the History of Glastonbury

The town of Glastonbury stands on the side of a hilly table-land which rises abruptly out of the flat moor, and is dominated by the Tor, a cone-shaped hill which rises to a height of five hundred feet at the south-west corner of the Isle of Avallon. The orchards and water meadows which surround the town have been reclaimed from the fens and swamps which once encircled the Tor, and made it without need of artificial protection except at the east, where a solid ridge of ground connects it with the hill at Pennard, which is a spur of the Mendips.

Along this ridge was a road or trackway by which the island could be reached by friendly or hostile visitors, and as a means of protection against the latter there was constructed right across the isthmus from swamp to swamp the rampart of clay known as Ponter's Ball. It was three-quarters of a mile in length, and was strengthened as a defence by a ditch, which went to a depth of twelve feet below the old level of the ridge. No one who was familiar with the plan of the 'cliff-castles' on the coast of Pembrokeshire could fail to recognise that the plan of the Tor at the sea front, with Ponter's Ball as the defence from the inland, was exactly similar: and would infer that both were constructed by the same people, the Iberian 'metal-seekers' from the eastern Mediterranean, who planted their groups of 'circle, menhir, and dolmen' all the way up from Cornwall to the Orkneys on either side of what is now St George's Channel.

A glance at the Ordnance Map will show how the entrance of the Brue estuary has been silted up; though the low-lying flatland will be flooded with an exceptionally high tide, or with heavy autumn rains, oven at the present time. And then the Tor stands out, as in days long since past, to the seafarer a welcome and inviting beacon, to the landsman a defence to seaward. With its levelled top, now crowned with the tower which is all that is left of a medieval chapel of St Michael, it proclaims itself as having been occupied at a time when the country was still so wet from the last glaciation that it could only be traversed by tracks along the top of the hills, terraces for the cultivation of crops of corn being hewn out from the top downwards by heavy mattocks of flint. Mattocks of this kind have been found in great numbers in Kent, where the megalithic builders have left abundant evidence of similar terraces made from the tops of the hills downward to the impenetrable swamps of the valleys.

The secret of their attraction to the Tor and its hinterland is disclosed in the rich, red soil laid bare by the plough in the area below the terraces; for that colour shows that there is abundance of iron to be had for the trouble of mining, and the 'metal-seekers' were stimulated to activity by the variety of valuable ores in the district. Only a few miles north of the Tor, is the famous cave known as Wookey Hole, where the stalactites are deeply stained with red and blue and green from the iron, lead, and copper in the soil above. Further north, at Priddy, a dolmen tells us that the Iberians worked at the lead mines long before the Romans came to the Mendips, and appropriated all metals to be the personal property of the Emperor.

According to the local tradition, our Lord visited Priddy in 'the silent years' before He entered on His public ministry: and Parry's musical setting has popularised Blake's poem based on this tradition:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?

For the hills would at that period be continually clouded by the smoke from the furnaces, and the conditions of heat and darkness, under which the mining and de-silvering were done, might well justify the description 'Satanic mills'.

The Tor at Glastonbury is not the only evidence of the occupation of this district by the Iberian metal-seekers. They set up their circles of monoliths, presumably for purposes of worship, as at Staunton Drew, where there are still three in a group, one of them containing a 'cove', ie. three monoliths formed into a shelter by a huge flat stone placed over them as a kind of roof; and they built their dolmens, to be abodes for the living or dead, as circumstances might dictate, in a chain stretching north into Gloucestershire and eastward through Wiltshire to Berkshire. The most important of these is at Stony Littleton, about three-quarters of a mile south-west of Wellow Church. It is approached through a passage forty-seven feet six inches in length, and of varying breadth, out of which three recesses, or transepts, open on each side. and an arched roof is made by setting the stones as corbels, each layer projecting forward from that below it till the passage is roughly vaulted and the chamber domed. At Maes How, which has been considered the abode of the overseer or 'nomarch' of the Orkneys, there is only one transept opening out on each side of the central avenue; that there should be three at Stony Littleton suggests how much more important and dignified was the resident in this chambered tumulus; and we must bear in mind that the area in which it is found is even today one of the most important mining districts in Somerset.

