresh, as he did not consider the building was sufficiently dignified for so important an abbey. Whether this Norman church obliterated or incorporated St. Dunstan's church we do not at present know, for the excavations that have been carried out by the Society of Antiquaries of Lon don jointly with the Somerset Archaeological Society during 1927-28, while they appear to have revealed the remains of Ina's church and the additions made to it by St. Dunstan, have not gone far enough to show the relation of the later Norman building to these earlier structures.
On May 25, 1184, this great church, all the monastic buildings, and, most serious of all, the venerable old wattle church, were consumed in a terrible fire. Four years previously the abbot had died, and his successor had not been appointed as the king was glad to keep the revenues in his hands. Henry II. now did his part with unusual generosity, placing the whole of the revenues at the disposal of Ralph Fitz Stephen, to whom the king entrusted the work of rebuilding after the fire. First the Lady chapel was built on the site the old church had once occupied for so many cen turies. This was finished and consecrated within three years. The foundation for the main church, the ruins of which are now standing, were put in on a magnificent scale, but the progress of the work was checked by the death of Henry II. and the con flict of the monks with Savary, bishop of Bath, who had succeeded in making himself abbot. Of the various additions made under successive abbots, one of considerable interest was the building of a Galilee to join the west end of the great church to the Lady chapel. This was effected during the time that John of Taunton was abbot, between 1274 and 1291. The east wall of the Lady chapel was removed, an open arch substituted, and then a building of the same width and length as the chapel itself filled the space between it and the west wall of the new church.
As the Lady chapel was said to record by its length the exact size of the original wattle church, now that it had been added to it was feared that this celebrated measurement would in time be lost. To guard against this, a cross or pillar was built at a later date outside the chapel, 48 ft. northwards from the original east ernmost buttress, so that the length from east to west could be easily calculated. A bronze plate, giving the story of St. Joseph's wattle church was fixed to the monument. In Aug. 1921, the foundations of this pillar, about 7 ft. in diameter, were uncovered. Another important alteration also affected the Lady chapel. Abbot Richard Bere, the last abbot but one (1493-1524) hollowed out a crypt under the floor of this chapel and the adjoining Galilee under-pinning the walls for the purpose. It was this crypt chapel that was dedicated to St. Joseph of Arimathea, and that contained his statue.
Of the monastic buildings themselves nothing remains standing except the Abbot's Kitchen, as it is popularly called, a solid and substantial building, square in plan, but rendered octagonal inte riorly by great fireplaces which are planted across the angles. The central ventilating shaft is a fine and ingenious piece of work and leads the roof up to a decorated octagon in which it finishes. Of other parts of the monastery nothing can now be seen except the undercroft of the refectory, excavated in 1911, under the direction of Bligh Blond, and the line taken by the cloisters lead ing to the church. The foundations of the rest of the monastery remain to be uncovered in time. The dissolution of the abbey commenced on Aug. when Dr. Layton visited the place. The venerable abbot, Richard Whiting, was taken at his manor at Sharpham, and sent up to London and lodged in the Tower, on account of "divers and sundry treasons." Cromwell, in his Re membrances writes, "Item, the abbot of Glaston to be tryed at Glaston and also executed there with his complycys" (Cott. mss. Titus B. 1, fol. 41) . The abbot was sent down to Wells, where he was "arraigned and next day (Nov. put to execution for robbing of Glastonbury church." The execution took place on Glastonbury Tor. His body was quartered and his head fixed on the abbey gate. A darker passage does not occur in the annals of the English Reformation than this murder of an able and high spirited man, whose worst offence was that he defended as best he could from the hand of the spoiler the property in his charge.
In 1907 the site of the abbey, with the remains of the build ings, which had been in private hands since the granting of the estate to Sir Peter Carew by Elizabeth in 1559, was bought by Mr. Ernest Jardine for the purpose of transferring it to the Church of England. Bishop Kennion of Bath and Wells entered into an agreement to raise a sum of £31,000, the cost of the pur chase ; this was completed, and the site and buildings were formally transferred at a dedicatory service in 1909 to the Diocesan Trustees of Bath and Wells, who are to hold and man age the property according to a deed of trust. This deed provided for the appointment of an advisory council, consisting of the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Bath and Wells and four other bishops, each with power to nominate one clerical and one lay member. The council has the duty of deciding the purpose for which the property is to be used "in connection with and for the benefit of the Church of England." To give time for further collection of funds and deliberation, the property was re-let for five years to the original purchaser. The Abbot's Kitchen was purchased in 1921 and has been added to the original trust.
The two legends most closely connected with the story of the abbey are those of King Arthur and St. Joseph of Arimathea. It was claimed that the former was buried there and that the latter was the builder of the original wattle church. These legends "are truly venerable traditions, which greatly influenced the story of the past and have left an abiding mark on the nomenclature of the present. They are not very ancient, when the long life of the abbey is taken into account. From first to last they occupied only the last three centuries and a half of its history. They were un known to William of Malmesbury when he wrote his book, On the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury, about the year 1125, although he had free access to all the abbey's records before the Great Fire, and made, as we know, excellent use of his opportuni ties of investigation. Our earliest date for any of them is 1191 (Two Glastonbury Legends, p. 5o, by the Very Rev. J. Armitage Robinson). The Glastonbury thorn (Crataegus praecox), which flowers at Christmas as well as in the spring, a late legend asserted sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea. It is probably nothing more than a perpetuated sport from the common thorn obtained by grafting. Trees raised from seeds of C. praecox revert to the ordinary type.
The abbey was overlord of the town of Glastonbury until the Dissolution. Henry II. granted a charter by which the men of Glastonbury were exempted from the jurisdiction of royal officials, and this exemption was recognized by Edward I. when on a visit to the abbey in 1278, he yielded to the abbot's plea and held his court of justice at the chapel of St. Gildas at Street, which was just outside "the Twelve Hides." The borough was incorporated by Anne in 1706, and the corporation was reformed by the act of 1835. In 1319 Glastonbury received a writ of summons to parliament, but made no return, and has not since been repre sented. A fair on the 8th of September was granted in 1127; another on the 29th of May was held under a charter of 1282. Fairs known as Torr fair and Michaelmas fair are now held on the second Mondays in September and October and are chiefly important for the sale of horses and cattle. The market day every other Monday is noted for the sale of cheese. Glastonbury owed its medieval importance to its connection with the abbey. At the Dissolution, a number of foreign weavers, chiefly Flemings, were introduced to check the decay of the town, and some settled among the ruins of the abbey. The cloth trade flourished for a century and was replaced by silk-weaving, stocking-knitting and glove-making, all of which have died out.
Gl.," and Saxon Abbots of Glastonbury (Somerset Hist. Essays, 1921), and Two Glastonbury Legends (1926). (D. E. H.)