6 June
2017
Obviously, the pace of traveling in a car—even with
scheduled walks along the way—is very different than walking the bulk of the
way across the countryside, and the biggest difference is the view beyond the
hedges. There is a limited view from the roads and though we are not
infrequently gasping with pleasure at vistas that open up before us through a
break in the hedge, some of what we drive through feels like being in either a
maze or a tunnel of trees.
We
reached Glastonbury on Friday, with much discussion on the topic of King Arthur
and whether he was a fictional or historical character (I am firmly in the
former camp). The “Welcome to Glastonbury” sign actually identifies the place
as the “Isle of Avalon,” and I was intrigued to discover if the crystal-gazing New
Age philosophy that dominated the place when I was there in 1997 is still in evidence.
It is.
Twenty Years Ago in Glastonbury: A store in the city centre, New Age pilgrims at the Chalice Well, and Glastonbury Tor from the Abbey
Twenty Years Ago: The
Age of Aquarius
Though the rain did not pour down as
hard as it had on the previous day the dawning of day three was wet enough to
dampen the spirits of the night before.
At breakfast I pondered the map again; there were no footpaths at all
that could reasonably constitute a route between Wells and Glastonbury. To argue in favor of walking, it was almost
completely flat, over moors with names like Queen’s Sedge, Splotts, and
Crannel, all connected by criss-crossing canals. The major argument against walking was that
it would be entirely along the A39 which I had grown to hate. I had asked yesterday at the Information
office if there were boats that travelled the canals and was treated with a
shake of the head and a look halfway between paternalistic and
patronizing. No busses ran on Sunday
morning. My feet seemed better, but my
calves were knotted tight and sore.
Before I called a cab, and then again
as I waited for the one I did call, I engaged in a serious bout of self
justification. It had been very easy to
declare from my dining room table at home that nothing would keep me from
walking every step of the way across England.
Wainwright had, after all, refused a ride during a howling gale on a
desolate mountainside. “I should have
had to be bound and gagged before I would have ridden in that car,” he
wrote. “I was pledged to do this trip on
my feet. ... If I had climbed into that car, my whole holiday would have been
irretrievably ruined.” But after only
two days walking I knew that I was no Wainwright.
Belloc never made a declaration about
walking in his book, and only in passing acknowledged “the baker’s cart which
had taken us along many miles of road so swiftly and so well: a cart of which I
have not spoken any more than I have of the good taverns we sat in, or of the
curious people we met.” Shirley du
Boulay, an English woman who followed Belloc’s pilgrim path from Winchester to
Canterbury and described the adventure in her book The Road to Canterbury
in 1994, did pledge to walk every step (somewhat stubbornly, she confessed),
but she and her companions were greatly assisted by a friend with a car who
picked them up at the end of each day’s walk and delivered them again the next
morning. And Sean Jennett, in his guide
to The Pilgrims’ Way: from Winchester to Canterbury recommends the bus
for several stretches of the path in no-nonsense terms. As to the Wife of Bath? “She rode a horse,” I reminded myself again
as I tossed my pack into the boot of the cab.
It was on to Glastonbury, where it had
been my intention from the first days of planning the pilgrimage to stay at the
George and Pilgrims Inn if I could get a room there. This was an ancient place that had been
rebuilt by Abbot John Selwood in 1475 just to accommodate pilgrims. Not knowing what vagaries might influence my
schedule, I had made no reservations in advance, and it seemed serendipity to
find that not only was there a room available, but it was the Henry VIII
room. They made no claims that Henry
VIII actually stayed in the room, though he is known to have made a pilgrimage
to Glastonbury, “but Jerry Hall stayed in that room,” the young woman at the
desk told me. The exterior was cut
stone, the interior half-timbered; the brochure and postcards featured my room
with a promise that one could “conjure up dreams of the past” there. Perfect.
For many centuries Glastonbury was the
most important pilgrimage site in England.