These Iberians were short in stature, about five and a half feet in height, with brown skins and dark hair, and have bequeathed these characteristics to 'the small dark Welshman, the small dark Highlander, the small dark South of Ireland man, between whom and the small dark Basque-speaking man from the Pyrenees there is no ethnological difference'; [Professor Boyd Dawkins, Y Cymmrodor, v.22.] and their descendants, planted in the metal-bearing district of Glamorgan, known then as 'Silures', were at once recognised by Agricola's soldiers as a kindred Mediterranean face, as in their bodily frame, so also in their speech they were akin to the Basque; to them we owe apparently the names of rivers such as Severn, Wye, and Eure (the river on which York, Eboracum, stands) for which no Aryan ancestry has been found, nor is it altogether fanciful to suppose, with these Iberian names of rivers surviving in the neighbourhood, that they called the c1iff-castle Tor, and that the word Ictis itself was the name given by them to their island trade-centre, it survives in Irish as muir-nOict, which in the Annals of the Four Masters, under the dates of 405 and 1537 A.D., is translated 'the Ictian sea', and is obviously from the context a name for the Bristol Channel. The entry in 1537 AD expresses the horror caused by the suppression of Glastonbury and other abbeys.

III. Ictis and Avallon

We are told that the Silures crossed the stormy seas which were, perhaps, the predecessors of 'a Severn bore' , in boats or coracles made of osier and protected by an outer covering of hides; and the crossing must have been robbed of some of its perils by the breakwaters afforded in the island of Steep Holm and Flatholm which were then of much greater size. The Brue estuary was open water until a short distance west of the Tor, where a group of small islands lay in the way to the larger one, known today as Avallon. These islands have for centuries past been joined by the silt to the mainland; but their rediscovery has led to the speculation that Avallon was really that Isle of 'Ictis' or 'Mictis' which travellers in the second century before Christ wrote of as being the centre of the British metal trade. Pliny, for instance (iv. 30), quotes Timaeus as follows: 'Six days sail inland from Britain there is an island called Mictis, in which white lead [? tin] is found, and to this island the Britons come in boats of osier, covered with sewn hides'; 'Timaeus historicus a Britannia introrsus sex dierum navigatione abesse dictit insula Mictim, in qua candidum plumbum proveniat; ad earn Britannos vitilibus navigiis, corio circumsutis, navigare.' We know nothing of Timaeus except that he is thus quoted by Pliny, but his statement is confirmed and expanded by Posidonius, who travelled in Britain, presumably about the year 80 BC, and is thus quoted by Diodorus Siculus (v. 21-22-31): 'They who dwell near that promontory of Britain which is called Belerion, are exceedingly fond of strangers, and from their intercourse with foreign merchants are civilised in their habits. These people obtain tin by carefully working the soil which produces it; this being rocky, has earthy interstices, the produce of which is ground down, smelted, and purified. They form the metal into masses shaped like knuckle-bones, and carry it to a certain island lying off the coast of Britain called Ictis; for as the ground between is left dry at low tide, they carry the tin thither in great abundance in their waggons. [The knucklebone form of ingot was for convenience of carriage. One such ingot, of quite uncertain date, which weighs 158 pounds, was dredged up near the entrance to Falmouth Harbour, and is now in the Truro museum. It has no definite mark or inscription, but its shape is corroborative of the statement of Posidonius,] Now there is this singular circumstance connected with the neighbouring islands, which lie between Europe and Britain; for at the high tides the intervening around is flooded, and they seem like islands, but at the low tide, when the sea recedes and leaves much space dry, they seem peninsulas. At this island (Ictis) the merchants buy the tin from the natives of Britain and carry it across into Gaul, and finally, journeying by land through Gaul for about thirty days, they convey their burdens on horses to the outlet of the river Rhone... A great deal of tin is carried across from the Britannic Isle to the opposite coast of Gaul. And thence conveyed by merchants, on horses, through the midland Celtic country to the people of Marseilles, and to the city called Narbonne.'

Many writers have identified this island peninsula which was the seat of the British metal trade with St Michael's Mount in Cornwall, because of the mention of Belerion, the pre-Christian name of Cornwall, and because it does at the present time fulfil the condition of being an island at high tide and a peninsula at low tide; but they assume that the coastline is the same today as it was two thousand years ago, and that is an extremely precarious assumption.

