Click Map For More Detail KeyWords: Joseph of Arimathea Glastonbury Abbey Benedictine monastery Abbot William of Malmesbury Old Church Venerable Bede Lucius Eleutherius "De Antiquitate" Faganus (Phagan) Deruvianus (Deruvian) "Gesta Regis Anglorum" Charter of St. Patrick KeySources: Bede: Ecclesiastical History William of Malmesbury: Chronicle Roman Emperors Roman Catholic Popes

n any discussion of the early legends of Britain, the name of Glastonbury Abbey will probably come up. And, no wonder, because over the years the abbey has become the gravitational center of Britain's legendary universe, largely because of its role in the creation and development of the legends of Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur.

Joseph, a Jew from the town of Arimathea, was an early first century figure who played a small supporting role in the events surrounding Christ's crucifixion, as recounted for us in the Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1.1). Arthur was the great King of the Britons who is said to have successfully led his armies against the Saxon invaders of his homeland, and who established his glorious and far-reaching empire based on the, then, revolutionary principles of nobility, equality and chivalry.

No reliable historical records even suggest that Joseph ever set foot outside the Holy Land, and the Arthur depicted by legend as conqueror of a vast European empire, never existed at all. Yet somehow, these two men, so separate from each other in time and space, have become entwined with the history and mystique of Glastonbury Abbey to the point that they are inseparable from it and from each other. The purpose of this article is to examine exactly how and why that came to be so.

The Beginnings of the Abbey
Glastonbury Abbey was established as a Benedictine monastery, under Beorhtwald, its first Saxon abbot, during the years 670 to 678 AD (1.2). Prior to that time, a religious community of one sort or another is believed to have existed in the vicinity for many years (some say centuries).

On the abbey site there stood a church constructed of " wattle and daub," said by local legends to have been dedicated by Jesus, Himself, in honour of his mother, Mary. William of Malmesbury, a 12th century historian, regarded highly by modern scholars, called this structure "the oldest church in England," and, henceforth, it was known simply as the Old Church (in Latin, vetusta ecclesia), serving as a symbol for the ancientness of Glastonbury's Christianity and as an object for veneration by pilgrims. By William's time, the story of the origins of the Old Church had been completely lost to history. Legend, though, was able to supply the missing information, attributing its construction to two early missionaries sent from Rome.

Early Missionaries Travel to Britain
In his "History of the English Church and People," written in the early eighth century, the Venerable Bede provides us with some useful background information:

In the year of our Lord's Incarnation 156, Marcus Antoninus Verus, fourteenth after Augustus, became co-Emperor with his brother Aurelius Commodus. During their reign, and while the holy Eleutherius ruled the Roman Church, Lucius, a British king, sent him a letter, asking to be made a Christian. This pious request was quickly granted, and the Britons held the Faith which they received in all its purity and fullness until the time of the Emperor Diocletian. (1.3)

Bede (c.673-735), a monk at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumberland, was the first scholar to record the history of the coming of Christianity to Britain. In the above account, Bede gives us several historical calibrations, although there are several difficulties with the names and dates he gives us. The first difficulty is that there never was a Roman Emperor named Marcus Antoninus Verus. The name seems to be a composite of actual emperors named Antoninus Pius (138-61), Marcus Aurelius (161-80), Lucius Verus (161-9). The co-Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus were followed by Commodus in 180. Another small problem is that the first of these three emperors, Antoninus Pius, was fifteenth from Augustus, not fourteenth.

According to modern scholarship, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus became co-Emperors in 161 AD (1.4). Bede gives us the date in another form, however. He tells us they became co-Emperors "In the year of our Lord's Incarnation 156." For that to be true, Christ would have to have been born in 5 AD, a date considerably at variance with the commonly accepted date of 4-3 BC. Also, in the passage above, we are told that a British king, Lucius, made a request to the pope in Rome "during their reign" (the co-Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, jointly reigned during the years 161-9). The name of the pope to whom the British king appealed is named Eleutherius. Our final difficulty with Bede's account becomes clear when we see that Eleutherius held his papal throne during the years 175-89 AD and did not overlap the co-Emperorship of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, at all.

All this is not to question Bede's reliability as an historian, but merely to point out the pitfalls in coming to hard and fast conclusions based on early sources. To provide a continuous account of how things had come to be, Bede was forced to deal with some areas of history where few, if any, reliable sources were found. In the preface to his "History," he states:

Should the reader discover any inaccuracies in what I have written, I humbly beg that he will not impute them to me, because, as the laws of history require, I have laboured honestly to transmit whatever I could ascertain from common report for the instruction of posterity. (1.5)

Bede's preface acknowledges the assistance the author had received from various churchmen of his day in the preparation of his "History." He recognizes the Abbot Albinus; Nothelm, a priest of the church of London, the brethren of Lastingham monastery and the most reverend Abbot Esi. One possible early source that Bede may have used is the "Liber Pontificalis," literally, "Book of the Popes," a collection of papal biographies believed to have been compiled by a Roman priest at the time of Boniface II (530-2). The point is that if Bede, with his sound historical method and closer time proximity, had trouble sorting out this material, then we must be especially careful in drawing our own conclusions.

