Medieval English People

January 9th, 2018 by ellenfoster

The second chapter of Ian Mortimer’s book, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, is entitled: The Medieval People.  It is natural to wonder how similar and how different were medieval people from modern ones.  Evolution dictates that some characteristics change slowly while technological progress may be rapid.

The average height of 14th century English males was 5’ 7”, for females, 5’ 2”, not much below modern standards.  Yet, there are some striking contrasts.  Medieval English people would seem very young to us.  Almost forty percent were under the age of fifteen.  Less than five percent of 14th century English people were at least 65.  The median age then was 21.  Now it is 38.

This meant that young men often had responsibilities which would be unthinkable today.  In some towns, boys as young as 12 served on juries.  King Edward III declared war on the Scots and led his outnumbered army against them at age 20.  Today he would be too young to be a Member of Parliament.  Prince Edward at Crecy led the foremost battalion of the army when just 16 years of age.  In general, men were considered in their prime in their twenties, mature in their thirties, and old in their forties.  A woman was considered in her prime by age 17, mature by 25, and old by 35.

Another aspect of the English population is that it shrunk from 5 million in 1300 to about half that number during the period of my novels (1380-1406).  England did not regain 5 million until the 1630’s.  The Great Plague in 1348-1349 accounted for much of that drop but not all.  There was a drop of around 10 percent between 1315 and 1325.  Another quarter of the population was lost in the second half of the 14th century.  Think how much wisdom and expertise were not available by the combination of the younger age distribution and the population reduction.

Medieval people were part of a class system which traditionally had three estates.  This divided people into those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked, in other words: the nobility, the clergy, and the peasants.  Of these, most literacy was found in the nobility and the clergy, with most peasants being illiterate.  The latter was by far the largest group.  The picture at the top is a display in the Corinium Museum in Cirencester which shows various classes of medieval people.  The top row shows a king, nobility, and clergy while the bottom row shows a knight, a burgess, and a peasant.

In the 14th century, this pattern of classes was still important, but changes were underway.  The nobles who did the fighting were joined by the English longbowmen who came out of the class that worked.  These longbowmen allowed greatly outnumbered English armies to triumph in such battles as Crecy and Agincourt.  Another change in the 14th century was the rising importance of the merchants.  These were not nobles or clergymen, but they often were literate and came into wealth that matched or exceeded that of noblemen.

Noblemen were very few, starting with the king.  Below the monarch were less than a hundred dukes, earls, and barons.  Next came over a thousand knights.  Some 10,000 esquires and gentlemen had lands which earned income.  The number of nobles and their families made up just a fraction of one percent of the population.  Lady Apollonia was the daughter of an Earl of Marshfield and the sister of the next Earl.

The clergy were more numerous, perhaps about 30,000.  Archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, canons, and archdeacons had a hierarchy like the nobles.  Below these were rectors, vicars, chaplains, friars, minor clergy, and hermits.  Much of the clergy were monastic.  They had to be at least 18 years old and comprised over two percent of the adult population.

In the social hierarchy, mayors of cities and incorporated towns were on a level with knights.  Merchants were becoming important in the 14th century.  Lady Apollonia’s second husband, Edward of Aust, was a franklin.  He owned property in Aust and elsewhere, including Exeter House in my second novel, Plague of a Green Man, and he was also a successful merchant.  He was below the nobility.  Hence, Apollonia married below her class when she was wed to Edward.  Still, he was her most beloved husband.

It is easy to classify those who worked in medieval England as just peasants, but it wasn’t that simple.  I have already suggested that merchants and franklins enjoyed a social status just below the nobility or the landed gentry as the lower nobility came to be known.  Working people were not known at the time as peasants.  There was concern with differences among working people.  Were they born to servitude?  Were they subject to a lord?  Were they free men?  What skills did they have?  Working people who had responsibilities such as a reeve or a constable were often resented by other workers.

Even servants could enjoy a good quality of life.  Consider Lady Apollonia’s affinity.  Her maid, Nan, came to Apollonia’s attention when Nan was a little girl.  She learned to speak properly and assumed considerable responsibility in the Lady’s household throughout her adult years.  Many servants did not fit our stereotype of the medieval peasant.

In this age of concern about lack of equal pay for equal work and growing awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace, I want to address the place of women in medieval England.  Men were described by what they did, but women by their marital status: maiden, married, nun, or widow.  A woman was dependent on the person who supported her, her father or husband, for example.  Married women had few legal rights and were much dominated by their husbands who often were forced upon them.  This was true irrespective of class.