It took Canterbury and the events of the life and death of Thomas Becket
to dislodge it from its position. Today
it has regained its preeminence and in a way that was first brought to my
attention as I looked out the window of my room on the second story and front
of the house. Out the window I could see
the small square with its market cross and a great row of old buildings, one
with a sign identifying it as “Archangel Michael’s Soul Therapy Centre,
Providing Tools for Personal and Planetary Ascension.”
It was Sunday morning and not yet ten
o’clock when I arrived in Glastonbury, so I got out my reference materials and took
a stroll around town waiting for the Abbey to open. I would be the first in line. From several vantage points I could see
Glastonbury Tor, the hill which was hugged by the town on its western flank; on
its summit sits another site for pilgrims, St. Michael’s tower.
Glastonbury Abbey is a dramatic
ruin. There is a persistent story here
that Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man who provided the burial cave for Jesus,
came here with the Holy Grail some thirty-five years after the crucifixion
(and, consequently, some five years before the Romans). I even read in one local brochure that J. of
A., as a merchant trader, came here with the young Christ, his kinsman, during
those years when the gospelers are silent about the details of Jesus’
life.
There was certainly a church here in
the seventh century, and in 940 St. Dunstan became the Abbot and supervised the
building of a new Abbey, which was destroyed by fire in 1184. During the rebuilding, the monks announced that
they had discovered the graves of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere on their
grounds, and onto that great story were heaped others, including a visit by St.
Patrick. If one is willing to suspend
historical reason one can find at Glastonbury the justification for any number
of pilgrimages.
During the reign of Henry VIII, this
abbey, like all the monastic enclaves across Britain, was “dissolved” by his
command, the treasures shipped back to London, the lead roofs stripped, and, in
the case of Glastonbury, the influential Catholic clergy executed. As the walls deteriorated, local people
removed the stones to build houses and pave roads. But in its first incarnation as a pilgrimage
site, Glastonbury Abbey was a sacred sight indeed. William of Malmesbury, writing about it in
1125 said “The stone pavement, the sides of the altar, and the altar itself are
so loaded, above and below, with relics packed together that there is no path
through the church, cemetery or cemetery chapel which is free from the ashes of
the blessed.” Today the only bones one
sees are the jaw bones of a whale, forming an arch over a disused entry. There is a small museum attached to the gift
shop which has a few nice pilgrimage items, including some pilgrim badges and
small vials and reliquaries.
On that Sunday morning, the ruins of
Glastonbury Abbey were mutely tragic.
Only the kitchen is left standing, but the “Lady Chapel” with its “Crypt
Chapel” dedicated to Joseph of Arimathea still has its walls largely intact. On the outside wall is a stone with “Jesus
Maria” carved into it, a touchstone for pilgrims for a thousand years and it
was for me as I laid my hand upon it.
There is a chapel dedicated to St. Patrick, also claimed as a visitor to
Glastonbury, and a thorn tree said to be a descendent of a tree on nearby Weary
All Hill, where an exhausted Joseph of Arimathea drove his staff into the
ground and it took root. I took a leaf
from the tree as a relic (and later bought another, dipped in copper, at the
souvenir shop.)
I stood for several minutes pondering
the sad little spot where once the black marble tomb of Arthur and Guinevere
had once stood before the high altar.
The grassy plot is marked off and an embarrassed looking steel-framed
sign mounted on a beige-painted metal shaft informs the tourist that there were
once bones here “thought to be” those of the Camelot duo. In a moment of inspiration I chewed off a
fingernail and dropped it into the grass, a relic of myself.
For the pilgrim who seeks the past in
the landscape there is much to ponder here.
We know a lot about Arthur: we
know of his idealistic notions of government, of his accidental incest with his
sister which produced his dysfunctional son Mordred, of his menage a trois with Guinevere and
Lancelot, of the court he created with the Knights of the Round Table, and of
their quest for the Holy Grail (which, handily was right here in Glastonbury,
though they never found it). What we
don’t know is whether he actually lived.
