# Glastonbury Abbey

former Benedictine abbey at Somerset, England, United Kingdom

England, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 712 CE – 1539 CE

## Story

• A Benedictine monastery in Glastonbury, Somerset, left in ruins in 1539 and set in 36 acres.
• A timber hall of about the year 500, with imported late Roman amphorae, stood here before the Saxon house, and a stone church is reputed to have been ordered in 712.
• Dunstan enlarged the church in the tenth century, built the cloisters, and instituted the Benedictine Rule.
• A fire in 1184 destroyed the Old Church, the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1186, and in 1191 the monks announced the grave of King Arthur.
• The last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn, and quartered on Glastonbury Tor on 15 November 1539.
• Five glass furnaces date to about 700, and a drainage trench in 2014 found the cemetery soil already churned by earlier digging.

## Visiting

The grounds are open from 10:00 to 16:00, Tuesday to Sunday, and last entry is at 15:15. Until 2 November the abbey is open daily, and from 2 November it is closed on Mondays and on Christmas Day. Last entry is always 45 minutes before closing. Adult admission booked ahead is £14, and admission bought on arrival is £15.
Each paying adult may bring two children under 16 free on a general admission ticket, and each further child under 16 costs £6.60. Online tickets are for one stated date and may be bought until 18:00 on the day before the visit. Refunds are not available on online tickets, and everyone in the party must arrive together. These admission prices include a voluntary donation, and a non-donation admission price is also offered.
A group of at least ten adults receives a tenth off the ticket price.

## History

Glastonbury Abbey was a Benedictine monastery in Glastonbury, Somerset. Its ruined church stands in 36 acres of parkland and is entered by a gatehouse of the middle of the fourteenth century. The walls that remain belong to the rebuilding after a fire in 1184, and the most complete piece is the Lady Chapel, on a crypt at the west end, where the old wooden church had stood.

The Abbot's Kitchen is the one substantial monastic building left. It is an octagonal fourteenth-century structure with four great fireplaces, built with the abbot's house under John de Breynton. The ruins were opened to the public in 1908 and are kept by a charity, and pilgrimage has been held here since 1924.

People lived on this ground before the Saxon monastery. A timber hall of about the year 500 stood near the later Lady Chapel, and a trodden floor held fragments of late Roman amphorae from the eastern Mediterranean, dated about 450 to 550. The hall may have lasted into the eighth or ninth century, but that does not prove a church and does not support a link with Joseph of Arimathea.

Romano-British pottery was found at the west end of the cloister, and the old trenches also showed prehistoric and Roman occupation. The idea of a Celtic or pre-Celtic sanctuary on this spot has been called dubious. A Christian settlement has been suggested on the Tor to the east, which is a separate claim from the abbey on the flat ground.

After the Battle of Peonnum in 658, Cenwalh of Wessex took Somerset as far west as the River Parrett, perhaps to control the abbey. The British abbot Bregored remained until his death in 669, and an Anglo-Saxon, Berhtwald, followed him. Charters of the late seventh century show grants of land, and a first Saxon church is placed between 670 and 690.

Ine of Wessex, king from 689 to 726, enriched the community and is reputed to have ordered a stone church in 712, with foundations at the west end of the nave. He issued a code of laws around 694, the first by an Anglo-Saxon king outside Kent, and in 726 he left for Rome. A glassworks stood here in the seventh century, and five furnaces dated to about 700 are the earliest substantial evidence of glass-working in Saxon England.

Dunstan was born near Glastonbury around 909, studied with the Irish monks of a diminished community, and returned in 943 to a hermit's cell against the old church of St Mary. As abbot he enlarged the church, built the cloisters, and instituted the Benedictine Rule, and one account places a Benedictine refoundation in 940. He became archbishop of Canterbury in 960 and died on 19 May 988.

King Edmund was buried here in 946, Edgar in the years 967 to 975, and Edmund Ironside in 1016. A charter of King Cnut was written in the wooden church in 1032, with the king present. Around the middle of the tenth century the monks cut a canal to the River Brue to carry stone, and later grain, wine, and fish.

The abbey became a great drainer of the Somerset Levels. In 1234, 722 acres were reclaimed near Westonzoyland, and by 1240 the figure was 972 acres. At Meare the abbot's fish house served a fishery that could land 5,000 eels in a year, and the house is the only surviving monastic fishery building in England.

In 1086 the abbey was the richest monastery in England. The Norman abbot Thurstin met resistance that ended with monks killed by Norman soldiers, and his successor Herlewin built a larger church. Henry of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror and brother of King Stephen, was abbot from 1126 and bishop of Winchester from 1129, and as papal legate from 1139 he was the most powerful churchman in England during the Anarchy.

He commissioned William of Malmesbury to write a history of the house in a contest of prestige with Westminster. The text that survives accepts forged charters, and the voyage of Joseph of Arimathea was added in the margin only in 1247. The abbot's lodging southwest of the cloister was on a palatial scale.

The fire of 1184 destroyed the Old Church. Rebuilding began with the support of Henry II, and the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1186 on the old site, which is why it stands at the west rather than the east. The great church was consecrated on Christmas Day 1213, probably before it was finished, and the nave was completed later in the thirteenth century.

Pilgrim income had fallen. In 1191, while Henry de Sully was abbot, the monks announced the bodies of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, found between two pyramids in a hollowed oak at a depth of 16 feet, with a lead cross naming Arthur on the isle of Avalon. Gerald of Wales tied the search to a story Henry II had heard from an aged British bard, while Ralph of Coggeshall said the bones turned up by chance during a burial. Historians treat the announcement as a way to raise money for the burned church and to answer the hope, strong in Wales, that Arthur would return.