My heroine, Lady Apollonia, was unusual in being able to attain her sovereignty after surviving three husbands who left her with considerable assets.  She was ripe for some man to claim her and assume control of those assets.  She avoided this by becoming a vowess in a ceremony performed before witnesses during mass where she, as a widow, was asked by the Bishop of Worcester if she desired to be the spouse of Christ.  By taking this vow, she assumed an obligation of perpetual chastity but was able to remain in the world and not be confined to monastic life.  The church protected her in this way from any more marriages.

Medieval English Landscape

December 10th, 2017 by ellenfoster

The first chapter of Ian Mortimer’s book, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, is entitled: The Medieval Landscape.  The landscape of England at the time of my novels was essentially rural.  Cities in the year 1377 were very small by modern standards.  London was the largest city in England at 40,000, followed by York at 12,000.  The largest city in the West Country was Bristol at 10,000.  Gloucester, the setting for my third novel, Memento Mori, was 16th largest in all of England with 3,700.  It had the biggest population among the cities in which I set my stories.  Exeter, where the second novel, Plague of a Green Man, is set, had 2,400, as did Worcester, where the sixth novel, King Richard’s Sword, takes place.  A drawing of Exeter at the top, done two centuries after my story, shows the city much as it would have been in 1380.  Most of the cities were surrounded by walls, as we can see in the drawing of Exeter.  These cities were small, but other settings of my novels in the towns of Cirencester and Glastonbury and the village of Aust were smaller still.

The population figures given above for cities represent the number of permanent residents.  These numbers would have been supplemented by visitors passing through these cities or residing temporarily at the many inns which they contained.  People were attracted to urban areas from the surrounding countryside every day to take advantage of their regular markets.  Clergy, merchants, messengers, king’s officers, judges, clerks, master masons, carpenters, painters, pilgrims, itinerant preachers, and musicians came to cities looking for employment.

Even the smaller towns of Cirencester, the setting for Templar’s Prophecy, and Glastonbury, setting for Joseph of Arimathea’s Treasure, had markets, monasteries, and special services which drew people from outside.  The tiny village of Aust, setting for Effigy of the Cloven Hoof and Usurper’s Curse, was a terminus of the southernmost ferry from England to Wales.  Many people passed through Aust on their journeys between England and Wales.

The cities usually had walls for defence, and the main streets within the walls were often those that led from the principal gates.  Along these main streets, people who could afford it lived in nice three-storey buildings which were long and narrow.  This was the case for Lady Apollonia in Memento Mori.  She lived in Windemere House on West Gate Street in Gloucester.  The ground floor was sometimes used for commercial purposes with the upper floors providing residential space.  As one got away from these finer parts of cities, the buildings were smaller, the lanes were narrower, and everything was less attractive.

Churches dominated the landscape of many urban areas.  The cathedrals in Exeter and Worcester were massive compared with buildings around them.  The same can be said for the monastic churches in Gloucester, Cirencester, and Glastonbury.  Even in the village of Aust, the parish church sits at a high point and stands in a dominating position over the village.  All the churches in my settings, except the monastic churches in Cirencester and Glastonbury, exist today and are still prominent in the modern landscape.  In medieval times, there were walls around many of these church and monastic precincts.  A castle may have occupied a tenth of a city’s area.  Half the area within a city’s walls was often devoted to religious institutions and the castle.  This meant that space for residents could be very precious.

The amount of the landscape in the vast countryside with trees was about seven percent, much the same as today.  Yet, the woods were carefully managed in medieval times because people were very dependent on wood as a fuel and for other purposes.  Some wood had to be imported from Scandinavia and other places for special purposes because the number of varieties of trees in England was limited.

The fourteenth century landscape of England was affected by various factors beyond the control of man.  For example, the mean temperature dropped by one degree Celsius between 1300 and 1400.  This doesn’t sound like much, but it changed England from a country which produced much wine in 1300 to one that could only import that beverage a hundred years later.  The climate change resulting from this temperature drop sometimes brought too much rainfall and a host of related problems such as crops rotting in the fields.

Another factor on the changing landscape was the series of attacks of plague visiting England starting in mid-14th-century.  The plague reduced the population by a third or more which meant that some farmland had to change its use to grazing for lack of manpower to tend crops.

Rivers and harbours sometimes silted up causing devastation to some towns.  At the same time, reclamation of lowlands in the fens of East Anglia and in the Somerset Levels changed wetlands into farmland.  This was occurring around Glastonbury at the time of my fifth novel, Joseph of Arimathea’s Treasure.

