About six miles south-west of Wells is the ancient Isle of Avelon, where
St. Patrick is said to have spent the closing years of his life, and
where are the ruins of one of the earliest and most extensive religious
houses in England--Glastonbury Abbey. A sixpence is charged to visit the
ruins, which adjoin the chief street, but the remnants of the vast
church, that was nearly six hundred feet long, are scanty. Of the
attendant buildings there only remain the abbot's kitchen and an
adjoining gateway, now converted into an inn. This kitchen is about
thirty-four feet square within the walls and seventy-two feet high. The
church ruins include some of the walls and tower-foundations, with a
well-preserved and exceedingly rich chapel dedicated to St. Joseph. On
the High Street is the old George Inn, which was the hostelrie for the
pilgrims, built in the reign of Edward IV. and still used. It is fronted
by a splendid mass of panelling, and the central gateway has a
bay-window alongside rising the entire height of the house. The church
of St. John the Baptist in Glastonbury has a fine tower, elevated one
hundred and forty feet and richly adorned with canopied niches, being
crowned by an open-work parapet and slender pinnacles. Almost the entire
town of Glastonbury is either constructed from spoils of the abbey or
else is made up of parts of its buildings. One of the most
characteristic of the preserved buildings is the Tribunal, now a suite
of lawyers' offices. Its deeply-recessed lower windows and the oriel
above have a venerable appearance, while beyond rises the tower of St.
John the Baptist. Behind the town is the "Weary-all Hill," from which
arose the foundation of the monastery. Tradition tells that Joseph of
Arimathea, toiling up the steep ascent, drove his thorn staff into the
ground and said to his followers that they would rest there. The thorn
budded, and still flowers, it is said, in winter. This was regarded as
an omen, and they constructed the abbey there around the chapel of St.
Joseph. The ponderous abbot's kitchen, we are told, was built by the
last abbot, who boasted, when Henry VIII. threatened to burn the
monastery, that he would have a kitchen that all the wood in Mendip
Forest could not burn down. King Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, and a
veracious historian in the twelfth century wrote that he was present at
the disinterment of the remains of the king and his wife. "The shin-bone
of the king," he says, "when placed side by side with that of a tall
man, reached three fingers above his knee, and his skull was fearfully
wounded." The remains of King Arthur's wife, which were quite perfect,
fell into dust upon exposure to the air.
[Illustration: GLASTONBURY TRIBUNAL.]