The alluvial flat of Mount's Bay, under which the submerged forest lies, formerly extended much further seaward, and old writers mention the tradition that St Michael's Mount formerly rose as an isolated rock, in a wood. As far as can be calculated from its known rate of encroachment, the sea cannot have reached the Mount until long after the Roman period, and the legend is probably quite accurate. The Mount was surrounded by wide marshy flats, covered with alders and willows, till well within the historic period. The contradictory story that the Phoenicians traded to St Michael's Mount for tin seems to be the invention of a sixteenth-century antiquary,' [Reid, Submerged Forests, 100, 101.]

And where near St Michael's Mount are the islands spoken of by Posidonius, which were only islands at high tide? Where, too, are the cart-tracks by which the metal was brought to Ictis? Not, certainly, 'In the wide marshy flats, covered with alders and willows', but we have at Glastonbury a centre, or junction, for roads leading up from Cornwall and stretching north and west to Rollright and Arbor Low, to Kit's Coty House and Coldrum. [R. Hippisley Cox, The Green Roads of England.]

There are, too, the islands. For if we start back from the Saxon overlordship, we find this striking and interesting fact: Kenwalch on his conquest of Somerset confirms to the Abbey of Glastonbury the possession of certain islands lying to the west, in the Brue estuary, up which it was still possible to sail. The names of these islands are thus given in Kenwalch's charter: 'The Manor of Glastonbury, with its islands, viz. Beckery. which is called "little Ireland", Westhay, Godney, Martinseye, Andresey, Clewer, Northlode, Redlake, Pamborough, and Bledney': of which Beckery, Westhay, and

Martinseye are in Mere; Andresey in Stoke Gifford; Clewer, Northlode, and Pamborough in Wedmore; and Bledney in Wookey. [Somerset Archaeological Society, Feodary of Glastonbury Abbey, 51, and note 45.]

Each rises still as a more or less conspicuous mound from the level of the silted-up marshes; and together they suggest that the statement of Posidonius that there were islands near his Ictis, which were of the same peninsula character as Ictis itself at low tide, refers to the Tor and the islands, still traceable, west of it, in the seventh century. And when we consider the distance of the Tor from the extreme point of Cornwall, we recall Timaeus' s statement, that his 'Island of Mictis was six days sail inland from Britain', and we are led to the conclusion that the island trading centre mentioned by Timaeus and Posidonius was none other than that place we now call Glastonbury. Nor is it without significance that an area between the Tor and the Brue is marked in the map facing page 35 of the first volume of Bulleid and Reid's book on the Glastonbury lake village as being named 'Actis'.

IV. The Brue and the Loire

Can we produce evidence that there was ever a trading centre near the Tor? To answer this question we need only refer to the account of the Lake Village discovered in 1892 at Glastonbury. The account is given by the excavators, Messrs Bulleid and Gray. in their monumental and exhaustive volumes. They conclude that the pasture fields known locally as Meare Pool occupy part of the site of a body of water which in AD 1540 is reported to have been five miles in circumference, and must have been much larger two thousand years earlier. In its area was noticed in March 1892, near the middle of the moorland lying between Glastonbury and Godney, a triangular space. three and a half acres in extent, which contained between sixty and seventy low hemispherically shaped mounds. They varied from fifteen to forty feet in diameter, with an elevation at the centre of from six to twenty-five inches above the surrounding level of the meadow, and each represented the place of a human dwelling. Of the amount of labour involved in the building of the village, we can judge from the fact that every scrap of stone, clay, and gravel had to be imported in primitive dug-out canoes, such as that discovered at Crannel Farm, three-quarters of a mile north-east of this village, and now on exhibition in the Glastonbury Museum. One dwelling-mound alone produced a hundred and fifty tons of material, and this material has been identified as having been brought from places one, two, six, and even twelve miles distant. Though discovered first, the Glastonbury lake village was of later construction than the Meare village, the method of which is copied with much exactness, and both date from the beginning of the third century before Christ. But whereas a layer of flood-soil varying from six to eighteen inches in depth, extending all over the area of the mounded field at Glastonbury, suggests that the inhabitants of the village may have been flooded out of their home; the Meare village came to an end through hostile attack. About which more will be said later.

The results of the excavation show us a good deal of the daily life of a highly-civilised community on the Severn shore in the two centuries before the raids of Julius Caesar.