Edward I and Queen Eleanor attended a reburial at the foot of the high altar in 1278. King Arthur, as the monks used him, was the legendary king of a twelfth-century history, not a ruler most historians of the fifth and sixth centuries accept as a real person. The monks asserted that Glastonbury was Avalon.

Joseph of Arimathea is the Gospel figure who buried Jesus. The claim that he founded the abbey in the first century became popular by the fourteenth century, and Abbot Richard Beere, from 1493 to 1524, put that cult at the centre of the house, with a crypt chapel and a remodelling of the Lady Chapel. The flowering thorn, and the staff said to have taken root on Wearyall Hill, enter the written story in a life of Joseph printed in 1520.

In 1197 Bishop Savaric tried to make the abbey the seat of his bishopric, trading Bath to the king. The monks resisted, King Richard backed them, and King John let Savaric in. The bishops used the title of Bath and Glastonbury until they gave up the claim in 1219.

In the fourteenth century only Westminster was richer. A wall was built around the precincts during the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VII was given a special apartment in the abbot's house. The library, still remarkable when it was dispersed in 1539, had been damaged in the fire of 1184, and about forty manuscripts are known to survive.

Henry VIII of England took the wealth of the monasteries after he made himself supreme head of the church. More than 850 religious houses stood in 1536, and by 1541 none remained. Glastonbury, reviewed for its plate and its lands, was not one of the lesser houses suppressed in 1535.

Richard Whiting, the last abbot, had signed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 and was told the house was safe. By January 1539 it was the only monastery left in Somerset, and he refused to surrender it. Commissioners arrived without warning on 19 September, found money and plate hidden in vaults, and sent him to the Tower. On 15 November 1539 he and the monks John Thorne and Roger James were dragged to Glastonbury Tor and hanged, drawn, and quartered.

The charge is uncertain. It is usually called treason, one account says he was convicted of robbing the church, and a book of arguments for Queen Katherine was reported among the treasures. His head was set over the abbey gate.

The church was then stripped of lead and dressed stone, some of it reused in the town and on the causeway to Wells. A colony of weavers was settled under Edward Seymour and later removed. Private owners quarried the ruins until the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, and Abbey House was built from the abbey's stones between 1829 and 1830.

Frederick Bligh Bond, appointed after the Church took the site, found buried chapels and was dismissed in 1921 because he said a psychic medium had guided the work. Later digging mapped the monastery and also claimed a British cemetery, Arthur's grave, and the first Saxon cloister in England. A reassessment of those records set the three claims aside and confirmed the scale of the abbot's lodging and a deliberate archaism in the architecture.

In March 2014 a drainage trench south of the Lady Chapel, through the ancient cemetery Dunstan had enclosed, found the ground already disturbed to at least 0.8 metres by earlier digging. The spoil included furnace waste, floor and roof tile, pottery, and worked stone. What the trenches now support is a high-status settlement around the year 500, Saxon glasswork around 700, and a medieval church whose oldest stories were arguments about pilgrimage, royal power, and where Christian Britain began.

## Photographs

- [Abtei Glastonbury in England — Gerd Eichmann](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Glastonbury_Abbey-02-2004-gje.jpg)
- [Abadia de Glastonbury — Josep Renalias](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Abadia_de_Glastonbury.JPG)
- [Abbey at Glastonbury. A view of the abbey from the opposite side to the other submission and taken in the summer. The tomb in the foreground is reputedly that — Pam Brophy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Abbey_at_Glastonbury_-_geograph.org.uk_-_28946.jpg)
- [Glastonbury Abbey with tower of St. John the Baptist's church — Tony Grist](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Abbey_grounds_with_tower_of_St._John%27s_church.jpg)
- [Glastonbury Abbey grounds, with tower of St. John's church in background — Tony Grist](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Abbet_grounds%2C_tower_of_St._John%27s_church_in_background.jpg)
- [View of Arches at Glastonbury, albumen print, by the British photographer Francis Frith. 16.7 cm x 21.1 cm (6 9/16 in. x 8 5/16 in.) Courtesy of the Yale — Francis Frith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Arches_Glastonbury_by_Francis_Frith.jpeg)
- [Abbey Glastonbury England — Snapshots Of The Past](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Abbey_Glastonbury_England.jpg)
- [Abbey St. Josephs Chapel Glastonbury England — Snapshots Of The Past](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Abbey_St._Josephs_Chapel_Glastonbury_England.jpg)
- [After the crucifixion of Jesus lore has it that Joseph of Arimathea (who according to the Bible donated his own tomb for Christ's interment after the — Lies Thru a Lens ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Alleged_Burial_Site_of_King_Arthur_%286337078108%29.jpg)
- [Ruines of the crossing and nave — Nessy-Pic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Abbey_Ruins_in_Glastonbury.JPG)