If there was an Arthur, he was not the man we know from folklore and
literature.
It is clear from the sign and from the
literature available that the folks at Glastonbury Abbey are not trying to
prove the existence of a historical Arthur just because they happen to have his
grave on their premises. One of the
guide books says: “In this grave were laid bones thought to be those of King
Arthur and his Queen, Guinevere. Their
graves were discovered in the Abbey graveyard in 1191. King Arthur was probably a Chief who helped
to defend this part of the country against the pagan Saxons. The stories of the Round table came many
years after his death.” Not quite a
declaration of belief.
Few historians today doubt that the
discovery of the bones was a medieval hoax, a way of bringing attention to the
Abbey at a time when its fortunes were at their lowest following a devastating
fire. It was an age of relics and false
relics, and the knowledge that the Norman Plantagenet Kings were looking to
link themselves to a Saxon-fighting royal lineage in Britain made Arthur a
brilliant choice. Henry II had died just
two years earlier, Richard the Lionhearted was on the throne, and his nephew
and potential heir was Arthur, Duke of Brittany.
The thirty-five year reign of Henry II
solidified Norman rule in Britain and his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine
brought additional territory on the continent.
Henry had been raised on the tale of Arthur as penned in 1138 by
Geoffrey of Monmouth, a member of his father’s court. If Geoffrey were writing today, his book, the
Historia regum Britanniae or “History of the Kings of Britain,” would be
categorized by the Library of Congress as “historical fiction.” He incorporated into his book a number of
earlier historical sources, but where the story bogged down, where it lacked
romance, or where alteration could advance political motivations, Geoffrey
filled in, and Arthur was born. Thus we
find an Arthur who defeats all comers on the Continent, and whips the Saxons,
Irish, Scots, and Picts for good measure.
(He even has the bishops of the defeated Scots deliver up their relics.)
In her dandy small book, King Arthur
and the Knights of the Round Table, Anne Berthelot describes what happened
next.
“When Henry II was crowned King of England in 1154
he was quick to assess the political advantage to be gained from Geoffrey’s
work. ...The Plantagenet king therefore adopted a twofold strategy. He sought, on the one hand, to turn the
legend to his own advantage by presenting himself as King Arthur’s legitimate
heir, while simultaneously ... satisfying [the Bretons] with the existence of a
real Norman king, who had their interests at heart, rather than a figure of
myth. To this end (and with political
rather than literary notions in mind) Henry commissioned an Anglo-Norman cleric
at his court by the name of Wace to turn the Historia regum Britanniae
into a novel. What this meant was the
translation of the Latin text into the vernacular. ... Henry died in 1189. Shortly after his death the monks of
Glastonbury Abbey put the final touches to the revised version of the myth by
‘discovering’ the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere... it guaranteed the authenticity of the legend
and turned Arthur into a figure of undeniable historical reality, at the same
time enabling those who had played such an important role in his ‘invention’—the
Plantagenets—to bask in his reflected glory.”
Henry’s heirs certainly embraced their
relationship with Arthur. His son
Richard I is said to have presented Arthur’s sword Excalibur to King Tancred at
Catania while on a crusade. Another Arthur
would have succeeded Richard as king had he not been murdered by his uncle
John, who took the throne himself.
John’s grandson, Edward I, brought a book of Arthurian Romances with him
on a crusade, sponsored “Round Table” feasts, and was the recipient of Arthur’s
crown when it was “found” in 1284. And
when the Glastonbury bones were reinterred in a glorious black marble tomb in a
rebuilt Abbey, Edward himself carried Arthur’s coffin. His grandson Edward III is said to have been
inspired by the Knights of the Round Table in the creation of the Order of the
Garter.
I first became acquainted with Arthur
through the Disney cartoon “The Sword in the Stone,” and was inspired to read
Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur after seeing the Monty Python movie
version of the search for the Holy Grail.
As a high school student I mistakenly thought Malory’s book, which first
appeared in 1460, was the original source of the story. A very important edition of Malory’s book
appeared in 1485, the year that the Tudors took power from the Plantagenets
with the defeat of Richard III by Henry VII.