For instance, in one area, worked wooden timbers were found, which were suggestive of the remains of the framework of looms, seventeen combs, and over twenty spindle whorls, besides triangular 'loom-weights' of clay, and of at least three sizes, all which indicate that here was a flourishing weaving industry. But besides weaving and spinning, there was pottery making, and work in glass, bronze, and iron, as well as admirable coopering and carpentry. In one hut so many needles were found that it is thought to have been a needle factory; and perhaps each industry was pursued in its own hut or group of huts.

The inhabitants grew crops of wheat, barley, and peas, on the adjacent land, and they possessed dogs, pigs, and cattle, flock of sheep and herds of goats, and mobs of small horses which were used for food, but also for driving and possibly riding. Their personal ornaments consisted of rings, brooches and armlets, and beads of amber, glass, and jet, and in their lighter moments they gambled with dice that may have been derived from Italy, and amused themselves with cock-fighting, with birds probably obtained from Gaul.

For it seems clear that a trade connection had already been established between the Silures, with their osier, hide-bound boats, and the Veneti, an offshoot of the same tribe as had occupied the northern slope of the Adriatic. This offshoot had made their way through Gaul to the mouth of the Loire, and controlled the sea coast near Brest and Ushant, with an inland capital which is still called after them, Vannes. Their ships were built on the model of those of the Carthaginians, whose trade they had inherited, entirely of heavy oak; the beams, which were a foot thick, were fastened with iron nails, the thickness of a thumb; their sails were made of skins and hides, in order to stand the violence of the winds. [Caesar, de Bello Gallico, iii.] The Silures also had ships of a similar kind, and took part, as allies of the Veneti, in the famous battle off Quiberon, the first recorded sea engagement outside the Mediterranean, in which they met with a crushing defeat from the fleet of Julius Caesar. It was through this battle that Caesar was inspired further to subdue the people of Britain and acquire its great mineral wealth for Rome.

The chief trade from Britain to the Mediterranean countries, through Gaul, was in tin and other minerals, but furs and skins were also in request; and the great wolf dogs, which were trained to fight for the protection of their owners and their homes, had increasingly repute in Gaul and the countries beyond. We conclude, then, that it was to this 'Venice of the West' on the banks of the Loire that the astragali of tin were carried by sea, to be forwarded thence to Marseilles across Gaul.

V. Afallach and his Descendants

Who, however, were the invaders who destroyed the Meare village?

An old map, that of Speed, published in 1610, shows the Belgae, situated west of the Meare Pool, and north of the Brue; and it appears certain that it was this Celtic tribe which, crossing from the opposite coast of France to the Solent, made their way inland and westward, to the sea, in the neighbourhood of the Tor; they established themselves on the island peninsula, which, from the name of one of their first cheiftains, began to be called Avallach. The form of the Latin adjective from this name being Avalonensis, led to the variant Avallon; but even so, many years later, at the time of King Arthur, we are told that his famous sword 'Excalibur' was wrought at Afallach. [Peter Roberts, Annals of the Kings, 142.]

For at least six centuries the descendants of Afallach held rights of property in the Tor peninsula; and their story was traced by a former librarian of the Bodleian, E. W. B. Nicholson, in a paper entitled, The Dynasty of Cunedda. [Y Cymmrodor, xxi, 63-104.]

He interpreted a genealogy found at the end of the Harleian MS of the 'Annales Cambriae' to this effect: a Belgic chieftain settled in the apple country near the beginning of the Christian era, and had a son whole name indicated his inheritance of the chieftainship; this son married a princess of the Coritanians, and their son married a princess of the Dobuni; and in adherence to the Iberian and Silurian tradition of inheritance through the mother, their son became the chieftain of the Dobuni, taking the name of Dobun; and Dobun married one of the Ambivariti, a small tribe settled in the Severn sea. Through the imperial policy of exercising rule through the local chieftains, the family, as generation succeeded to generation, became more and more attached to Rome; and owing to the inter-tribal influence it had acquired through its politic marriages, it received increasing confidence from the Roman authorities. In the first half of the third century they began assuming 'regnal' names of Roman origin, and there is ground for believing that their doing so coincided with the Caledonian expedition of Severus; that the emperor found the son of Dobun a 'teachable' lieutenant, and that when, after reconstructing the Northern Wall, he retired south, 'Docilis' (teachable) was left to occupy, as a dependent chief, that part of the country between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus known to the Welsh as Manau Guotodin. From Docilis, a succession of four more regnal names, indicating that their bearers held rule in subordination to, or alliance with, the Roman government of South Britain, brings us to Cunedag, or Cunedda, the hero of Welsh minstrelsy, and founder of a line of kings in Wales. Of two of his great grandsons, Gwytherin and Glast, we shall hear more later on, in connection with their ancestral property on the Isle of Avallon.