## Sources

- [Glastonbury Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Dunstan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunstan) — Wikipedia
- [Henry VIII of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Henry de Sully (died 1195)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_de_Sully_(died_1195)) — Wikipedia
- [Henry of Blois](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_of_Blois) — Wikipedia
- [Ine of Wessex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ine_of_Wessex) — Wikipedia
- [Joseph of Arimathea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Arimathea) — Wikipedia
- [King Arthur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur) — Wikipedia
- [Richard Whiting (Abbot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Whiting_(Abbot)) — Wikipedia
- [History](https://www.glastonburyabbey.com/history.php) — Glastonbury Abbey
- [Plan Your Visit](https://www.glastonburyabbey.com/plan-your-visit.php) — Glastonbury Abbey
- [Abbey Admission](https://www.glastonburyabbey.com/buy-admission.php) — Glastonbury Abbey
- [Research](https://ourresearch.reading.ac.uk/glastonburyabbeyarchaeology/research/) — University of Reading
- [Glastonbury: archaeology is revealing new truths about the origins of British Christianity](https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revealing-new-truths-about-the-origins-of-british-christianity-93805) — The Conversation
- [Glastonbury Abbey list entry](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1345447) — Historic England
- [Glastonbury Abbey monument record](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/0d636742-8028-4a8c-8b7c-e1f9aaf2d338/7ddd4ceb-d935-4458-9988-c7a1ac2778ab) — Historic England
- [Archaeological monitoring and recording at Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset](https://doi.org/10.5284/1135525) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Brief for a consultant archaeologist](https://www.glastonburyabbey.com/documents/brief-for-glastonbury-abbey-consultant-archaeologist-glab1151.pdf) — Glastonbury Abbey
- [Glastonbury Abbey-02-2004-gje.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glastonbury_Abbey-02-2004-gje.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abadia de Glastonbury.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abadia_de_Glastonbury.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbey at Glastonbury - geograph.org.uk - 28946.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbey_at_Glastonbury_-_geograph.org.uk_-_28946.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbey grounds with tower of St. John's church.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbey_grounds_with_tower_of_St._John%27s_church.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbet grounds, tower of St. John's church in background.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbet_grounds,_tower_of_St._John%27s_church_in_background.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arches Glastonbury by Francis Frith.jpeg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arches_Glastonbury_by_Francis_Frith.jpeg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbey Glastonbury England.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbey_Glastonbury_England.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbey St. Josephs Chapel Glastonbury England.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbey_St._Josephs_Chapel_Glastonbury_England.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alleged Burial Site of King Arthur (6337078108).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alleged_Burial_Site_of_King_Arthur_(6337078108).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbey Ruins in Glastonbury.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbey_Ruins_in_Glastonbury.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Glastonbury Abbey was a Benedictine monastery in Glastonbury, Somerset. The church is a ruin in 36 acres of parkland, entered by a gatehouse of the middle of the fourteenth century that was restored in 1810. What still stands of the church belongs to the rebuilding after a fire in 1184. The most complete survival is the Lady Chapel, St Mary's Chapel, set on a crypt at the west end, where the old wooden church had stood. Tall fragments of the eastern crossing piers, with adjoining pieces of the transept, mark the late twelfth-century work. Parts of the outer walls of the chancel aisles remain, with a fourteenth-century retrochoir, three bays of the south nave aisle, the lower west front, and the Galilee and its crypt. The great church was 220 feet long and 45 feet wide. The choir was 155 feet long and the transept 160 feet long. A chapel tied to Joseph was 110 feet by 24 feet. In 1478 the Lady Chapel was described as 34 yards long and 8 yards wide. The one substantial monastic building left is the Abbot's Kitchen, begun with the abbot's house under John de Breynton between 1334 and 1342. It is octagonal, with a curved buttress on each face, a cornice of grotesque gargoyles, four great arched fireplaces, and another smoke hole at the centre of a pyramidal roof. The hall it served rose about 80 feet, and one small piece of that wall is left. The kitchen has been called one of the best preserved medieval kitchens in Europe, and for a time it was used as a Quaker meeting house. A fourteenth-century barn outside the walls later became part of a rural-life museum. The ruins were bought for the Church in 1907 and 1908, opened to the public in 1908, and are now kept by a charity. Pilgrimage resumed in a small way in 1924. Anglicans gather in the second half of June, Catholics early in July, and services are also held in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Visits have been counted at more than 100,000 in a year.

People were on this ground long before that monastery. A reassessment of the twentieth-century excavation archive found prehistoric, Roman, and sub-Roman occupation, earlier than the first documented Saxon house. Near the later Lady Chapel, inside the bounds of the early monastic cemetery, were the traces of a timber hall. A roughly trodden floor held fragments of late Roman amphorae imported from the eastern Mediterranean, dated about 450 to 550. The building is placed around the year 500. A radiocarbon date puts its demolition in the eighth or ninth century, so it may have remained in use for as long as three centuries, from a pre-Saxon phase into the time of the Saxon monastery. The Saxon community may have kept the timber building on purpose, as something already old and charged with meaning. That evidence does not prove an early church, and it does not support a link with Joseph of Arimathea. It does show a high-status settlement with elite trade to the eastern Mediterranean, two centuries or so before the Anglo-Saxon monastery of around 700. In 1955, digging at the west end of the cloister uncovered Romano-British pottery. The suggestion of a religious site here in Celtic or pre-Celtic times has been called dubious. On the Tor to the east, a Christian settlement, perhaps one of the earliest monastic sites in Britain, has been claimed. The flat ground below the Tor is a different question, and the archive does not turn legend into a first-century church.

