CHAPTER IX
Old Glastonbury Abbey.—Its Library.—John of Taunton.—Richard Whiting.—Malmsbury.—Bookish Monks of Gloucester Abbey.—Leofric of Exeter and his private library.—Peter of Blois. Extracts from his letters.—Proved to have been a great classical student, etc., etc.
he fame of Glastonbury Abbey will attract the steps of the western traveller; and if he possess the spirit of an antiquary, his eye will long dwell on those mutilated fragments of monkish architecture. The bibliophile will regard it with still greater love; for, in its day, it was one of the most eminent repositories of those treasures which it is his province to collect. For more than ten hundred years that old fabric has stood there, exciting in days of remote antiquity the veneration of our pious forefathers, and in modern times the admiration of the curious. Pilgrim! tread lightly on that hallowed ground! sacred to the memory of the most learned and illustrious of our Saxon ancestry. The bones of princes and studious monks closely mingle with the ruins which time has caused, and bigotry helped to desecrate. Monkish tradition claims, as the founder of Glastonbury Abbey, St. Joseph of Arimathea, who, sixty-three years after the incarnation of our Lord, came to spread the truths of the Gospel over the island of Britain. Let this be how it may, we leave it for more certain data.
After, says a learned antiquary, its having been built by St. Davis, Archbishop of Menevia, and then again restored by "twelve well affected men in the north;" it was entirely pulled down by Ina, king of the West Saxons, who "new builded the abbey of Glastonburie[310] in a fenny place out of the way, to the end the monks mought so much the more give their mindes to heavenly thinges, and chiefely use the contemplation meete for men of such profession. This was the fourth building of that monasterie."[311] The king completed his good work by erecting a beautiful chapel, garnished with numerous ornaments and utensils of gold and silver; and among other costly treasures, William of Malmsbury tells us that twenty pounds and sixty marks of gold was used in making a coopertoria for a book of the Gospels.[312]