THE ANCESTRY OF GLAST

Beli, magnus. The chieftain of the invading Belgae, who destroyed the Lake village.
Aballac (called by William of Malmesbury Avalloc) or Amalech, both archaic forms of Afallach, which means 'rich in apples' or 'apple-lander', took possession of Ictis.
Eugein = Avigenios, 'of noble birth'.
Brithguein, or Prydein, son of a princess of an East Midland tattooed tribe, Cruithni or Coritani, of which the Kymric form is Prydein.
Dubun, son of a princess of the Dobuni, a tribe settled about the head of the Severn estuary, in Gloucestershire.
Amguerit, son of an Ambivaritan mother.
Dumn = domn, ie. dominus
Doli = Docil, ie. docilis, 'teachable'.
Cein, Ceionius, a well-known Roman family name borne by a consul in 240.
Tacit, Tacitus, the name of a Roman emperor, 275-6. Appears in later Welsh as Tegid.
Patern Pesrut = Paternus (a name borne by Roman consuls in 267, 268, 269, 279), 'of the purple cloak', ie. he was holder of the highest rank of command in the imperial army.
Aetern = Aeternus, a title borne on coins by the Emperors Diocletian (284-305) and Julian (360-3).
Cunedag.

Dunaut (4th son).
Ebiaun.
Dinacat.
Gwytherin 'ab Dingad' = Victorinus

Docmail (9th son)
Elno
Glast

VI. Joseph and the Metal Industry

Long before the Belgae came the Phoenicians must have lost their monopoly of the metal trade from Britain, and it is not impossible that enterprising members of the Jewish race should have begun to take a part in it. According to a Cornish doggerel 'Joseph was a tinman', and in all the Latin versions of the Gospels of St Mark (15: 43) and St Luke (23: 50), without exception, he (Joseph of Arimathea) is called 'Decurio', which, at the time those versions were made, was the regular term in the Roman Empire for the officers placed in charge of the metal mines. He may indeed, even then, have been drawing some of the wealth upon which St Matthew lays such emphasis from the metal workings in the Mendips, as our English merchants have derived wealth from concessions arranged with the rulers of lands outside the British Dominions.

For even as being nothing more than a well-to-do and well-educated subject of the Roman Empire, he could hardly be ignorant of Caesar's historic naval battle of Quiberon, and the upshot of it - which was the desire to acquire for Rome that district which had for millennia supplied the lands east of the Mediterranean with metals. He must have known about the Isle of Ictis and its actual situation; there must have been hundreds of mariners able and eager to describe it to him, and to advise as to the route thither, and the possibilities of acquiring land, and if he had already a line of merchant vessels, and regular commerce with native rulers, how natural would it not be for him, at the time when the Christians were all scattered abroad, except the Apostles' (Acts 8: 1), to turn his back on the land of his own kindred, and make a home where as yet there was no Roman ruler.

So we may imagine Joseph of Arimathea came to the long-established and well-known harbour, and the Tor gave him the same beckoning welcome that it had given to un-numbered generations of immigrants from the same eastern Mediterranean. Tradition makes him land at Weary-All Hill on the north-west corner of the island, along the top of which a road ran from Street to the Lake Village: there he planted his staff which became a thorn-bush of distinct variety, and was cut down by a fanatical Puritan in 1624. Cuttings from it, however, had been made, and one of them has grown into the vigorous tree in the churchyard of the parish church, and flowers twice a year, at Christmas and in May. His wealth and trading connection made it easy for him to acquire a piece of land on the north-east of the Tor, and on it he quickly had a church built.