Like his predecessors, the new King linked himself to Arthur,
christening his first son by that name in a ceremony at Winchester, a city identified
as Camelot by Malory. Even in the modern
age, Victoria and Albert found in Tennyson a writer who could do justice to the
Arthur saga, and they too gave the name to one of their numerous children. Arthurian murals decorated the walls of the
neo-medieval castle at Balmoral, and the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was
illustrating every facet of the story in lush romantic paintings of red-haired
Guineveres.
There are two wonderful and important
things about Wace’s Roman de Brut, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur,
Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” and in fact all of the Arthur stories
following Geoffrey of Monmouth’s. Though
nominally set in the fifth or sixth century, the world described is the
medieval period in which the Plantagenets lived, with chivalrous armored
knights pledging chaste love to various ladies between quests, hunts, jousts,
and revels at court. And the stories are
so solidly grounded in the actual English landscape that I would walk where
Arthur was said to have walked on more than one occasion on my pilgrimage,
though never so strongly felt as here in Glastonbury.
The discovery of a grave made it seem
so historical, I guess. Bones are
evidence of a person, and there certainly have been a lot of people over the
last nine hundred years who have been willing to believe that that person was
Arthur. My friend Joannie, for instance,
when I told her I thought the grave was a hoax, held up her hand to silence me
and said, “Don’t tell me anymore. I
don’t want to know if it’s not true.”
Ralph Adams Cram, a noted architectural historian of the turn of the
century, wrote a book about The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain in which
all his critical disbelief was suspended when Glastonbury was reached. “Whether we hold or discard the tradition
that St. Patrick first organized the scattered hermits of Avalon into a
semblance of order, or that Arthur and Guinevere lay here in a single grave,”
he wrote, “enough and more than enough remains, against which even modern
criticism is powerless, to make this the holiest land in Great Britain.” To Cram, the founding of the Abbey by Joseph
of Arimathea is “perfectly credible and also perfectly unprovable,” and the
fact that there was a grave proved that there was an Arthur.
“The
narrative of the finding of the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere during the
abbacy of Henry de Soliaco, in the year 1191, goes far to prove not only its
own truth, but the material fact of real existence as well: it is concise,
detailed, convincing, full of internal evidences of perfect veracity; if false,
it is a masterpiece of circumstantial evidence quite unimaginable in the
twelfth century.
Giraldus
Cambrensis, declaring himself an eye-witness, sets down the facts simply and in
the most matter-of-fact way. Between the
two mysterious pyramids beside the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, seven feet
below the surface, was found a large flat stone, in the under side of which was
set a rude leaden cross, which, on being removed, revealed on its inner and
unexposed surface the roughly fashioned inscription, ‘Hic jacet sepultus
inclitus Rex Arthurius in Insula Avalonia.’
Nine feet below this lay an huge coffin of hollowed oak, wherein were
found two cavities, the larger containing a man’s bones of enormous size, the
skull bearing ten sword wounds, the smaller the bones of a woman and a great tress
of golden hair, that on exposure to air crumbled into dust. ‘The Abbot and Convent receiving their
Remains with great joy, translated them to the great Church... where they rest
in magnificent Manner ‘til this Day.’
Here
facts fall and dissolve: the instant one stands in the shadow of these mighty
crags of riven masonry, all the inheritance of a thousand years comes back, and
we know that here also walked St. Joseph of Arimathea, St. Patrick, King Arthur
and his queen, and that beneath the vanished vaults once rested the Holy
Grail.”
There is plenty of evidence that
medieval confidence men were just as able to perpetuate scams as their modern
counterparts, and Cram places a ridiculous amount of faith in so-called
“eyewitness” testimony. There are many
medieval narratives that begin with the claim that everything therein was
witnessed by the author, and then go on to describe sheep growing on trees,
bands of Cyclops, and sea monsters; not to mention that at the time Arthur’s
tomb was discovered relics circulating around Europe included the staff of
Moses, samples of the manna from heaven, thorns from the crown of Jesus, and
enough pieces of the true cross to build a boardwalk back to the Holy Land.