The Saxon story begins with conquest and a change of abbots. Glastonbury fell into Saxon hands after the Battle of Peonnum in 658. Cenwalh of Wessex took Somerset as far west as the River Parrett, perhaps in order to control the abbey. He left the British abbot, Bregored, in place, which may have been a gesture toward the defeated Britons. Bregored died in 669 and was followed by an Anglo-Saxon, Berhtwald, though British monks stayed for many years. The earliest historical evidence of the monastery is in charters of the late seventh century, grants of land by three Saxon kings, matching the earliest archaeological evidence of a church here. One account places that first Saxon church between 670 and 690. Another names Ine of Wessex as the founder who enriched the community and is reputed to have ordered a stone church in 712, with foundations that form the west end of the nave. Ine was king of Wessex from 689 to 726. He was the son of Cenred, of the royal blood of the Gewisse, the early West Saxon people, and he was married to Æthelburg. His predecessor Cædwalla had pushed West Saxon power hard and then left for Rome to be baptised in 688. Ine's own dates leave room for an unsettled year before 689, and his father may still have been reigning beside him. Ine could not hold all of Cædwalla's gains. By the end of his reign Kent, Sussex, and Essex were no longer under Wessex, while Hampshire remained his and the western peninsula was consolidated and extended against the British kingdom of Dumnonia. Around 694 he issued a code of laws, the first by an Anglo-Saxon king outside Kent, and those laws show a Christian king at work. Trade grew in his reign, and Hamwic, now Southampton, became prominent. The West Saxons probably began to mint coins then, though none yet found bear his name. In 726 he abdicated and went to Rome, leaving the kingdom, as Bede put it, to younger men. Æthelheard succeeded him. A stone church of 712, if that dating holds, belongs to this long reign, not to a sudden foundation at the end of it. A glassworks is attested on the abbey site in the seventh century. Five glass furnaces, radiocarbon dated to about 700, are the earliest and most substantial evidence of glass-working in Saxon England. The two datings sit close together: a seventh-century industry, and a craft complex fixed at about 700.

William of Malmesbury, writing in the twelfth century as a guest of the monks, set down a grant of land said to have been made in 601 by King Gwrgan of Damnonia to the old church, in the time of Abbot Worgret. The same writer, in his history of the English kings, finished in 1125, said the abbey was built by preachers sent by Pope Eleuterus, and he quoted documents claiming that no hands but those of the disciples of Christ had erected the church of Glastonbury. He did not name Joseph of Arimathea there. He pointed instead to the apostle Philip, who was said to have preached in Gaul and might therefore have carried the word across the channel. His account of the antiquity of the church was compiled between 1129 and 1139, in a campaign to assert the abbey's primacy against Westminster. The surviving text accepts forged charters and unsubstantiated early legends, and even his list of abbots cannot be reconciled with tenth-century originals found later. Many scholars have judged that his first version was more careful, and that passages on the missionaries Phagan and Deruvian, and various passages about Arthur, were added afterwards to strengthen the monks' case. The stories that bring Joseph of Arimathea into that chronicle can be pinned to 1247, when a voyage of Joseph was written into the margin.

Danish raids troubled the region in the ninth century, and the abbey itself may have been attacked, though that is not certain. Saint Neot, later the founder of his own house in Somerset, was sacristan here. The great figure of the tenth-century revival was Dunstan. He was born around 909, or about 910, near Glastonbury, to Heorstan and Cynethryth, and he died on 19 May 988. He was abbot of this house, then bishop of Worcester, bishop of London, and archbishop of Canterbury, and he was later canonised. An early biographer, known only as B, places his emergence in the reign of Æthelstan, from 924 to 939. The word used has often been read as "born", which would make him too young to be ordained in that reign, so it is better read as the moment he came to notice. He was related to Ælfheah the Bald, bishop of Winchester. As a boy he studied under the Irish monks who then held a diminished community at the abbey. He became a favourite of the king and was envied. A plot accused him of witchcraft and black magic. The king ordered him out. As he left the palace his enemies beat him, bound him, and threw him into a cesspool. He crawled free, reached a friend, and went to Winchester to serve Ælfheah. The bishop urged him to become a monk. Dunstan doubted a celibate vocation until a severe swelling, thought at the time to be leprosy and more likely blood poisoning from the beating and the cesspool, changed his mind. He took holy orders in 943 in Ælfheah's presence and returned to live as a hermit at Glastonbury. Against the old church of St Mary he built a cell five feet long and two and a half feet deep. There he studied, made art, and played the harp. A legend of the late eleventh century says the Devil tempted him and was gripped by the face with Dunstan's tongs. He worked as a silversmith and in the scriptorium. He is thought likely to have drawn the image of Christ with a small kneeling monk in the Glastonbury Classbook, an early example of the outline drawing that became a mark of Anglo-Saxon art. He was famous as a musician, an illuminator, and a metalworker. Lady Æthelflæd, niece of King Æthelstan, made him a trusted adviser and left him a considerable fortune, which he later used to foster a monastic revival.

As abbot, Dunstan enlarged the church, built the cloisters, and instituted the Benedictine Rule. He is the central figure of the tenth-century restoration of English monastic life. One account places the extension of the church in 940 to 963, and another says the house was refounded as a Benedictine abbey by him in 940. He became archbishop of Canterbury in 960. He was an important minister to several English kings, and for nearly two centuries he was the most popular saint in England, surrounded by stories of cunning against the Devil. King Edmund was interred here in 946. Kings Edmund and Edgar were both buried at the abbey, Edgar's burial falling in the years 967 to 975. In 1016 King Edmund Ironside was buried here as well. Other burials associated with the house include Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia, Indract of Glastonbury and his sister Drusa, Ealdgyth the wife of Edmund Ironside, Humphrey Stafford, earl of Devon, the later abbot Richard Beere, Eosterwine, and Hwaetberht. William of Malmesbury also suggested that relics of Oswald, king of Northumbria, of Queen Balthild, and of Aelfflaed, second wife of Edward the Elder, had been deposited here. In the Middle Ages, bone fragments of Caesarius of Terracina were brought to the abbey. King Cnut's charter of 1032 was written and promulgated in the wooden church, in the king's presence. The old church was still standing in the twelfth century, and it was described then as the oldest church known in England. It perished in the fire of 1184. Any archaeological trace of a still earlier church on that spot would have been destroyed when a crypt was later built under the Lady Chapel.