The Missionaries Come to Glastonbury
In any case, the intervening four hundred years between Bede and William of Malmesbury saw some additions to Glastonbury Abbey's founding legend, most notably the names of the two missionaries who were said to have built the Old Church.

William tells us in "De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae" (Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury), a work composed while he was a guest of Glastonbury Abbey in the late-1120's, that in response to King Lucius' request, Pope Eleutherius dispatched the missionaries, Faganus and Deruvianus (Phagan and Deruvian), to the island of Britain to preach the Gospel, which William puts at some point past the middle of the second century AD. Coming from the continent, the missionaries would probably have landed somewhere in Kent, and must have worked their way toward the west, preaching as they went. On their westward journey, William tells us that they came to Glastonbury, where they constructed a church (1.6).

There are now no extant copies of William of Malmesbury's "De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae," but what we know of its original text comes from another of William's writings, the "Gesta Regis Anglorum" (Deeds of the Kings of England) into which large sections of the "De Antiquitate" had been transcribed (the essential parts of which are contained in William's Chronicle; see sidebar to download). The earliest version of the "De Antiquitate" that has come down to us is a thirteenth century interpolation by the Glastonbury monks which adds significant "embroidery" not present in the original document.

For example, the later interpolations tell us that Phagan and Deruvian . . .

. . . came to Britain, as the Charter of St. Patrick and the Deeds of the Britons attest. Proclaiming the word of life, they cleansed the king and his people at the sacred font in 166 AD (1.7)

The interpolated version also does not claim that Phagan and Deruvian were the original builders of the church at Glastonbury, but that they merely restored an existing church that they had found there.

At first glance, this change of story seems to be disadvantageous to the abbey. Monastic houses of the middle ages, as we shall see, were proud of their traditions and were ardent in the veneration of their founders. Glastonbury Abbey, at least in the time of William of Malmesbury, seemed satisfied to be able to trace the possibility of its origin back to the second century.

While it may seem to be only a minor adjustment to William's original text, the interpolated version of the story effectively made the date for the construction of the Old Church, and by extension, the beginning of Glastonbury's Christian community, years earlier than previously claimed. An earlier foundation would go a long way toward solidifying the abbey's claim to pre-eminence among Britain's religious houses, merely on the basis of its great antiquity. But how much earlier could they plausibly claim the founding of their abbey to have been? And if it had been founded earlier than the time of Phagan and Deruvian, then who could they claim as their original founder?

In the original version of "De Antiquitate," William opens the door for a creative solution to the monks' dilemma when he writes:

There are documents of no small credit, which have been discovered in certain places to the following effect: 'No other hands than those of the disciples of Christ erected the church of Glastonbury.' Nor is it dissonant from probability; for if Philip, the Apostle, preached to the Gauls, as Freculphus relates in the fourth chapter of his second book, it may be believed that he planted the word on this side of the Channel also. But, that I may not seem to balk the expectations of my readers by vain imaginations, I shall leave all doubtful matter and proceed to the relation of substantial truths. (1.8)

The author seems to be saying that there existed, perhaps in the abbey's archives, unspecified documents which could be construed as supporting an Apostolic foundation (the most prestigious kind) for the abbey. He speculates on the possibility of the validity of an earlier tradition that there had been a first century Apostolic mission to Gaul led by the Apostle Philip (Freculphus, an early ninth century continental chronicler, repeated a claim made in the 630's by Isidore of Seville about Philip's mission to Gaul). William (pictured at left) reasoned, if that were true, then it would not have been out of the question for a satellite mission to Britain to have been sent out from Philip's team. He refused to go beyond that, being careful to keep his feet on more substantial ground (the implication being that, without more supporting evidence, he considered this to be insubstantial ground).

William's purpose in writing the "De Antiquitate" was simply to tell the true story of Glastonbury Abbey. Why would the monks, a mere hundred years later, imply that Phagan and Deruvian hadn't been the first Christians to arrive at Glastonbury, effectively writing them out of William's version of their founding legend? Had they discovered new information or did they have other motivations for doing so?

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Article Notes
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1.1) Matthew 27:57-9; Mark 15:43-6; Luke 23: 50-5; John 19: 38-42

1.2) Watkin, Dom Aelred, The Glastonbury "Pyramids" and St. Patrick's "Companion",
The Downside Review 63 (1945), p.41

1.3) Sherley-Price, Leo, trans., Bede: A History of the English Church and People, Penguin Books, 1965, p.42

1.4) Salway, Peter, The Oxford Illustrated History of Roman Britain, Oxford University Press, 1993

1.5) Ibid., Sherley-Price, p.35

1.6) Scott, John, Early History of Glastonbury: An edition, translation and study of William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1981

1.7) Ibid., Scott, p.57

1.8) Ashe, Geoffrey, King Arthur's Avalon: the Story of Glastonbury, Barnes & Noble, 1992, p.42