In 1607 a man named William Camden
published a sketch he made of the lead cross with the inscription “HIC IACET SEPULTUS INCLITUS REX ARTURIUS IN INSULA
AVALONIA,” (“Here lies
buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon”), but the cross itself
disappeared sometime in the next hundred years.
Camden’s picture of this crucial piece of lost evidence has been the
subject of much speculation. Geoffrey
Ashe, a historian who has written some eight books on King Arthur is convinced
by the fact that the “ clumsy lettering does not suggest the style of the twelfth
century, and the Latin spelling Arturius is an archaic form which was used five
hundred years earlier.” Like Cram, Ashe
does not credit that good fakers of the twelfth century might also have thought
of that.
In his book The Discovery of King
Arthur, Ashe makes a very compelling argument for the existence of a real
Arthur in the person of a king known in early texts as Riothamus. Filled with knowledgeable detail about the
invasions of Romans, Saxons, and Normans into Britain, and wonderfully complete
in its discussion of all of the early sources of the Arthur legend, the book
builds, layer by layer, a very convincing argument that there was an
actual Arthur whom we would recognize even after a millennium and a half. But the effect for me was completely
undermined by a short appendix in which Ashe attempts to link Arthur/Riothamus
to the current heartthrob of the “Tiger Beat” set, Prince William, in a string
of once and future kings that smacks of the same romantic and political
motivation that influenced Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Malory, Tennyson, and
all the other writers who had pandered to a particular monarch.
“Neither the medieval kings nor the
Tudor kings claimed to be literally descended from Arthur,” Ashe begins.
“The royal inheritance from him was collective;
English monarchs were the successors to his kingdom. Yet those who promoted this view may have
missed the most glorious connection of all.
Here the usual course of events is reversed. We do not confront a legend which scholarship
refutes. We confront a possibility,
unknown to legend, which scholarship reveals—a speculation, but an alluring
one.”
What follows is Ashe’s speculative
lineage: If Arthur was Riothamus,
and if had a wife before Guinevere, and if they had children,
then it might have been Cerdic who, according to the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle arrived from the Continent in 495. The unknown wife, the fact that the Anglo
Saxon Chronicle gives Cerdic a different father, and many other details are
rationalized and explained in ways that would have made Geoffrey of Monmouth
proud. It is as if Ashe’s real motive is
to provide the link between Arthur and the Windsors that the Plantagenets and
Tudors sought; when the royal family becomes as dysfunctional as the rest of
us, elevate them through their Arthurian connections. (Ashe’s rationalization reminded me of an
article I read in a supermarket tabloid after Richard Burton died. It claimed that “Liz Can Still Have Burton’s
Baby!” even though he was dead and she was past menopause.—If an egg could be
harvested from Elizabeth Taylor and fertilized with a sperm bank donation that
Burton might possibly have left behind, then a surrogate mother just might be
able to bring the baby to term.)
To top it off, Ashe gives credit to
Arthur’s grave at Glastonbury even though Riothamus died on the continent. What makes an otherwise good historian behave
in such a goofy manner is at the heart of the medieval pilgrimage
experience. It is not just a willingness
but a wish to belive. Whether it was a
piece of the true cross or a piece of English oak didn’t matter if you believed
it was a piece of the true cross. New
Age pilgrims believe with Ashe that it is Arthur’s grave, and they are only the
most recent link in a long chain. The
original grave site was explored by archaeologists in 1963 and it was found
that there had been an ancient graveyard and that it had been
excavated in medieval times, leaving just enough proof for believers, while
allowing sceptics to continue as before.
