But the hope was vain; he went to Avalon to die.
This story was sung by the Welsh Bards to King Henry II. on his journey to Ireland in 1177, and interested him so deeply, that he recommended a search for the remains, and that they should be (if found) exhumed and re-interred in the Church, as a more fitting resting place. This wish was carried out after that king’s death by his nephew, Henry de Soliaco, then Abbot, in 1191, and in the spot indicated by the Bards, the remains were found both of Arthur and his queen. Geraldus Cambrensis, who was present, relates the scene, and says that a stone was found with a leaden cross bearing the inscription,—“Hic pace sepultus rex Arthurus, in insula Avalonia,”—and beneath it the remains of the hero king, which were of giant proportions, and of his queen, mingled in the same coffin. In the large skull were three wounds, and in the cavity occupied by the queen’s remains a tress of fair yellow hair, which being touched fell to pieces. The remains were duly honoured by a black marble mausoleum in the Church.
When more than eighty years had passed away, the greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward the first, and his Queen Eleanor kept the festival of Easter at Glastonbury, and the tomb was opened for their inspection; when the king commanded the hallowed relics to be exposed before the high altar, for the veneration of the people, ere they were recommitted to their resting place; there to rest, until the tyrant—
“Cast away like a thing defiled
The remembrance of the just.”
We have dwelt upon these old legends, not without pleasure, as recorded chiefly by William of Malmesbury, on the authority of a “Charter of S. Patrick,” and an ancient British historian whose writings were then extant, but whose name he does not hand down to posterity.
But the Charter is pronounced by Archbishop Usher to be the forgery of a Saxon monk, and historians in general, consider the truth of the legends, hitherto recorded, as doubtful as those of the kings of Rome, or of the Trojan war.
Still, there can be little doubt in a candid mind, that these ancient myths enshrine many facts, that in the early British times, nay in the very infancy of Christianity, Glastonbury was a centre of light under its earlier name, “the Isle of Avalon,” and that the site of S. Joseph’s Chapel, or the “Vetusta Ecclesia,” is that of one of the oldest, or perhaps the oldest Christian Church in Britain.
We have already seen that the English Conquest had advanced as far as Glastonbury by the year 658. Sixty years afterwards, Ina, King of Wessex, after building the first Church in Wells, by the advice of Adhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, (in which diocese the new conquests were incorporated until the foundation of the See of Wells by Edward the Elder in 909,) rebuilt the monastery on the Isle of Avalon, which by that time, owing to the subsidence of the sea, had either ceased, or was fast ceasing to be an island; save, so far as it was encircled by the waters of the river Brue and its tributary streams, with the marshes they formed. So long as the English had remained heathen they had destroyed all the Churches and monasteries they found; now that they, the West Saxons, had become Christian they respected the Churches and monks, and thus they became great benefactors of Avalonia, or as the English called it, “Glæstingabyrig,” or “Glastonbury.”
Ina died at Rome, whither he had gone, after resigning his crown, in all the “odour of sanctity.”