Glastonbury (Somerset, England)

Site of a medieval abbey that was dissolved in 1539 by royal decree and largely ruined, but is destined to rise again, according to a prophecy ascribed to the last survivor of the community.


Glastonbury is a small town cradled in a cluster of hills. This was formerly encircled by water, or nearly so, and is sometimes called the Isle of Avalon—the “apple-place,” a name derived from Celtic mythology. The isle has a long history and prehistory and is thought to have been a pre-Christian sanctuary, perhaps associated with goddess-worship. On the eve of the Christian era, Celtic lake-villages rose out of the water a short distance away. For a long time, it was possible for seagoing craft to reach Avalon from the Bristol Channel.
Glastonbury has a complex aura of Christian mythology, some of it truly old, some comparatively recent. A large space at the center of the present town is said to have been the home of the first Christian settlers in Britain, led, according to medieval legend, by Joseph of Arimathea, the rich convert who obtained the body of Christ after the crucifixion and laid it in the tomb. Such beliefs evolved from a fact demonstrated by carbon dating and other research techniques: that Glastonbury actually was the site of a very ancient church, its true foundation forgotten, and of an early British monastic community, existing before the Anglo-Saxons’ arrival in this part of the country. Later, under the auspices of Saxon kings, this community grew gradually into a Benedictine abbey on an impressive scale.
There were associations, not only with early Christians, but with King Arthur. One legend made Glastonbury the scene of the earliest of several stories about the abduction and rescue of Guinevere. In 1191, the monks of the abbey announced that an excavation in their graveyard had revealed the remains of Arthur and his queen, which they enshrined in their church. Archaeological work has partially confirmed their account: they did indeed dig where they said they had, and they did find an early burial, although the real identity of the person or persons buried there is now irrecoverable. Since Arthur’s last earthly destination was said to be Avalon, this discovery was taken as proving that the name, hitherto only doubtfully localized, meant the Glastonbury hill-cluster,
and that meaning has been customary ever since.
Thanks to the tradition of Joseph as the founder of the original community and thanks also to the presence of Arthur, Glastonbury became a national shrine and made a contribution to medieval Arthurian romance. It was involved, as Joseph was, with the saga of the Grail, the wonder-working vessel of Christ’s Last Supper, reputedly brought to Glastonbury through Joseph’s agency. Glastonbury Abbey became the greatest and wealthiest in England, or an equal-first with Westminster, and attracted numerous pilgrims and visitors. It maintained a school and one of the finest libraries in the kingdom. As receding waters left a landscape of pools and marshes, the abbey and its tenants embanked the River Brue to prevent flooding and drained the whole territory down to the sea for farming.
King Henry VIII, however, broke with the pope and reestablished the Church in England on a national basis. His program included the suppression of all monasteries and convents, and in 1539, he dissolved Glastonbury. The abbey, its valuables, and its lands were seized for the crown, and the abbot was put to death. Most of the monks were pensioned off or given posts in Henry’s Anglican Church. After a period of uncertainty, the abbey came into the hands of private owners.
It is in this phase of Glastonbury’s history that its prophet appears. His name is given as Austin Ringwode, and he is said to have been the last of the monks. He lived on in the neighborhood until 1587 and made a deathbed pronouncement: “The abbey will one day be repaired and rebuilt for the like worship which has ceased; and then peace and plenty will for a long time abound.”
This prophecy used to be ignored or played down because of a lack of early documentation. Ringwode, it was pointed out, was nowhere on record as a monk. Yet the transmission of such a story, in a county that became strongly Protestant and not disposed to hope for a monastic revival, tells in favor of its genuineness as a local tradition. The objection that Ringwode is not on record as a monk was removed by the publication of a memoir written in 1586 but little known until modern times. The author, William Weston, writes of meeting a very old man living near Glastonbury who kept up Catholic devotional practices in private. He had been employed at the abbey in a lay capacity, as a servant or clerical worker. Weston does not name him—his religious sympathies could have got him into trouble—but careful scrutiny has indicated that this man was very probably Austin Ringwode. With the passage of time and the disappearance of all religious communities, any man attached to this community might have been spoken of vaguely as a “monk.”
No similar prophecy is connected with any other abbey in England, and at Glastonbury, the notion would have seemed extremely far-fetched. In 1587, the abbey was firmly in private hands, and a long process of destruction had already begun. The various owners, over the next 300 years, were seldom interested in preservation, but they valued the ruins as a quarry for marketable stone. More and more of the fabric found its way into houses, walls, roadbeds. A few poets and antiquarians made nostalgic comments, and some of the legends were improved in retelling. But in the early years of the twentieth century, while new books on Glastonbury were appearing, only one author mentioned Ringwode’s prophecy. Resurrection was simply not an issue.
Yet resurrection happened. The Church of England acquired the site from its last owner. Services began to be held again, and pilgrimage revived, Catholic as well as Anglican. Actual rebuilding was out of the question—too little was left—but repair work was done, and the process of dilapidation was halted. In time, a new shrine came into being near the abbey. This twentieth-century rebirth

was not purely ecclesiastical. It included a major festival of music and drama created by the operatic composer Rutland Boughton; this came to an end in its original form, but there were several revivals in later years, and the abbey grounds became a venue for concerts and other performances, with audiences equaling the whole population of the town. A further development, gathering momentum from about 1970 on, was the growth of Glastonbury as a kind of “alternative” spiritual center, attracting mystics and seekers of many kinds and building an international reputation as such. This was accompanied by a fresh wave of mythmaking, some of it focused on the pre-Christian background. One tangible result among several was the foundation of a unique Library of Avalon.
Austin Ringwode, of course, would have meant a monastic restoration. It was the only form in which he could have pictured rebirth. A resurgent future could only have presented itself to him through that image, at least consciously. He could not have foreseen some of the modern developments, especially those of a non-Christian kind, and he would doubtless have disapproved of them if he had. Yet it is curious that he should have predicted rebirth by a circumlocution about “the like worship which has ceased,” rather than by speaking of Catholic religion, even though he undoubtedly had that in mind. On his deathbed, he no longer had any reason to fear prosecution. A modern neopagan might take his words to be inspired in a way that he himself was unaware of, and to apply not only to a new beginning of Christian worship but to a new beginning of whatever preceded it.