I Read the English Heritage Book of Glastonbury Because the Spirit of a Medieval Monk Told Me To

English Heritage Book of Glastonbury by Philip Rahtz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wish I had read this book before I went to England, not after, because not a single person bothered to tell me about poor Richard Whiting, the final abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. During the Dissolution he was dragged across town and then up Glastonbury Tor and hanged, and THEN he was quartered and his head was mounted over the gateway of the Abbey!

Apparently people thought he'd hidden treasure in the Abbey? But the thing is that later they literally DID find a ton of treasure in the walls, but poor elderly Abbot Whiting probably didn't have anything to do with it.

Fun facts like these kept me fascinated by this history of Glastonbury, and I enjoyed reading the history through the lens of the texts and archaeological evidence that vividly illustrate it. I really liked the Lady Chapel when I visited, for instance, and it was cool to read that this spot is also the location of St. Joseph's Well, which is likely pre-Normanic and possibly the very first thing ever built on this site. 

Lady Chapel crypt, but the part with St. Joseph's Well is out of frame because I didn't know it was important, damnit.

I wish I'd known that when I was standing next to it--I would have taken a photograph! It's a bummer that the on-site resources didn't tell me all this interesting info, so thank goodness for archaeologists who write books for English Heritage!

The literal illustrations are also excellent, and now I get to pine for my own print of the works of Judith Dobie, who apparently has the coolest-ever job of creating illustrations of historical England. I wish *I* knew how to watercolor Neolithic long barrows! 

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My teenager, who's very into Arthurian legends, really wants Dobie's print of the exhumation of Arthur and Guinevere from this book--you can actually see in the illustration both the monk who picks up Guinevere's golden hair only to watch it disintegrate in his hands (doh!) AND the monk who finds the lead cross that super conveniently is inscribed something along the lines of "Here Lies the Definitely Very Real Not Fake King Arthur."

Even though Rahtz is very much NOT a fan of the Arthurian legends like these that surround the place, which is a bummer because I think the legends are the most fun and that's why I went to visit Glastonbury myself, he still devotes time to mentioning them and other woo theories, including some woo theories that I hadn't heard about! I know about King Arthur and ley lines and Joseph of Arimathea, etc., but I did not know that in the early 1900s a wealthy artist also decided that the entire Zodiac was recreated in the topology around Glastonbury. What Rahtz says about her is probably my favorite quote in the entire book:

When Mrs. Maltwood died, she left a considerable sum of money to further the understanding of her ideas. The Trust which administers this has taken the liberal view that understanding of the Zodiac will be achieved only by a wider understanding of the archaeology of Somerset; to this end many grants have been made to archaeologists in the area (including the present author), for which we must be thankful.

Lol!

This is rivaled by my second-favorite anecdote, that of the director of excavation in the early 1900s (what was with the early 1900s and its woo?!?), F. Bligh Bond, who decided that archaeology probably wasn't as good of a way to get at the truth as sacred geometry and automatic writing guided by spirits would be. I mean, of course! He effed up a BUNCH of stuff before the Church of England finally got wind of his shenanigans and fired him. Rahtz sums up his biography this way:

In 1926 he went to America, where he lectured on Glastonbury, and on his psychic techniques concerning the 'Company of Avalon.' He returned to England in 1936, and died, very much alone, in North Wales in 1945.

I did some more reading up on Bond because he sounds so weird, but nowhere else have I seen the fact that he died "very much alone." Like... Rahtz, you got a bone to pick with this guy? He's already dead--you don't have to keep punching him!

The book ends with some excellent suggestions for further readings and a thorough bibliography, both of which I've picked through. I'm especially interested in the "Myth and Legend" sources that Rahtz gamely includes despite his abhorrence, and the Bond book entitled The Gate of Remembrance: A True Story of Psychic Archaeology. I want to see for myself what bonkers stuff he wrote via his spirit monk!

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