There existed, until about 1859, another very notable “New” inn, probably the work of the Abbots of Sherborne, and intended for the reception of visitors to that beautiful Dorsetshire abbey. That splendid old hostelry, with a noble front of yellow sandstone, built in the Perpendicular style of architecture, probably about 1420, was the finest example of an inn of its period in England, but it was ruthlessly, and with incredible stupidity, demolished, and the only pictorial record of it appears to be an entirely inadequate, severe, and unsympathetic little wood-cut in Parker’s Domestic Architecture.[13] It figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s story of The Woodlanders as the “Earl of Wessex” inn at “Sherton Abbas.”
It was in those “good old days” that are so interesting to read about, and were so ill to live in, that the ancient hospice flourished most bravely. When ways were not merely rough and lonely, but were also infested by “sturdye beggaris,” “maysterless men,” and others who would not hesitate to do the solitary traveller a hurt, the good abbots or monks who established wayside houses of entertainment where no secular innkeeper dared were truly benefactors to their species. The relic of just such a place, on a road once extremely lonely and dangerous, is to be found along the present highway between Brecon and Llandovery, in South Wales, some two miles westward of the town of Brecon. The road runs terraced above the southern bank of the river Usk, through a rugged country where, in ancient times, Welsh chieftains and outlaws, alike lawless and beggarly, knocked the solitary traveller on the head and went over his pockets amid the appropriately dramatic scenery of beetling crag and splashing waterfall. At the gate of this lurk of bandits the holy monks of Malvern Priory founded an hospitium, on the spot where stand to-day the ancient and picturesque church and the few houses of the village of Llanspyddid: whose Welsh name, indeed, means the Hospice Church.
Nothing, unfortunately, is left of that “spythy,” or hospice, they so piously built and maintained, for, its usefulness long overpast, it was left to decay: but the church they built, in which travellers returned thanks for the succour vouchsafed them, remains by the roadside. It is a romantic-looking church, placed in an appropriate setting of extremely ancient and funereal-looking yews that lead up darkly to the heavy north porch, beautifully decorated with carved woodwork.
The “George” at Glastonbury presents the finest exterior of all these pilgrims’ inns, for it stands to-day very much as it did in the time of Edward the Sixth, when it was built (1475) by Abbot John Selwood for the accommodation of such pilgrims as were not personages. There has ever been a subtle distinction between a personage and a mere person. The great ones, the high and mighty of the land, on pilgrimage were made much of, and entertained by my lord Abbot in appropriately princely fashion, in the Abbot’s lodgings: the middle-class pilgrims were lodged at the Abbot’s inn, and the residue lay where best they might: perhaps in some guesten-hall, or possibly in the open air.
Pilgrimages to Glastonbury were less numerous and popular than those to the pre-eminent Shrine of the Blessed St. Thomas at Canterbury, but they were not few, for the story of this great mitred Somersetshire Abbey is one of the marvels and legendary wonders that, however greatly they may stagger the twentieth-century capacity for belief, were of old implicitly relied upon. Few were those who in mediæval times questioned their genuineness, and those who did so kept their doubts prudently to themselves.
This marvellous lore narrates how it was to St. Joseph of Arimathea that the Abbey owed its origin. In A.D. 63 he came, with eleven companions, wandering among the bogs and morasses of this western land, and discovered this elevated ground rising above the marshes, further topped by the commanding peak of Glastonbury Tor. “Weary all!” they exclaimed, as they sank down, exhausted, on the spot called Weary All Hill to this day, although its name is properly “Wirrall.” Here St. Joseph thrust his staff into the ground, and, taking root and blossoming every Christmas Day for over fourteen hundred years, it was known in all Christendom as the Holy Thorn.
THE “GEORGE,” GLASTONBURY.
The Holy Thorn itself was a sight to see, for, whatever its origin, it did actually blossom on or about Christmas, as descendants from the parent stock do to this day. The original hawthorn—or what was looked upon in the time of Queen Elizabeth as the original—was fanatically attacked by an early Puritan who succeeded in felling one of its two trunks, and was proceeding to destroy the other, when he struck his leg instead, and had an eye gouged out by a flying chip: an incident that would have pleased the old monks, had they not been dead and gone a generation earlier. This capacity in the Holy Thorn for taking its own part did not avail when a Cromwellian soldier-saint, a half-century or so later, cut it down. Nothing in the tragical way appears to have happened to him.