Around the middle of the tenth century the monks cut a canal about 1.75 kilometres to the River Brue. It is thought to have carried stone for the building works, and later grain, wine, and fish from outlying estates. Much of the stone came from the abbey's quarries at Doulting, reached by the River Sheppey at Pilton. From the eleventh century the abbey sat at the centre of a wider water network. New channels were cut, the Brue was diverted to serve the estate at Meare and to ease the way toward the Bristol Channel, and in the thirteenth century the head boatman carried the abbot in an eight-oared boat on visits to nearby manors. Early drainage of the Somerset Levels in the later twelfth century put the keeping of the watercourses between Glastonbury and the sea onto named men, among them Ralph de Sancta Barbara of Brentmarsh. In 1129 the abbot was recorded inspecting enclosed land at Lympsham, and efforts to control flooding on the Parrett are noted around then. In 1234, 722 acres were reclaimed near Westonzoyland, and by 1240 the rent books show 972 acres. In the fourteenth century a fish house was built at Meare for the abbot's chief fisherman, and it was also used for salting and preparing fish. It is the only surviving monastic fishery building in England. The abbey needed fish on Fridays, on fast days, and in Lent. As many as 5,000 eels were landed in a typical year. At the dissolution, Meare Pool was said to hold a great abundance of pike, tench, roach, and eels. In 1638 William Freake owned it and called it lately a fish pool. The fishery brought bitter disputes with the Dean and Chapter of Wells. Inside the precinct, early fourteenth-century documents mention an orchard, a vineyard, a herb garden, vegetable plots, and pasture. Fish were also kept in purpose-built ponds, and a conduit system served the abbey. A probable mill site was later overlain by the nineteenth-century Chaingate flour mill. A tithe barn stands just outside the walled precinct at the south-eastern corner. The standing wall on the north and east is a fifteenth-century repair that keeps thirteenth-century masonry. The southern precinct wall was demolished in the nineteenth century and rebuilt on a slightly different line.

At the Norman Conquest the wealth of Glastonbury made it a prize. William the Conqueror made Turstinus, also called Thurstin, a Norman abbot in the 1080s. His reforms were not welcomed. Tension ended in a bloody fight in which Norman soldiers killed several monks. He added to the church, building unusually to the east of the older Saxon church and away from the ancient cemetery, and so he shifted the sanctified focus. The next abbot, Herlewin, changed that scheme and built a larger church. When the Domesday survey was commissioned in 1086, this was the richest monastery in the country. Henry of Blois was abbot from 1126 until his death on 8 August 1171, and bishop of Winchester from 1129, allowed to keep the abbey he loved. He was born about 1096, or possibly about 1100, a son of Count Stephen-Henry of Blois and of Adela of Normandy, and so a grandson of William the Conqueror and a younger brother of King Stephen. His father died in 1102 at the Battle of Ramla. Henry was educated at Cluny and held to Cluniac reform, with its discipline and its taste for learning. His uncle King Henry I brought him to England for this abbey. He wanted to be archbishop of Canterbury but would not give up Glastonbury. He resented subjection to Canterbury and tried to have a third archdiocese created in the west, with himself at its head. The scheme failed. After Henry I died in 1135, Stephen took the throne. On 1 March 1139 Henry of Blois obtained a commission as papal legate, which set him above Theobald of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury, and made him the most powerful figure in the English church during the Anarchy. When his brother was unavailable, he was the most powerful and wealthiest man in England. The brothers did not always agree. After the Battle of Lincoln in 1141 he found it useful to back their cousin, the Empress Matilda, then turned from her as arrogant and greedy, and rejoined Stephen. With Queen Matilda and an army under William of Ypres, his defence of Winchester against the empress was the turning point of the civil war. He stayed in touch with Peter the Venerable at Cluny, and he knew the continental quarrels of his day, including the case of Peter Abelard. He was a great builder, of villages, canals, abbeys, and churches, and he was proudest of what he did at Glastonbury, long before the fire of 1184. About the time he became abbot he commissioned William of Malmesbury to write the history of the house. The Norman and later medieval ranges are confirmed in the excavation record, and the abbot's lodging to the southwest of the cloister was on a palatial scale.

Disaster came in 1184. A great fire destroyed most of the abbey, including the Old Church, the wooden vetusta ecclesia. Rebuilding began at once, with the support of King Henry II, and it began with the Lady Chapel, which kept the position of the Old Church and was consecrated in 1186. The chapel was dedicated to Mary and was the most sacred part of the medieval abbey. Its place at the west, rather than the east, is owed to that older church. There is evidence that the ruined nave was patched enough for services while the new great church rose. Parts of the aisle and crossing walls were done by 1189, and then the work slowed. Help from Henry II ceased when he died. The great church was consecrated on Christmas Day 1213, most likely before it was entirely finished, and the nave was completed in the later thirteenth century. By the end of that century the church stood complete. The architecture often looked backward on purpose. Retrospective details were a strategy, meant to make the antiquity of Glastonbury, and its claim to the first place in monastic history, visible in the stone. The cult stayed focused to the west, on the Lady Chapel and the memory of the church the fire had taken.

