SAVARIC, GLASTONBURY AND THE MAKING OF MYTHS: A REAPPRAISAL

Historians have long been aware that the vicious feud between the monastery of Glastonbury and its bishop in the early thirteenth century was responsible for turning Glastonbury’s scriptorium into the most astonishing and inventive manufacturer of forged documents. In what Julia Crick has memorably termed ‘the marshalling of antiquity’, new documents were produced and older ones annotated, all tending to demonstrate the antiquity of Christian Glastonbury, and its right to self-government and autonomy, free from external interference. The monastery’s chroniclers were equally partisan, but historians and archaeologists alike have tended to accept their account of Glastonbury’s more recent history at face value. Correcting the chroniclers’ anti-Savaric bias allows for some fresh thinking on the construction of both the Glastonbury mythos and of the abbey building itself. It also raises questions about the remarkable reverence with which scholars continue to treat Glastonbury’s ancient texts.