SOMERSET HISTORICAL ESSAYS.
THE DEAN or WELTS in his new volume of Somerset Historical
Essays (H. Milford for the British Academy, 10s. 6d. net) is concerned with the Somerset of the Early Middle Ages and with ecclesiastical personages whom only the erudite remember.
Yet Dr. Armitage Robinson writes so well and reasons so clearly that the layman unversed in mediaeval history may read his book with pleasure. Two of the essays relate to Glastonbury, its antiquity and its Saxon abbots. Two disentangle the suc- cession of the first Deans of Wells and the early Somerset archdeacons. The remaining essays are concerned with Peter of Blois—whose correspondence throws light on the Angevin period and whom the Dean regards as an honest man—and Bishop Jocelin, who stayed beside King John long after the Papal Interdict and left him only when John was excommuni- cated. The opening essay on William of Malrnesbury's account of the antiquities of Glastonbury is particularly entertaining.
The Dean seeks to show how and why the legend grew up. Westminster and Glastonbury, like Oxford and Cambridge after them, were contually disputing as to which of them was the older foundation. It was no mere academic dispute. The head of the more ancient abbey would take precedence at a General Council. At Bale, in 1434, for example, Glastonbury had to contest the Spanish claim on behalf of Compostella where, they said, the Apostle James had preached. The, elaboration of the legend can be traced. First, Westminster traced its origin to Sebert in 604, knowing that Glastonbury was built by Ina a century later. Then Glastonbury traced back its origin to the British King Lucius, in the year 166.
Westminster retorted by discovering that she, too, was a Lucian foundation of the year 169. Glastonbury replied by annexing
"the legend of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail and so settled her date once and for all as the thirty-first year after the Passion of the Lord and the fifteenth after the Assumption of the glorious Virgin. It was vain for Westminster to plead that the blessed Peter himself had left the gate of heaven and come down to consecrate his new church with his own apostolic hands. For when St. David came with his seven bishops thinking to consecrate- the church of Glastonbury, the Lord Himself appeared to him in a vision by night and told him that He the Great High Priest had long ago dedicated the little church of wattle to the honour of His Ever-Virgin Mother."
The Dean shows that William of Malmesbury, writing in 1135-40 on the antiquities of Glastonbury, knew nothing of the story of Joseph of Arimathea and other accretions of the abbey legend which may be assigned to the thirteenth
century. On the other hand, the Dean defends William's list of the Saxon abbots. Glastonbury may well have been a British abbey before the Saxon conquest, and there seems no
reason to doubt that the first Saxon abbot, Beorhtwaid, was appointed about the year 670. The Dean's careful examination of the scanty evidence puts the early history of the great monastery on a sound basis.
Previous page