Pilgrim visits had fallen after the fire. In 1191 the monks announced that they had found the bodies of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in the cemetery. The abbot was Henry de Sully (died 1195). He is also called Henry de Soilli. He had been prior of Bermondsey Abbey from 1186. In September 1189, after Henry II's death, Richard I appointed him abbot of Glastonbury. He was elected bishop of Worcester on 4 December 1193, consecrated on 12 December, and he died on 23 or 24 October 1195. While he was abbot, the house claimed the grave. Gerald of Wales, not an eyewitness, wrote the story around 1193 and returned to it around 1216. In his telling, Henry de Sully ordered a search. At a depth of 16 feet the diggers found a massive hollowed oak trunk with two skeletons. Above it, under a covering stone, was a lead cross inscribed to the effect that here lay the famous King Arthur on the isle of Avalon. Gerald said the digging followed news that Henry II had from an aged British bard. Ralph of Coggeshall, writing somewhat later, said the older tomb was found by chance while earth was moved to bury a monk who had asked to lie there. Both writers place the spot between two pyramids. William of Malmesbury does not mention Arthur's tomb. He does describe pyramids of varying height, with statues and inscriptions naming Her Sexi, Bliserh, Pencrest, Bantomp, Pinepegn, and others. In his history of the English kings he had written that Arthur's grave is nowhere seen, and that old fables therefore still claim Arthur will return. His work on the antiquity of the church, even with its forged privileges, nowhere joins the abbey to Arthur's grave or to Avalon. Historians now generally dismiss the 1191 discovery as a publicity device to raise money for a church mostly burned in 1184, at a moment when royal funding had stopped. The search is also tied to Henry II and to Edward I, both of them kings who fought major wars in Wales, and propaganda may have been part of the point. Gerald, a steady supporter of royal authority, used the grave to kill the idea that Arthur might come again. He wrote that the British peoples, meaning the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Bretons, kept Arthur alive in their stories, and that once the body was known the fairy-tales were snuffed out. In 1278 King Edward I and Queen Eleanor attended a magnificent reburial of the remains at the foot of the high altar. One account spreads the completion of the nave and that royal visit across 1274 to 1291. The excavation archive challenges the claim that Arthur's grave was an archaeological discovery at all.

King Arthur, in the form the monks needed, was already a literary king by the twelfth century, and a legend rather than a documented ruler. In Welsh sources he is a leader of the post-Roman Britons in battles against the Anglo-Saxons in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He first appears in the Annales Cambriae and the Historia Brittonum, written about three centuries after he is supposed to have lived, and most historians of that period do not treat him as a historical person. His name is also in early Welsh poetry, where it may be a later insertion. Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the kings of Britain, a fanciful twelfth-century book, made him a king who defeated the Saxons and held a wide dominion. That book supplied Uther Pendragon, Merlin, Guinevere, Excalibur, the conception at Tintagel, the last battle against Mordred at Camlann, and the rest in Avalon. From at least the twelfth century the Glastonbury country was tied to this legend, and the monks asserted that Glastonbury was Avalon. Chrétien de Troyes added Lancelot and the Holy Grail and shifted romance toward the knights. The themes were never fixed in a single canon. What mattered at the abbey was narrower: a body, a cross, an island name, and a reason for pilgrims to come while the new church was unfinished. A fresh reading of the dig records has also set aside a pre-Christian British cemetery and an alleged Saxon cloister said to have been the first in England.

The other great claim, that the first founder was Joseph of Arimathea, grew more slowly. In the Gospels he is the man who asked Pilate for the body of Jesus and buried him. Matthew calls him a rich disciple and says the tomb was his own. Mark calls him a respected member of the council, looking for the kingdom of God. Luke says he had not consented to the council's decision. John says he was a secret disciple, and that he and Nicodemus bound the body with myrrh and aloes. The burial was hurried because the Sabbath was near. The place called Arimathea has not been fixed. From the second century, apocryphal accounts added a great deal, including an imprisonment and a miraculous release, and those extras are not given credit against the Gospel narratives. Later retellings made him the first Christian bishop in the isles, which is a fable. In the late twelfth century Robert de Boron made him the first keeper of the Holy Grail. In that romance Joseph receives the vessel from an apparition of Jesus, and his followers, not Joseph himself, carry it to the vale of Avaron, identified with Avalon. In other romances he does travel to Britain with relics. In the Lancelot-Grail cycle it is his son Josephus who is the primary holy man of Britain. Around 1350 John of Glastonbury wrote that Joseph brought vessels holding the blood and sweat of Christ, without using the word Grail, and he gave Arthur an imaginary pedigree back to Joseph through Arthur's mother. Medieval interest settled on two ideas: Joseph as founder of a British Christianity older than the faith of Rome, and Joseph as guardian of the Grail. Early Christian writers had said the Gospel reached Britain, but they did not name him. Tertullian, before 222, said the Britons had been subdued to Christ. Eusebius wrote that some disciples had crossed the ocean to the isles of Britain. Hilary of Poitiers said the Gospel had passed into Britain. None of them mentions Joseph of Arimathea. The monks added him in 1247. By the fourteenth century it was popular belief that he had founded the abbey in the first or second century. The abbey's own later telling puts a legendary foundation of the Old Church and a first community at about the year 63. By the early sixteenth century the mythic claim was at its height. Abbot Richard Beere, from 1493 to 1524, put Joseph at the heart of the traditions. He is probably responsible for a drastic remodelling of the Lady Chapel. He had a crypt chapel for Joseph built, and the Edgar Chapel, the Loretto Chapel, and St Patrick's almshouses were added in those years. Miraculous cures in 1502 were attributed to Joseph. In 1520 Richard Pynson printed a life of Joseph in which the Glastonbury Thorn is named for the first time. A common hawthorn at Glastonbury, unusual because it flowered twice a year, once in spring on old wood and once in winter on new growth, was propagated by grafts under the names Biflora and Praecox. The legend says that Joseph and his companions, weary on Wearyall Hill, stuck his staff in the ground and that it took root and blossomed. That staff miracle is a type known elsewhere in saints' lives. James Montague, bishop of Bath and Wells in the reign of James I, began the custom of sending a budded branch to the sovereign at Christmas, and he sent one to Queen Anne. Grafts still grow, including thorns in the grounds of St John's Church in the town, and the blossom sent to the sovereign has come from one of those. A critical look at the legends in 1989 found little reason to think that an oral tradition of a visit by Jesus to Britain existed before the early twentieth century. A Cornish tale, that Joseph the tin merchant brought the child Jesus and that the child taught the purging of tin, may have grown from the fact that Jews under the Angevin kings farmed the tin of Cornwall. After the break with Rome, Joseph's supposed early mission was useful to Protestants, because it was said to predate the Roman mission of 597. In 1546 John Bale argued that this made the original British church purer than Rome's. Elizabeth I cited Joseph's missionary work when she told Catholic bishops that the church in England was older than the Roman church in England. The politics of the legend outlived the monastery.

