[THE LORETTO CHAPEL]
Among the lost features of Glastonbury Abbey recorded by Leland[45] is a chapel built by Abbot Bere on the north side of the nave. Leland says of this:
"Bere cumming from his Embassadrie out of Italie[46] made a Chapelle of our Lady de Loretta, joining to the north side of the body of the Church."
But apart from his record, which has preserved the bare memory of the work and its approximate location, we have no surviving facts, either historical or descriptive, to guide us in the search for its vestiges, save one or two trifles which the orthodox archæologist would probably despise, but on which the imagination might build an airy and tenuous fabric, a mere gossamer which the rude touch of practical argument would dispel, and which would find its place more fittingly in the pages of romance than in the chronicles of the labours of serious-minded antiquaries.
Here, then, was a chance for the subliminal mind to exercise its powers, just the opportunity most desirable for an experiment in the psychology of inductive and deductive processes, and a test of the possibility of drawing by the thread of slenderest and most imperfect knowledge, some kindred knowledge from the great reservoir of the memory of nature. This experiment was made, and the result of it I am going to give my readers without any sort of reticence or reserve, making no claim, but asking that they will regard it with an open mind, and accepting it for analysis as an illustration of the working of the latent powers of the mind under the same conditions that we in the onset laid down for our work.
The material from which our sublimated essence was distilled was as follows:
1. Leland's note, as above.
2. A fragment of walling shown in Coney's view of the Abbey, 1817. This appears in the sketch just on the spot where the wall of the north aisle of the nave would have joined that of the transept at its eastern extremity, but it is diminutive in height—only about a third of the height proper to the nave wall, as is clearly evident by comparison with the surrounding features. It is like a little screen-wall, and such as might have filled at one time an archway at this point opening from the last or most eastward division of the north aisle wall towards a chapel just without, in the angle between the aisle and the north transept. But in Coney's sketch it does not look like a Gothic work, but is more like a building of the modern times, since it has four little dumpy windows with round heads and the projecting cills which we associate with our everyday experience of domestic building. No one but Coney, so far as I am aware, has indicated any sort of remnant of building at this point, and there are several older views of the Abbey, which would be expected to show it if anything had been there. Look, for example, at Stukeley's panoramic view of the ruins, published in 1723. (See Fig. [10], p. 115.) Nothing visible there—the whole of the north side of the nave an open field, as it had been for at least half a century previous (vide Hollar's view).
3. In the Cannon MS., a diary referring to Glastonbury about the time of George II., is a sketch plan of the Abbey, very crude, in which the writer shows a mound of rubbish and rough stones with suggestions of a broken wall on the ground at or near this point, and he makes a note to the effect that it is the remains of "The Chapter House."