The houses of the Meare lake village had been built of wattle and daub, and Joseph availed himself of this, the local method of construction, which as we know from the remains of Roman merchants' houses excavated in London, was capable of receiving handsome fresco decoration on the plastered walls. It was therefore no indication of poverty or economy to build the church in this style, and as a matter of fact the church so erected lasted till the fifth century, and then only needed repair on account of the damage it received in the raids made upon the place by the Pagan Irish.

When the Romans advanced into Somerset, they took possession of the lead mines, and worked them in the interests of the government to raise revenue. By Roman law, all minerals belonged to the state, and lead pigs from most of the British mines bear the reigning emperor's name. The two earliest of the twelve exhibited in the British Museum came from the Mendips; one, dated AD 49, bears the name of Britannicus, son of Claudius; the other, dated AD 60, is inscribed, 'British lead, property of the Emperor Nero'.

Four others are stamped as coming from the mines of Lutudarum, which was in Derbyshire, near Matlock and the river Derwent, and leased apparently to a succession of Greek freed-men. Two of these) pigs have been de-silverised, showing from their inscriptions that the Romans were mining for silver, but finding little of it in Britain, were content to continue to work the lead.

More interesting perhaps than these 'pigs' are the leaden sealings, exactly similar to those used today still in Italy for securing a passenger's registered luggage. As they originally had cords through them, they seem to be peculiar to Britain. They had letters or device, on one or both faces. They may have been used for sealing or certifying military (ie. government) stores, or they may have been custom marks for merchandise, as they were found in the principia of the Roman official at Combe Down, near Bath, in the Mendip mining area; as well as at Richborough, Felixstowe, and at other similar coastal places.

Some other exhibits in the British Museum, which belong to the first century of the Roman occupation, show how the metal industry grew in importance and spread in area; for the injuries likely to be inflicted on the eyes of the workers from the glowing masses of red-hot metal, and the sparks which might fly from them, led to the emergence of a school of medical men in Britain, who made a special study of disease of the eye and of remedies for them. Such was Lucius Valliatinus, who practised as a physician in the Roman colony on the Esk, and there prepared his own medicines for the eye. Such was Stolus, whose eye-salve came under the notice of Galen, the court physician of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. And these specialists used to stamp their remedies with the name of the practitioner or make, the nature of the salve and directions for its use, either on the wax fastenings of the preparation or on sticks of solid collyrium. The stamps were not unlike in size and appearance to oblong pieces of scented soap, only their inscriptions were not on the top, but on the sides, each of which, as in the case of one found at Sandy, 2⅛ x 1½ x ⅜ in., might be inscribed with a different medicine; while one found at Cirencester boldly advertises a 'heal-all'.

It is strange that the makers of these stamps seem only to have thought of using them to make an impression on soft or yielding substances. Had they made the experiment of setting their dies, while still damp and sticky from the coloured mass on which they had been impressed, on some flat surface or fabric, they would have stumbled into the discovery of printing, and achieved for the old world what was one of the mainsprings of progress in the new.

VII. Banna Venta Bernae

Meanwhile, as the 'pimbo', to use the Italian term for the leaden seals clamped over the knots of corded luggage, found at Combe Down, seems to indicate, the Isle of Avallon continued to thrive as a well-known place of commerce in metals; and the fame of Joseph's religious foundation grew, and attracted more and more pilgrims and settlers. Before the year AD 139, a Christian named Adiuuandus, known later as St Diuvan, was flourishing there; and some time after AD 210 another Christian, Pacandus, arrived; he became the St Mawgan, after whom a monastery on the borders of Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire was named.

So, as the years passed, the Isle of Avallon became a strong Christian centre, with links of intimacy with the Christians of Tours of the same kind as in pre-Christian days existed in commerce between the traders of the Lake Village and 'the Venice of the West' at the mouth of the Loire. Martin, the bishop of Tours, had two sisters married in Britain, one to Gorthol, prince of the Strathclyde Britons, to whom she bore Ninian, the apostle of the southern Picts; the other, Concessa, was married to Calpurnius, the deacon decurio, to whom she bore Succat, otherwise known in later days as St Patrick. An inscription at Hexham records how a prefect of cavalry, named Concessinus, cut to pieces a band of Irish raiders, and McNeill raises the question, from the similarity of names, whether the prefect of cavalry and Patrick's mother were of the same kin, and whether the raid in which Patrick was taken captive was not a calculated reprisal for the Hexham massacre. [Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, xxxvii, 6, 140. Patrick had consecrated both Fiacc and Aed to be successive Bishops of Sletty.]