Between the fire and that late flowering of Joseph's cult, the abbey was fought over by a bishop. In 1197 Savaric FitzGeldewin, bishop of Bath and Wells, traded the city of Bath to the king in return for the monastery. He won the support of Pope Celestine III for taking the abbey as the seat of his bishopric in place of Bath, so that he would be bishop of Bath and abbot of Glastonbury. He gathered letters, including from Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, claiming that the plan would end long disputes between abbey and bishops. The monks appealed to Rome and were dismissed in 1196. King Richard, free from prison in Germany, sided with them and let them elect William Pica. Savaric excommunicated the new abbot. When John succeeded Richard in 1199, Savaric forced his way in and set up his see inside the abbey. The monks appealed to the new pope, Innocent III. At first Innocent backed the monks and lifted Pica's excommunication. Pica and some of his supporters died in Rome in 1200 while appealing in person, and some monks alleged poison on Savaric's orders. Innocent then changed his mind, restored Savaric as abbot, and ordered English clergy to divide the revenues between the bishop and the monks. Savaric tried to extend his hold over other monasteries in the diocese and died before he could. Bishops kept the title of Bath and Glastonbury until they renounced the claim in 1219. What was at stake was not a point of ceremony. The richest house in England carried estates, courts, and a pilgrimage, and a bishop who could sit there as abbot would have moved the balance of the west-country church.

In the fourteenth century only Westminster was more richly endowed. The abbot kept a great estate, of which the kitchen with its four fireplaces is the witness. Excavation has shown a special apartment at the south end of the abbot's house for a visit of Henry VII, who came as he would to any great territorial lord. During the Wars of the Roses life in England was so unsettled that a wall was built around the precincts. The cloister was remodelled between 1374 and 1420. In 1348 the pestilence killed about a third of the people of England. The George Hotel and Pilgrims' Inn was built in the late fifteenth century for visitors. The abbey held lands across large parts of Somerset and into neighbouring counties, and tithe barns at Doulting, Mells, and Pilton stored the crops due from those estates. The library, which John Leland, antiquary to Henry VIII of England, described as holding unique histories of England and unique early Christian documents, had been hurt by the fire of 1184 and was still remarkable in 1539. It was then dispersed. About forty of its manuscripts are known to have survived. Some early documents had already been lost in the fire. A charter of Robert of Winchester, abbot from 1171 to 1178, survives with a seal that gives a schematic picture of the abbey in the late twelfth century.

Henry VIII of England was born on 28 June 1491 and died on 28 January 1547. He came to the throne on 22 April 1509, a younger son made heir when his brother Arthur, prince of Wales, died in 1502. A papal dispensation let him marry Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon. He later wanted that marriage annulled so he could remarry in search of a male heir. Pope Clement VII refused. In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage void in the eyes of the new church order. Clement excommunicated Henry. The Acts of Supremacy made Henry supreme head of the Church of England and cut his realms free of obedience to the pope. He dissolved the monasteries and took their wealth. That seizure is the immediate cause of the abbey's end. At the start of the dissolution in 1536 there were more than 850 monasteries, nunneries, and friaries in England. By 1541 there were none. More than 15,000 monks and nuns had been dispersed, and the buildings had been seized by the Crown to be sold or leased. Glastonbury was reviewed for its silver and gold and for its lands. The act of 1535 suppressed the lesser houses and was a warning. This abbey did not fall under that act.