One aspect of this whole Arthur’s grave
thing continues to bother me, and that is the question of why the tomb was so
ruthlessly and completely destroyed at the time of the dissolution of the
Abbey. Henry VIII, like his father and
all those numerous predecessors going back to the Norman Invasion, had
attempted to link himself to Arthur, and the fact that his hero’s supposed
grave was completely desecrated by his own men would seem to indicate that
Henry did not have much faith in the authenticity of the remains. That he passed up the opportunity to take
advantage of the public relations potential of moving the bones to another
site, makes me wonder if anyone in the sixteenth century had much confidence in
the Arthurian relics. Later in my
journey I would find persistent stories of the removal of bones from shrines in
anticipation of the arrival of Henry’s men: the remains of Edward the Martyr at
Shaftesbury, those of King Stephen at Faversham, and of course Becket’s bones
at Canterbury (which are still the source of speculation). In each case, local people are said to have
rescued the relics, but there is no such story at Glastonbury. Neither Henry nor the locals valued the bones
enough to preserve them.
Leaving Arthur’s grave behind, I began
my quest for the Holy Grail. I had read
that it was in a well and in fact there was a well in the remains of the Lady
Chapel on the Abbey grounds that was associated with Joseph of Arimathea which
for a time I mistakenly believed was the well. Another look at the local map informed me
that the Chalice Well was actually up the road a bit, on the way to Glastonbury
Tor.
The Abbey site has been re-consecrated
by the Church of England and continues to be a pilgrimage site. In late June a multi-denominational
pilgrimage attracts thousands of Anglicans, Catholics and even Orthodox
Christians. But the Arthurian connection
gives it a New Age spin and the other sites in Glastonbury go even farther
toward taking the town into a cosmic realm.
Glastonbury Tor is said to both an ancient Christian and a pre-historic
Celtic site, and at the Chalice Well things have slipped right over the
edge. Here the interplanetary vortex
reaches the earth in a big way.
At the well itself I found four women
standing completely still, eyes closed breathing in the essence. They had that wan skinny vegetarian
look. As the water flows downhill there
is a lion’s head fountain where you can drink the water and where a very
strange cast of characters was assembled.
All through the grounds people lay on their backs, barefoot, eyes
closed. At the fountain people were
touching, leading each other to the water, pouring it over their heads. The mystical quality for the faithful led to
shaking, moaning,and swaying. Several
people wore a silly smile on their face, one woman blew me a kiss. It all reminded me of that “Star Trek”
episode when the Enterprise crew goes to this planet where everybody is
loving and beautiful, but there is an undercurrent of weirdness. Not willing, however, to look a gift miracle
in the face, I went forward and took a sip of the water in my cupped hand (I
was not going to use the glass shared by all these people!) and then poured
some on my sore feet and knees. Tomorrow
will tell. I took a small piece of one
of the old yew trees as a relic.
There were lots of opportunities in the
nearby shops to buy crystals, magic potions, Celtic jewelry, prints of
pre-Raphaelite paintings of Arthur’s women, etc. I picked up a leaflet from a group looking
for financial support to build a sanctuary “dedicated to the sacred in all
spiritual paths.” It was to be “a new
idea for a new millennium” and would be located in Glastonbury because of the
“spiritual energies of this holy place.”
“Glastonbury
is the outer expression of the Isle of Avalon or Place of Apples, also known as
the Western Isle of the Dead. It is the
mythic home of the Nine Morgens, the Merlins, Modron, Brigit the Swan Maiden,
Mikael the Sun Lord and Gwyn ap Nudd.
Here the famed King Arthur lies sleeping with his Queen Guinevere until
the day of their return.
Glastonbury
also lays claim to being an ancient and present day Goddess site, an early
Druidical centre... In the present Glastonbury is described as the heart chakra
of Planet Earth and as a World Sacred Site it is a place of global spiritual
significance. ... Many people are drawn to Glastonbury by the atmosphere of
mystery.”
And some are driven away. It all just felt creepy to me and I reached
something of a low point upon reading this thing. Had this been what the Christian pilgrimage
meant to the pilgrims of medieval days?
