Motor Tours in the West Country 3

Motor Tours in the West Country 3

sinned against than sinning, for the palace and many other things were

wrung from him by Protector Somerset, from whom they passed to one Sir

John Gates. This vandal was the destroyer of the banquet-hall, and would

probably have done more mischief than he did, if he had not been most

justifiably beheaded.

 

It is behind the palace that we find the loveliest spot in Wells. Here,

overlooked by sixteenth-century oriels, are the springs that long ago

gave the city its name--the wells of St. Andrew, whose still surface has

reflected for hundreds of years the beautiful east end of the cathedral.

For hundreds of years, too, its waters have fed the moat. It is only at

certain hours, of course, that strangers may walk in the palace garden;

but the moat that circles it and the towers that guard it are visible to

everyone. So is the swan who rings for his dinner when it is late, with

all the jerky impatience of a man in the same plight.

 

[Illustration: WELLS CATHEDRAL.]

 

There is something that takes a hold on the imagination in the very

dulness of the country that lies between Wells and Glastonbury. For the

reason that this road with the rough surface is so level, and has such

uninteresting surroundings, is that all this country was once the swampy

land that lay round the Isle of Avalon. There is Glastonbury Tor before

us, conspicuous for many a mile with its steep sides and crowning tower;

and here on our left is the orchard-clad slope of Avalon itself, where

“golden apples smile in every wood.”

 

We drive slowly down the long High Street of Glastonbury.

 

Many, many pilgrims have come this way before us: have passed the great

Tudor-rose and mullioned windows of the old stone court-house on the

right, have stopped before the panelled front, the wreathed vines and

carven beasts, of the “George” Inn, and have entered it beneath the

painted arms of Edward IV. For this inn is the New Guesthouse that Abbot

Selwood built and embattled and made so fine, for such of the pilgrims

as paid for their lodging.[1] It was Selwood’s successor, Abbot Bere, “a

grave, wise, and discreet man, just and upright in all his ways,” who

raised the grey Tribunal that has been in turn an abbot’s court-house, a

boys’ school, and a lawyer’s office. Exactly opposite this house is the

passage that leads to the abbey.

 

It is not in the stones of Glastonbury that we shall find her history;

not in this soaring broken arch that leads our eyes and our hearts

upwards; nor even in the splendours of arcading and moulding that are the

glory of the _Ealde Chirche_, the chapel usually called St. Joseph’s,

though it is really St. Mary’s. Many centuries before these walls were

raised, many centuries before Norman hands ever laid one English stone

upon another, the soil beneath our feet--this dust that is the dust of

saints and kings--was held sacred by Saxon and Celt. “This place,” says

Camden, “was by our Ancestors call’d the first ground of God, the first

ground of the Saints in England, the rise and fountain of all religion in

England, the burying-place of the Saints, the mother of the Saints.”

 

[Illustration: ST. MARY’S CHAPEL (OFTEN CALLED ST. JOSEPH’S),

GLASTONBURY.]

 

The mind loses itself here in a cloud of legend. Dim forms of early saint

and holy grail give place to visions, almost as dim, of St. Patrick and

St. David and St. Bridget. Every holy man and woman came to Glastonbury,

according to the chroniclers, sooner or later, alive or dead; so that the

very floor, says William of Malmesbury, and the sides of the altar, and

even the altar itself above and beneath, were laden with the multitude

of relics. From Northumbria, from Ireland, from Wales, came the bones of

the saints in search of safety: Paulinus and Aidan and Bede, and Hilda

from her wild cliff by the North Sea, and David from his Rosy Valley

in the west. How much of this is true we not know and need not greatly

care, seeing that in any case the fact that gives interest and beauty to

these stories is the fact of Glastonbury’s immense age and sanctity, the

undoubted fact that it was “the first ground of the Saints in England,

the burying-place of Saints, the mother of Saints.” We may even be

informed by some officious person that the real name of the Glastonbury

Thorn is _Cratægus oxycantha præcox_, and that it will blossom at

Christmas elsewhere; yet nothing can rob us of the picture of Henry

VIII.’s lying and thieving commissioner, when he came hither to despoil

and desecrate, carefully wrapping up two sprigs of the sacred thorn

in a piece of white sarcenet, and sending them as a present to Thomas

Cromwell; nor of that other picture of the zealous puritan, solemnly

hacking the thorn-tree to death for the good of his soul.

 

When St. Dunstan was a boy, living here in the primitive monastery

founded by King Ina, he dreamt that he saw, on this spot where we are

standing among the ruins, a glorious fabric of “fair alleys and comely

cloisters.” The splendours of his vision have come and gone, but we too

may see them in dream: the mighty church with its towering arches, its

many chapels, its marble floors and sapphire altar; the enclosing wall

with the two great entrances; the acres of domestic buildings--cloisters

and dormitories, library and refectory, and the abbot’s stately lodging.

Over there among the trees his kitchen still stands. The steam of much

good cheer rose to its quaint octagonal roof when Henry VII. was here

as the guest of that wise and discreet man, Abbot Bere; and when Leland

visited his “especial friend,” Richard Whiting; and when Henry VIII.’s

commissioner came on his mean errand, and found to his annoyance that the

brethren were “so straight kept that they could not offend.”

