Page:Somerset Historical Essays.djvu/21

 none other men's hands make, but actual disciples of Christ built it '. He found it, he says, 'in certain places' (in nonnullis locis). For these vague words the De Antiquitate gives us ' at St Edmund's ', and it adds a reference to an earlier mention of the missionaries sent by St Philip. When we turn back to the first section we read, after a long account of these missionaries: ' Now that all this was so, we learn alike from the Charter of St Patrick and from the writings of the seniors. One of these, the historian of the Britons (Britonum historiographus), as we have seen at St Edmund's and again at St Augustine's the Apostle of the English, begins as follows: There is on the boundary of western Britain a certain royal island. &hellip;' The citation is in fact taken from the early Life of St Dunstan, written about A.D. 1000 by the Saxon priest known only by his initial B. A copy of this work was, as William of Malmesbury tells us in his own Life of St Dunstan, placed in his hands by the monks of Glastonbury; so that in any case this could not be the writing to which he refers. Moreover what we are there told is that ' the first neophytes of the Catholic law found an ancient church, built, as it is said, by no human skill, but made ready from heaven for the salvation of man '. This is in direct conflict with the statement that it was built by actual disciples of Christ. Further, it is not likely that William of Malmesbury could have spoken of this book, as the writer of the first section does, as the work of Britonum historiographus. It is plain that we have here an ignorant attempt of some later writer to identify the work to which reference had been made.

We must now resume our analysis of the work as it stands, taking it up at the third section (p. 15).

How a certain monk of St Denys discoursed concerning Glastonbury. The antiquity of the church is shown by the story of a Glastonbury monk named Godfrey, of the time when Henry of Blois was abbot, who visited the monastery of St Denys. 'We have taken both this and the chapter which we shall subjoin from a letter of his.' An old monk there told him that, while both their churches were known to have been dedicated by the Saviour Himself, Glastonbury had the further distinction of being called 'Roma secunda'.

How a multitude of folk first came to dwell at Glastonbury. 'In the ancient Deeds of the Britons we read that from the northern part of Britain there came to the West twelve brothers.' The last on the list is Glasteing. It was he who passing through the English of the Midlands