1632. Yet his visits were not made at
random, and even Naveus finds it difficult to substantiate any apparition
of St. Michael so far north as Cornwall, except by invectives against the
_impudenta et ignorantia_ of Protestant heretics who dared to doubt such
occurrences.

But this short sentence of William contains one word which is of great
importance for our purposes. He says that "the Hore-rock in the wodd" was
formerly called _Tumba_. Is there any evidence of this?

The name _Tumba_, as far as we know, belonged originally to Mont St.
Michel in Normandy. There a famous and far better authenticated apparition
of St. Michael is related to have taken place in the year 708, which led
to the building of a church and monastery by Autbert, Bishop of Avranches.
The church was built in close imitation of the Church of St. Michael in
Mount Garganus in Apulia, which had been founded as early as 493.(91) If,
therefore, William of Worcester relates an apparition of St. Michael in
Cornwall at about the same date, in 710, it is clear that Mont St. Michel
in Normandy has here been confounded by him with St. Michael's Mount in
Cornwall. In order to explain this strange confusion, and the consequences
which it entailed, it will be necessary to bear in mind the peculiar
relations which existed between the two ecclesiastical establishments,
perched the one on the island rock of St. Michel in Normandy, the other on
St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall. In physical structure there is a curious
resemblance between the two mounts. Both are granite islands, and both so
near the coast that at low water a dry passage is open to them from the
mainland. The Mount on the Norman coast is larger and more distant from
the coast than St. Michael's Mount, yet for all that their general
likeness is very striking. Now Mont St. Michel was called _Tumba_ at least
as far back as the tenth century. Mabillon, in his "Annales Benedictini"
(vol. ii. p. 18), quotes from an ancient author the following explanation
of the name. "Now this place, to use the words of an ancient author, is
called _Tumba_ by the inhabitants, because, emerging as it were from the
sands like a hill, it rises up by the space of two hundred cubits,
everywhere surrounded by the ocean; it is six miles distant from the
shore, between the mouths of the rivers Segia and Senuna, six miles
distant from Avranches, looking westward, and dividing Avranches from
Brittany. Here the sea by its recess allo