There is abundant evidence, therefore, that Christian faith and worship were maintained in the neighbourhood of the Tor previously to the time when the monastic life was introduced, on stricter lines, by St Patrick, when he came at the end of his missionary toils in Ireland to Avallon. Patrick was accompanied by Bridget and other companions, who established themselves as anchorets on the little islets of the Brue estuary to which they gave their names: Andresey, Martinseye, and Becary, ie. Bridget's Island, which was actually called 'Little Ireland'.

But what took Patrick to Avallon? Why should he have chosen that place in preference to others, in which to pass his latter days? How was it, that when he was first given land in Ireland, for the purpose of building a church, he built, at Donagh Patrick, one which was in size and shape an exact reproduction of Joseph's vetusta ecclesia? To state the problem clearly: is it possible that the Isle of Avallon was Patrick's birthplace?

There are four sources for the life of St Patrick; and taking first Fiacc's hymn, we learn that the saint 'was born in Nemthur' , a word which is in the dative, corresponding to a nominative Nemthor, and as far as signification goes may be represented by St Michael's Tor. The importance of Fiacc's statement is that the name he gives is that known to him as the name of Patrick's birthplace; for it seems that the author of the hymn was not the Fiacc who was a contemporary of St Patrick, but his successor, Bishop Aed, at whose 'dictation' our next authority, the life by Muirchu, was written. [Whitley Stokes, Tripartite Life of St Patrick, Rolls Series, cxi, 127.] Muirchu states that Patrick was born at a town which he knew by a constant and undoubting tradition to be called Ventre, ie. practically the same as Nemthor, the copyist having made the common error of reading u for n. The form Nemtrie is actually found in the Brussels codex of Muirchu' s Life of St Patrick. And considering the frequent interchange of b and v in Latin we may find the last syllable of Severn in Bernae. When we come to our other two authorities, St Patrick's Confession and Letter to Coroticus, what we find is not the name but a description of his birthplace, as a man born in London might say he was born in the metropolis. The saint admits that he cannot write good Latin, and his spelling may have been as bad as his grammar and idiom; but he insists on the fact that his father was a townsman, and it would be quite in keeping with his insistence on the social standing of his family for him to assert that his birthplace was no obscure village but 'the chief trading place of the Severn'.

The phrase he uses was obscure even to Irish writers of the seventh century, and the spelling of it differs in different manuscripts; but Dr Newport White [Newport White, Libri Sancti Patricii, SPCK (1918).] gives it as Banavem Taberniae, and Professor Eoin McNeill [Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, xxxviii, 6, 123.] took 'the common ground that the phrase as it exists in its various spellings is corrupt and requires reconstruction, and that in its original form it contained the word Venta' (trading-place, Chepstow). Hence McClure [E. McClure, English Place Names, 130.] says that the phrase would in early Irish represent 'the principal Chepstow on the Severn', ie. the Isle of Avallon or Ictis. No other Venta, such as that in Glamorganshire, had so long a history: it fits in with Muirchu's phrase, 'not far from our sea' - the Ictian sea or Bristol Channel; and perhaps the most decisive point in the identification is that Fiacc asserts that he learnt that Nemthur was Patrick's birthplace from Patrick himself.

All indeed that Patrick tells us about himself locates him near the Tor. He was born of a family in which not only the Christian faith but the Christian ministry was traditional. His father, Calpurnius, was a deacon, one of the sons of Potitus, a presbyter. The district was so thickly populated that 'many thousands' of captives were carried off in the same raid as that in which Patrick was snatched from his father's suburban villa. And it was a metal producing district, for Calpurnius was a decurio, one of the order which the Romans used as an agent to establish a thorough system of local government, and for administration.

If Spain may be taken as typical of other parts of the empire, a decurio was established in every little mining centre, being charged with the care of the games, the water supply, the sanitary arrangements, and the local fortifications.

Hence Calpurnius must have been a very well-known man, and his son, as a captive, a specially valuable asset to the Irish raiders.

