But, of course, the Chapter House was on the south side of the Choir, and could not have been elsewhere in the case of Glastonbury, as its site was never in doubt, and it has now been recovered and its dimensions tested and proved.
4. Marsh, the old gardener at the Abbey for over forty years, used to say to me that in the grass bank which runs along the north side of the nave area, under the trees, there was a fine bit of freestone walling, some of which Mr. Austin, his earlier employer, used up for building. I dug in, but could find nothing of this at the point he indicated.
Now, at the risk of being a little tedious, I propose to quote a short paragraph from my Architectural Handbook, because it shows what I was thinking about this matter in 1910, and such evidence is needed for any useful analysis of the psychology of the whole subsequent matter.
I would add that, so far as I can remember, my friend J.A. had formed no theory as to the nature of the chapel or its real position other than my own, and what I here quote represents the utmost that could at the time be said (Architectural Handbook of Glastonbury Abbey, second edition, pp. 32, 33, 1910):
"Some fragments of building on the north side of the nave were surviving as recently as 1817, when Coney's drawings were published. In one of these we see a wall with a row of windows having a rather unusual detail in their heads (Fig. 10). This would be near the site of the Loretto Chapel, built by Abbot Bere. Carter, writing some few years later, tells us that the Loretto Chapel was then standing, and if he be correct, it must have been a substantial piece of masonry exterior to the church, and not a light internal structure within it, as has been conjectured. But he may have been referring to the Chapel of Saint Thomas the Martyr in the north transept, which has sometimes been miscalled the 'Loretto Chapel.'
Fig. 10.—View of the Ruins in 1723. (From Stukeley's Itinerary.)
Fig. 11.—Glastonbury Abbey in 1655 circa: Enlargement of Hollar's View.