y year as surely as the Feast of the Nativity came round.
The "Holy Grail" (the cup of blessing from the Last Supper), which
Joseph brought with him, he buried at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, and
from the place of its sepulchre gushed forth the Bloody Spring, which
may be duly inspected to this day. The pilgrims made more friends than
disciples, and the king, after a dilatory conversion, set apart for the
maintenance of the newcomers "twelve hides of land." Here the
evangelists possessed their souls in patience and built for worship a
little shrine of wattle and daub, which was many generations afterwards
found intact when fresh missionaries came to re-evangelise the
islanders. Round this _vetusta ecclesia_ gathered the subsequent
glories of the monastery. This long-cherished tradition enshrines
sufficient fact to justify Glastonbury's claim to be "the only tie
still abiding between the vanished Church of the Briton and the Church
of the Englishman." Its authentic history begins with its foundation as
a monastery by that ecclesiastically-minded layman, King Ina (688-726),
who built a church here and dedicated it to St Peter and St Paul.
Dunstan, himself a Glastonbury man, by the austerity of his conduct and
the vigour of his administration, made the fame of this early religious
house. With the coming of the Normans grander ideas prevailed. Abbots
Thurstan (A.D. 1082) and Herlewinus (1101-20) both projected buildings
of some pretensions, but Henry of Blois, brother of King Stephen, abbot
in 1126, was the first great builder. Henry's church was a fabric of
much magnificence, but it completely perished in a fire in 1184, and
Henry II., in one of his occasional fits of piety, charged himself with
its rebuilding, and entrusted the work to his chamberlain Ralph, who,
upon the site of Joseph's legendary shrine, erected the present
beautiful chapel of St Mary (_c._ 1186). With the death of the king the
work languished, for no funds were forthcoming from the empty pockets
of his "lion-hearted" successor; and it was not until 1303 that the
great church whose ruins still survive was finally dedicated. Even then
the fabric was not complete. It took two centuries to add the finishing
touches. Abbot Sodbury (1322-35) vaulted the nave, and it was left for
one of his successors, Walter Monington (1341-74), to fill in the
vaulting of the choir. Not content with the already considerable
dimensions of the church, Monington extended the chan