Patrick speaks of the raid in which he was carried off, as if there were nothing unusual in the occurrence; and there had been since the close of the third century a series of Irish raids on the Welsh coast, and of settlements inland in Wales. It was to check these, and re-establish Roman-British authority, that Cunedda, no doubt because of his influential tribal connections, was commissioned to return from the district between the walls of Solway and Clyde, in the first decade of the fifth century. The genealogy of his descendants shows a series of great political and religious leaders, who always reverted to their ancestral possessions in the Isle of Avallon. One of his great-grandsons, St Gwytherin (ie. Victorinus), betook himself to Avallon not very long after the death of Patrick, and there founded a community house, 'Insula Victorini'.

The word 'insula' could not here mean the whole of the Avallon island, for Avallon already had upon it Joseph's church and its surrounding buildings, and Patrick's settlement; but it was used in what may be called its military sense, for a group of soldiers' quarters and stores, such as filled each of the corners made by the roads which crossed each other through the camp, was an 'insula'.

Hence the actual meaning of 'Insula Victorini' would be 'the convent or monastery quarters of Victorinus'. This in the British language became Yneswitherim, which the passage of time reduced to Yniswitrim; and through that form it became by way of the Latin vitreus a plaything for the monkish fabulists, who thought the name of their foundation had something to do with glass and the aspect of its shallow surrounding waters.

VIII. Glastonbury

But the name 'Glastonbury' reveals that it belongs at least to the seventh century, for it means 'the fort of the descendants of Glast', and Glast was a military commander in high favour with King Arthur when he was fighting his twelve great battles against the heathen. Glast, who from the way in which his name has been impressed on history, had inherited the gifts and powers of his grandfather Cunedda, was in the year AD 510 defending the important strategic point of Luitcoyt, where the Watling Street which led from London to Chester was crossed by the Icknild Way, along which the megalithic or Iberian metal-seekers had travelled from St Davids to the lead mines in Derbyshire. Luitcoyt was the Roman fort of Letocetum, two miles west of the present city of Lichfield, which preserves in its first syllable the original Celtic name of the place, Letoc. It was being besieged by an Anglo-Saxon army, and Arthur coming to Glast's relief, routed them, in the tenth of his great battles, at the River Bassas, now known as Hammerwich Water, which runs below Lichfield, and has left traces of its former name in the three Staffordshire Basfords. Routed from Luitcoyt, which seems even then to have been a See city - William of Malmesbury calls it Escebtiorne (a word compounded from the Welsh escob, bishop, and teign, lordship) - the heathen determined, in their furious hatred of Christianity, to make an effort to secure and destroy the venerable sanctuary at Avallon, and moved westward; Arthur himself moved to intercept them at Mt Badon, near Bath, where in his last great battle, he inflicted on them a defeat from which they did not recover for fifty years. But he could not with certainty anticipate that issue, and so he directed Glast to go to the protection of the home of his ancestors. Accordingly Glast took the Icknild Way until it joined the Fosse, followed the Fosse to Bath, and thence took the right hand road to Wells, and so came to Avallon.

It was still a place of great importance, for its wealth in metals and the forging of them - had not Arthur's famous sword 'Excalibur' been wrought at Afallach? - and it would have been a great prize for the invaders. 'Glast on coming saw that it was rich in manifold sources of wealth' (eam multimodis bonis affluentem uidit). But even more serious was the threat of these invaders to the oldest Christian sanctuary in Britain, and every nerve therefore had to be strained for its defence. Glast seems to have repaired and strengthened Ponter's Ball, which after five hundred years of peace was still likely to be of as much value as before in checking invasion from the land side, and the marshes and the open river Brue made Avallon practically impregnable on the other three sides. But the invaders never came; the sanctuary remained inviolate, and Arthur's body was brought there by water for interment in the grave in which in AD 1191 his body was found in a massive trunk of oak. There was a slab inscribed, 'Hic iacet sepultus inclytus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia.'

Glast remained, after Arthur's burial, as a kind of overlord in his ancestral estates, and his descendants maintained his name and fame, so that when, more than a hundred years later, the Saxons had become Christians and occupied Avallon, they not only called the town Glaston, but King Kenwalch gave special honour to the Abbey, and confirmed it, in 670, in the possession of 'the adjacent islands'. These were they in which Patrick's companions had lived in Irish fashion, as anchorets, and which on that account were known by their names: as they answered to the description given by Posidonius they help us to recognise in Avallon the Isle of Ictis.

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