 

It was not the magnificent building of Dunstan’s dream, but the simple

church he knew, that was the burial-place of kings. He himself, as abbot,

laid Edmund the Elder in his grave; and here in the monastery “which he

ever loved beyond all others” lies Edgar the Pacific, “the flower and

pride of all kings, the honour and glory of England,” and near him his

grandson Edmund Ironside, who was merciful and kind, says Matthew of

Westminster, “to the just persons in his kingdom, and terrible to the

unjust.… And all England mourned for him exceedingly.” And somewhere

deep beneath the turf, near the spot where the high altar used to stand,

is the dust of those bones and that golden tress of hair that some

would have us believe were the actual remains of Arthur and Guinevere.

Edward I. and his Eleanor believed it, and came to the great church

here when it was new to gaze, adoring and credulous, at the skulls of

their predecessors. But now our minds--like that of the blameless king

himself--are “clouded with a doubt”: for the historic Arthur, we are

told, died almost certainly in Scotland, and never came to the Island

Valley of Avilion to heal him of his grievous wound.

 

The first Norman abbot of Glastonbury, Thurstan, set to work at once to

improve the old building, and would have done more if his abbacy had

not suddenly ended in an unseemly skirmish on the very steps of the

altar. “He would have taught the monks amiss,” says the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle severely. In point of fact he was resolved to abolish the use

of Gregorian chants, to the great scandal of the monks, and, like many

another, thought that the introduction of the soldiery would have a

convincing effect. “Rueful things happened there on that day,” says the

chronicler, “for the French broke into the choir and threw darts towards

the altar where the monks were collected, and some of their servants went

upon the upper floor and shot down arrows towards the chancel, so that

many arrows stuck in the crucifix which stood above the altar, and the

wretched monks lay around the altar, and some crept under it … and they

slew some of the monks and wounded many, so that the blood ran down from

the altar on the steps.” Rueful things indeed!

 

The dogmatic Thurstan was removed, and a year later the monastery was

burnt to the ground. It was then that this beautiful chapel began to

rise, with all its profusion of ornament; and round it for hundreds

of years the great abbey continued to grow slowly into the perfection

of Dunstan’s dream. How great was the magnificence of it we may judge

from the “dyverse parcells” that were ultimately “delyvered until his

Majestie”--the spoils of many shrines, gold and silver vessels, jewelled

altars, and “the great saphire of Glastonburg.” Poor Abbot Whiting did

his best to save them before he went to his death on Glastonbury Tor.

 

[Illustration: THE CHOIR, GLASTONBURY.]

 

There is Glastonbury Tor before us, framed in the piers of the broken

chancel-arch. It was to the summit of that hill that Richard Whiting,

last Abbot of Glastonbury, who had been wont to travel in all the pomp of

a prince, was dragged upon a hurdle to the gallows. Over the great gate

through which his guests had so often crowded--sometimes five hundred in

a day, they say--his head was set up, lest men should forget that the

King loved “parcells of gilte plate” more than justice. For there was

hardly a pretence of justice in the trial of Richard Whiting. Like the

Abbot of Fountains, he hid the treasures of his abbey from the King’s

commissioners, and, since he must be proved a traitor before these riches

could be wrung from him, this act was called high treason. Neither his

immense charities, nor his simple, saintly life, nor even his submission

to the Act of Supremacy could save him. It was with “businesslike

brevity,” says Green the historian, that Thomas Cromwell “ticked off

human lives.” “Item,” he wrote among his memoranda, “the abbot of Glaston

to be tryed at Glaston and also executyd there.” So Richard Whiting was

hanged and quartered at the foot of that tower that still stands upon the

hill, and serves him for a monument.

 

I am not sure whether the main entrance to the abbey, over which

Whiting’s head was set, was the vanished gateway on the north side, or

the still existing entrance in Magdalen Street. We pass the latter as we

drive out of the town. Its newly restored archway stands on the left,

beside the house that was once the “Red Lion” Inn, and quite close to

the modern market-cross that is so unusually graceful. Our road skirts

the foot of Wearyall Hill, where once the sacred thorn-tree grew--the

miraculous tree that had been, said the monks of Glastonbury, the staff

of Joseph of Arimathea.

 

After a few minutes of level running we climb the Polden Hills--no very

arduous work--and look down upon the wide green plain of Sedgemoor. It

lies on our right as we glide down the hill, and stretches far away from

us to Bridgwater. It was from some spot in that blue distance that “a

volley of shot and huzzas” rang out into the night, when Monmouth and

his peasant army made their futile attempt to “vindicate their religion,

laws, and rights;” and it was far away across those level fields that

Feversham’s grim line of gibbets rose on the following day. In all this

peaceful country there was not a ditch from which some poor wretch was

not dragged to make sport, later on, for Jeffreys: but the ditch that hid

Monmouth himself was not here, but in Dorset. As we look out upon the

scene of his undoing let us forget that distant ditch, and the weakness

of an exhausted, starving man, and remember only that he made a gallant

end. “I shall die like a lamb,” he said on the scaffold. “I have now no