Richard Whiting (Abbot) was the last abbot. He was born near Wrington in 1461 and educated at the abbey and at Cambridge, where he took an MA in 1483. He was ordained deacon in 1500 and priest in 1501, returned to Cambridge in 1505 for a doctor's degree, and served as camerarius, in charge of the dormitory, the lavatory, and the wardrobe. When Abbot Richard Beere died in February 1525, the community handed the election to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who obtained the king's permission and chose Whiting. The first ten years were prosperous and peaceful. He was regarded as a sober and careful head of the house. About a hundred monks lived in the enclosure, and sons of the nobility and gentry were taught here before university. As abbot he was a peer and the administrator of vast estates. In 1534 he and his monks signed the Act of Supremacy. Henry sent Richard Layton to examine them. Layton found the place in good order, suspended the abbot's jurisdiction over the town, and issued small injunctions about the management of the property. More than once in the years that followed, Whiting was told the abbey was safe. By January 1539 it was the only monastery left in Somerset. He refused to surrender it. On 19 September 1539 Layton, Richard Pollard, and Thomas Moyle arrived without warning, on the orders of Thomas Cromwell, to find faults and ease a closure. They expected considerable treasure, found comparatively little, searched further, and discovered money and plate walled up in vaults. There was a rumour that other goods had been moved to the abbey's estates. Whiting, feeble and old, was sent to the Tower of London to be examined by Cromwell. The precise charge is uncertain, though the case is usually called treason. One account says he was convicted of robbing Glastonbury church. The abbey's later history calls the treason charge a fabrication. The lead summary of his life ties the execution to loyalty to Rome. The French ambassador Marillac wrote on 25 October that the abbot had been put in the Tower because, among treasures valued at 200,000 crowns, a written book of arguments on behalf of Queen Katherine had been found. Cromwell's own notes order men to the Tower for further examination of the abbot, order the abbot to be tried at Glastonbury and executed there with his accomplices, and name the councillors who were to give evidence. As a member of the House of Lords, Whiting should have been condemned by act of Parliament. The execution was over before Parliament met. He was sent back with Pollard, reached Wells on 14 November, and was tried. On Saturday 15 November he and two monks, the treasurer John Thorne and the sacristan Roger James, were fastened on hurdles and dragged by horses to the top of Glastonbury Tor. There they were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Whiting's head was fastened over the west gate of the deserted abbey, and his limbs were exposed at Wells, Bath, Ilchester, and Bridgwater. The Catholic Church beatified him, with Thorne and James, on 13 May 1895, and his feast is kept on 15 November. In 2023 a pastoral area of the Roman Catholic diocese of Clifton was named for him. The official charge remains cloudy. What is not cloudy is the sequence: a rich house that would not surrender, a search for hidden plate, a trial arranged in Cromwell's notes, and a public death on the Tor overlooking the town.

After the dissolution the abbey was stripped of its valuables. Two manors in Wiltshire were sold to John Thynne and descended in his family, later marquesses of Bath, who have kept many of the abbey's Wiltshire records. Lead and dressed stone were hauled away for other buildings, including buildings in the town and the stone causeway to Wells. Waste from that destruction, broken stone, glass, and mortar, lies more than a metre deep near the core of the church. Edward VI granted the site to Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, who settled a colony of Protestant Dutch or Flemish weavers there. The grant is placed in the years 1547 to 1553. When Seymour was attainted in 1551 the site returned to the Crown, but the weavers stayed until they were removed under Queen Mary. In 1559 Elizabeth I granted the site to Peter Carew, and it remained in private hands into the twentieth century. Further stone was taken in the seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century the abbey was described as a ruin. Antiquaries drew it, among them William Stukeley, whose sketches, though they lean on earlier sources as well as on his eye, are among the most famous images of the ruins. Early in the nineteenth century gunpowder was used to dislodge more stone, and the site became a quarry. John Fry Reeves acquired it, in one account in 1825, and between 1829 and 1830 John Buckler built Abbey House from the abbey's own stones, with a view over the ruins. The house was altered between 1850 and 1860 and again in 1957. The Austin family lived there at the turn of the twentieth century. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882 stopped further damage and led to the first historical and archaeological surveys. When the house and grounds were auctioned in 1907 there was wide speculation about the buyer. Ernest Jardine purchased the abbey and passed it to the Church of England once funds were raised. The diocesan trust is also named as the buyer in 1908. On taking the site, the trust appointed Frederick Bligh Bond to direct the digging. He found the Edgar Chapel, the north porch, and St Dunstan's Chapel. In 1919 his book The Gates of Remembrance said that many of his interpretations had been made with a psychic medium. Dean Armitage Robinson dismissed him in 1921 for the use of seances and psychic archaeology. Later excavations, notably those of Ralegh Radford and Wedlake from 1951 to 1979, mapped a great deal of the monastery and also fixed several ideas that the archive project has since challenged. Abbey House was a diocesan retreat from 1931 until 2018, when its management returned to the abbey charity. It is now opened at times for special events and used for administration. The estate charity was formed in 1963, and the charity in its present form was registered in 2009.

The archive project set the myths of the excavators beside the records of the trenches. Besides the timber hall and the glass furnaces, it confirmed the Norman and later ranges and the exceptional abbot's lodging. It argued that the plan of the abbey was shaped by its origin legends, with the religious focus kept to the west. In March 2014 a single trench was dug by hand south of the Lady Chapel, which had been built in 1184 to 1186 on the site of the old timber church. The ground to the south was the ancient cemetery, enclosed by Dunstan in the late tenth century. The trench ran about 25 metres, from the junction with the Galilee, west and then north between St Dunstan's Chapel and the Lady Chapel, to improve drainage. The soil had been disturbed to a depth of at least 0.8 metres, probably by the early twentieth-century excavations. The trench exposed a large quantity of discarded finds: glass-furnace and iron-working fragments, medieval floor and roof tiles, medieval and post-medieval pottery, medieval architectural fragments, clay pipes, other ceramic objects, worked stone, and metalwork. A trench in March 2017, east of houses at Chaingate Court, went through nineteenth- and twentieth-century ground and showed a wall of twentieth-century date. The recent knowledge of the abbey is therefore not a new treasure from an undisturbed grave. It is a slower correction. The high-status settlement of about 500 is real. The Saxon glasswork of about 700 is real. The stone church associated with Ine of Wessex, the reform under Dunstan, the wealth under Henry of Blois, the fire, the Lady Chapel, and the execution of Richard Whiting (Abbot) are the documented spine. King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea are the stories the monks and their successors used when antiquity itself was the prize: against Westminster, against a bishop who wanted the abbot's chair, against Welsh hope of Arthur's return, and later against Rome. The ruins still stand in that double light. The kitchen, the chapel, and the broken piers are medieval buildings. The graves announced in 1191, and the founder placed in the first century, were arguments about power, pilgrimage, and the right to say where Christian Britain began.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/glastonbury-abbey