As I was not looking for a meaningful encounter with Jesus and the
saints, so much as to understand the experience of perceiving the awesome power
that was transmitted to believers through their relics, I hoped to be able to
view this dispassionately, but I found that I have little patience with New Age
Pilgrims.
They do not believe less than the
average medieval pilgrim, if anything, they seem to enter more fervently into
the experience, and that is what I found so disquieting. People living in England in Chaucer’s time
had lived through the ravages of the Black Plague and had seen the government
shaken by the grasping for power that would lead to the War of the Roses. The Catholic church, which might have
imparted some structure beyond the vagaries of patriotism or nationalism, was
split under two different Popes for half of Chaucer’s lifetime. There was little “science” to speak of, the
vast majority of the people were illiterate anyway, and their lives were
controlled by an aristocracy that, if anything like the idiotic aristocrats one
reads about in today’s tabloids, must have made life a living hell. It’s no wonder they sought escape in a
pilgrimage.
But what is the rationale of these
people here in Glastonbury today? The
fundamental difference between past and present pilgrims as I see it is that
the medieval religious pilgrimage was a mainstream manifestation, and never
more than a temporary escape from the hardships of life. The literature of the New Age pilgrims
implies a rejection of the real world in favor of fantasy. The majority of mystic seekers at the well
appeared to be solidly middle class. It
was not poverty that drove them here, or plague, or oppressive regime, so what
was it? What misfortunes of love, or
failure at school, or loss of health, or dysfunctional family, or job crisis
led them to seek out the swan maidens and goddess sites and heart chakras and
mythic nobles? It can’t be an escape
from technology, because you can visit their web sites, and computer games that
take place in medieval landscapes on distant planets are readily purchased in
Glastonbury.
Occasionally I ask myself if historians
are not really in the business of creating a fantasy world of the past, and my
conclusion, in all honesty, is that they are not. Or at least that that is not my reason
for choosing history as a career. I may
occasionally live in other fantasy worlds, but not day in and day out as part
of my job. I tell my students (and I
believe) that history provides us with a way of looking at human beings and how
they respond to adversity, diversity, and how they live in and use the natural
world. While the people and events of
the past are intrinsically interesting, they are also worth studying for what
they tell us about the present. It is
only because we are constantly reinterpreting the past according to those
tenets important in our own society that historians stay in business generation
after generation. We ask different
questions of the historical evidence and we get different answers. And religious folk from the Wife of Bath’s
day to the present have always embraced a certain element of fantasy as part of
their faith.
The evening I spent at Wells Cathedral
I transcribed the words to the Blake poem that became the standard Anglican
hymn “Jerusalem,” and I thought about it several times that day. It begins with a reference to Joseph of
Arimathea bringing the young Jesus to England (on a prior trip to that on which
he brought the Holy Grail).
And did those feet in ancient times
Walk
upon England’s mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On
England’s pleasant pastures seen?
The setting of the tune is powerful,
but the message struck me as such a wonderfully queaky British fantasy. I mean, by God, this Jesus chap would hardly
go to all that trouble to be born of a virgin and made flesh and if he were not
going to come to England! Because I was
raised in an Irish-Catholic family in Spokane, Washington, I never even heard
this song until it became the hymn-of-choice of “Monty Python’s Flying
Circus.” Marching across the English
countryside I decided to make it my personal anthem.
Though Chaucer doesn’t mention it, the
Wife of Bath would probably have made one or more pilgrimages to
Glastonbury. It was an easy trip from
her home near Bath, and, after Canterbury, the most important pilgrimage site
in England. Here she would have seen the
grave of Arthur, not as the apologetic sign-on-a-stick that you see today, but
as a large and inspiring black marble tomb set directly before the high
altar. Her own decision to tell a tale
of a knight from King Arthur’s Court might have been influenced by such a visit
in earlier years when she was only a novice pilgrim.
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring
me my arrows of desire!
Bring my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring
me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor
shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In
England's green and pleasant land.
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