Pilgrim Ways

Dunstan was born in or close to Glastonbury around the year 909 and after a career at Court he became a monk. As abbot, in 943, he introduced strict reforms insisting on the practice of the Benedictine rule and with the active support of King Edmund I and King Edred he reformed monastic life throughout Britain. He was an educator, a liturgist, a lover of church music, an aesthete and a builder. He created new monasteries or refounded old ones at Exeter, Peterborough, Ely, Bath, Malmesbury and Westminster. Tradition has it that those who were buried here included St.Patrick and St.Bridget - although there are also more compelling claims made by other locations.

St.David is said to have been at Glastonbury and to have arrived with a retinue of bishops intent on rededicating the church. In a vision it was revealed to him that the chapel had already been dedicated by Christ Himself to Mary, His Mother. David built an oratory, instead, at the east end of the Old Church.

King Aviragus had originally granted Joseph 1440 acres of land and although, by the time the Domesday Book was compiled, the monastic lands had grown well beyond the area of the “twelve hides,” within the perimeters of the original land the abbot enjoyed tax exemptions and sovereign powers. Although the Vikings never desecrated Glastonbury, and the British, Saxon and Norman rulers respected its antiquity and sanctity, fire proved its most daunting enemy. On May 25th, 1184, the wattle church, which had been enclosed by a wooded structure, caught light and a fire swept through the abbey. The abbey was rebuilt but its reputation as a centre of pilgrimage declined.

The Arthurian Legend The abbey saw its fortunes restored a few years later when two ancient oak coffins were discovered sixteen feet below the surface of the earth in the burial ground to the south of the abbey. Here, it was said, were the remains of Queen Guinevere and King Arthur. Their coffins were reburied at the heart of the abbey church and today‟s pilgrim can still see the location which is marked with an inscription.

Of the medieval buildings few now remain. The Abbot‟s Kitchen is a fourteenth-century octagonal building in which a few artifacts and photographs are exhibited. At the corner of Chilkwell Street and Bere Lane is the abbey‟s tithe barn - dating from around 1420. It is used as a museum of rural life.

The vast site and the scale of the buildings still stand testimony to the wealth and importance which monasteries such as Glastonbury came to symbolise. This was ultimately to be their undoing. The thousand year tradition of annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury - during August to celebrate the feast of St.Joseph - was about to come to an abrupt end.

Abbot Whiting: Death and Dissolution Henry VIII, jealous of the wealth, independence and power of monastic foundations, and embittered by his acrimonious arguments with the Pope over his determination to divorce his wife, decided to destroy the monasteries. The last abbot of Glastonbury was Abbot Richard Whiting (see also chapter 3, Monasteries). Henry VIII‟s agents called on him in 1539 and began the confiscation of the abbey‟s possessions. Henry‟s agents accused Abbot Whiting of concealing abbey treasures. He was brought to trial on these trumped up charges and on November 15th he was taken with two of his monks to the summit of the Tor and they were