London does not have a major role in my first six novels, but it does play a significant part in the forthcoming seventh book, Usurper’s Curse.  Therefore, I will mention its relationship to the landscape.  I have already indicated that it was more than three times larger than any other city in England.  It was also richer, more vibrant and polluted, and most powerful, colourful, violent, and diverse.  The largest cities on the continent were Bruges, Ghent, Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome, all with at least 50,000.  London is the only English city that can be compared with these.  Also, Westminster which housed some government functions was connected to London by the Strand.  Yet, much of the government was itinerant.  King Richard II held his parliaments in various cities including Gloucester.

Time Travel to Medieval England

November 21st, 2017 by ellenfoster

For over a year I have been posting information about the venues in which the first six novels of my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries have been set.  I have supplemented these posts with others about some medieval phenomenon such as the plague which has appeared in one of my stories.  I have also posted links for purchasing paperback or ebook versions of my books.

These blog posts have been supplemented with posts on three Facebook pages: My own Ellen Foster author page, a Lady Apollonia page, and the personal page of my husband, Louis Foster.  Each of these Facebook postings has included a short text along with one or two pictures.  Most of the pictures were taken by my husband in the parts of the West Country of England which I have described in my blog.

Currently I am writing the seventh and last novel in the series, Usurper’s Curse.  It is set in Lady Apollonia’s home village of Aust in 1408 but has many scenes set in London at the time of King Henry IV, the usurper who deposed King Richard II in 1399.  There will be more to say in future blog posts about the new story when it is closer to publication.

Meanwhile, I intend to use this blog in the coming months to discuss some general topics about medieval England.  I plan to base my postings on the table of contents in Ian Mortimer’s book, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century.  The front jacket cover of the American edition is pictured above.  Ian Mortimer has also written other books dealing with my period.  One that I have found these to be very helpful in my current project is The Fears of Henry IV: The life of England’s Self-Made King.

Topics for my monthly postings will include the landscape, the people, the medieval character, basic elements, what to wear, travelling, where to stay, what to eat and drink, health and hygiene, the law, and what to do.  As I deal with these topics I hope to relate them to my stories.  Next month the topic will be the medieval landscape of England.

Links to buy Richard

November 14th, 2017 by ellenfoster

Worcester Cathedral from across the River Severn

Last month, I posted articles on this blog related to King Richard’s Sword, the sixth novel written in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series.  This story is set in Worcester, England, in 1399-1400.  If you have enjoyed reading the posts about medieval Worcester and have not yet read my story, this might be a good time to order it.

 

The paperback can be ordered online
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The ebook can be ordered online
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Worcester Cathedral Architecture

October 31st, 2017 by ellenfoster

King Richard’s Sword, the sixth book in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, is set in the city of Worcester in the years 1399-1400.  At that time, the cathedral church was a priory as described in my previous posting.  The cathedral and priory play an important role in my story.

Saint Wulfstan is credited with planning and starting construction of many monastic buildings of the priory which was associated with the cathedral.  These were largely completed after his death in the first quarter of the 12th century.  There are some traces of what may be Anglo-Saxon or pre-Norman architecture in the cloister of Worcester Cathedral.  These traces are found in all the walls of the cloister except the north wall.  This suggests to me that the cloister, the refectory, and perhaps the dormitory may have been started before the Norman Conquest in 1066.

The chapter house was not started until the beginning of the 12th century after Wulfstan’s death but was completed by 1125.  Its Norman work was unusual because it was circular on the interior and polygonal on the outside.  The central pillar has a base which is 13th century.  Further revisions were executed in the 14th century, giving the chapter house a mixture of Norman and Gothic styles by the time of my novel.  That is still the case today.

Saint Wulfstan started his new church in 1084 from which the crypt still survives under the quire of the present church.  The crypt and the part of the cathedral directly above it were completed in 1089.  Wulstan’s church plain and massive, and plastered and white-washed inside and out.  The footprint of his church was essentially the same as that of the nave, the main transepts, and the western part of the quire of the modern church.

Two Western bays of the nave were rebuilt in Transitional Style around 1170.  A fire in 1113 (which I mentioned in my posting of October 17) and a tower collapse in 1175 contributed to a need for major restoration of the church.  This was almost complete by 1218, so King Henry III attended a service of rededication in that year.

The Edgar Tower is an impressive gatehouse which was originally built in the early 13th century and then remodelled in the 14th century.

Construction of a Lady Chapel in the Early English Gothic style began in 1224.  This led to a much-enlarged east end of the cathedral beyond the apsidal end of Wulfstan’s church.  The rebuilding of the nave under Bishop Cobham commenced in 1317.  By the end of the century, the largely Gothic church which has survived to the present day was in place, despite interruptions in construction due to the plague that struck England in mid-century.

The present central tower was completed in 1374.  It is interesting from an architectural viewpoint because the top portion is of the English Decorated Gothic style, while the section below is of the later Perpendicular style.  Perhaps, that section was originally more open and was modified subsequently.  It is also interesting that at some point buttressing for the tower piers was added in the eastern-most bay of the nave arcade.

The monastic buildings in 1399-1400 also included a great hall commonly called Guesten Hall just south of the south transept in 1327.  I had the pardoner in my novel, Brandon Landow, stay in that facility.  The ruin of that hall next to the church is pictured on the right.  The refectory survived the Dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII and is now the great hall of the King’s School which he founded.  The dormitory on the west of the cloister was not so fortunate.

The 14th century work on the cathedral also included a magnificent north porch to the church, completed in 1386, which Lady Apollonia used to enter the church in my novel.  It is shown in the picture on the top left.  I made one of the characters in my novel, Goran Carter, a patron of that project by contributing carving to the newly built porch around 1395.

For more on these subjects, click on
http://www.worcestercathedral.co.uk/Heritage.php or on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Cathedral or on
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/worcs/vol4/pp394-408

Worcester Cathedral History

October 24th, 2017 by ellenfoster

King Richard’s Sword, the sixth book in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, is set in the city of Worcester in the years 1399-1400.  As mentioned in my last posting, Worcester has been the seat of a bishop since before the end of the first millennium.  A diocese was founded, and Bosel was consecrated as first bishop in 680 although there had probably been a Roman Christian community with a church on this site since the 4th century.  The first cathedral was dedicated to Saint Peter.

Around 981, Saint Oswald became bishop and built a new cathedral dedicated to Saint Mary, and it stood next to Saint Peter’s until after the Norman Conquest.  Oswald also founded a Benedictine priory at Saint Mary’s, so the church served the priory and as the Cathedral of Worcester.  This remained the case for hundreds of years including the time of my novel and beyond into the 16th century when King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

The cathedral was known as Worcester Priory before the English Reformation when the Diocese of Worcester also included the present Diocese of Gloucester. The picture above shows the tomb of King John I in the Quire of the church.  As a monastic cathedral, it was included as one of England’s monastic cathedrals about which I posted on August 3, 2016.  After the Dissolution of the monasteries, it has continued to be a cathedral to the present.  Now it is known officially as the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Mary the Virgin of Worcester.

In 1062 Saint Wulfstan, already serving as Prior of Worcester, was appointed Bishop of Worcester serving until his death in 1095.  He was the last of the English, pre-Norman Conquest bishops when he died.  Under his tutelage, the number of monks increased from ten to fifty.  Wulfstan also developed a plan for the monastic buildings.  I will say more about them in my next posting.

There is an interesting story of how Wulfstan retained his bishopric after the Norman Conquest.  William the Conqueror, wanted to replace Anglo-Saxon bishops with Normans of whose loyalty he could be sure.  At a meeting in Westminster Abbey, the new Norman Archbishop Lanfranc therefore tried to replace Wulfstan as Bishop of Worcester. Legend says Lanfranc ordered Wulfstan to surrender his bishop’s staff and ring.  Wulfstan refused to remove the ring, saying he would wear it to the grave.  He placed the staff on the tomb of King Edward the Confessor, saying he yielded it to the king who made him a bishop and that St Edward ‘will surrender it to whom he chooses’.  The new appointee could not pick up the staff, which remained miraculously attached to the tomb until Wulfstan picked it up – and was allowed to continue as bishop. In the drawing on the right from Trinity College, Cambridge Archbishop Lanfranc, left, reads while Wulfstan, holding his staff, listens.

Wulfstan was canonised in 1203, and his tomb, as well as Oswald’s, became important places for pilgrims to visit.  I posted a blog article on Saint Wulfstan on October 10, 2016.  Another important burial at Worcester was that of King John in 1216.  The king’s tomb is pictured above left.

For more on Worcester Cathedral, click on
http://www.worcestercathedral.co.uk/Heritage.php or on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Cathedral or on
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/worcs/vol4/pp394-408

Worcester History

October 17th, 2017 by ellenfoster

King Richard’s Sword, the sixth book in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, is set in the city of Worcester in the years 1399-1400.  Worcester is located on the east side of the River Severn midway between Gloucester to the south and Shrewsbury to the north.  These were principal medieval towns that grew at places where the river could be forded, especially at low tide.  Begun as Roman towns, they had each provided access to Wales long before the Roman period.  Worcester grew at a location on the river which could readily be defended.

The name of Worcester suggests that the Romans occupied this place, but very little is known about the Roman town beyond its existence.  The Roman walls probably enclosed a smaller area than did the later medieval walls, parts of which remain today.  Roman coins from the 1st to the 4th centuries have been recovered.  Enough fragments from the Roman period existed at the time of the Norman Conquest to recognise the site as a “chester” or Roman castre.

The Romans themselves may have called this place Vertis.  Its name then evolved over the centuries from Uueogorna in the 7th century to Weogorna ceastre (or Fort of the Weogorna) by the 9th.  The Weogorna were the people of the winding river.  The picture at the top shows a bend which the River Severn makes at Worcester.  The city name became Wirccester in the 11th and 12th, centuries, Wigornia from the 12th to 17th, and finally Worcester.

Christian churches in Worcester have been important for more than thirteen centuries.  In the later 7th century, a church dedicated to Saint Peter was built and soon became the seat of a bishop.  This has been the cathedra of a bishop ever since.  I will write about the history of Worcester Cathedral in my next post.

The defences of Worcester were bolstered in the late 9th century, a period when the country was threatened by the Danes.  It was also a time when Worcester achieved some status as a borough, complete with a borough court.  The market of the town was important and provided a source of revenue for the build-up of its defences which influenced the location of the walls built in the medieval period.

The map which is pictured below shows medieval Worcester and its city wall and gates.  Sidbury Gate and Frog Gate at the bottom play their role in my story.  Both Lady Apollonia, my heroine, and Bryan Landow, the pardoner, are mentioned in the story as passing through the Fore Gate at the top of the picture.  Although it is not stated explicitly, there are instances in the story when various characters passed through Saint Clement’s Gate on the upper left of the map because they crossed the river.

Worcester often endured turbulent times.  There was a rebellion in 1041 in reaction to the heavy taxes imposed by the Danish king.  Within three years of the Norman Conquest, a motte and bailey castle was built on the southwest corner of the town.  The 12th century saw four major fires consuming Worcester.  On 19 June 1113, the town including its cathedral and castle were destroyed in a major fire.  There were several local battles in the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.  One of these resulted in a major fire in November 1131.  Eight years later, a part of the city was burned when it was taken by a garrison from Gloucester.  Finally, nearly the whole town was destroyed by fire in 1189.

Worcester was granted it first charter in in 1227 by King Henry III.  Among its provisions, the charter granted the town a merchant gild or guild.  It also provided that two local bailiffs would have precedence within the town over the sheriff of the County of Worcestershire.  The gildhall became the local court of justice.  Some Jews played a role in 12th century Worcester, especially as usurers, but by the end of the next century, Jews had been banned from England.  Thus, others emerge as usurers and money lenders.  They play a role in my story which is set at the end of the 14th century.

Worcester grew in prosperity in the 14th century despite the Black Death which reduced the population in 1348-49.  The town’s population was around 2,600 people in 1377.  It was important as a distribution centre for the western Midlands because of its bridge crossing the River Severn on the route to Wales.  The manufacture of cloth became an important local industry, and continued well beyond the period of my book.

For more on the history of Worcester, click on
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/worcs/vol4/pp376-390 or on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester#History

Links to buy Joseph

October 10th, 2017 by ellenfoster

In recent weeks, I have been posting articles on this blog related to Joseph of Arimathea’s Treasure, the fifth novel written in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series.  This story is set in Glastonbury, England, in 1395.  If you have enjoyed reading the posts about medieval Glastonbury and have not yet read my story, this might be a good time to order it.

 

The paperback can be ordered online
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or from Barnes and Noble by clicking
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or from Lulu Press on sale by clicking
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The ebook can be ordered online
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or from Barnes and Noble for the Nook by clicking
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Happy reading!

Glastonbury Legends

October 3rd, 2017 by ellenfoster

Glastonbury in 1397 is the setting for Joseph of Arimathea’s Treasure, the fifth novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series.  This location is rich in legends, particularly in the medieval period.  The two figures who are most important in the legends that arose in the medieval period and later are King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea.  Glastonbury Abbey advanced the legends about these men, beginning in the 11th century in the case of King Arthur and especially from the late 12th through the 15th centuries with Joseph of Arimathea.

In 1191, seven years after the destruction of the abbey by a great fire, Abbot Henry de Sully ordered his monks to dig in the cemetery just south of the Lady Chapel.  The result of their work was the discovery of a body which they identified as King Arthur.  This exhumation is depicted in the drawing shown above.  Note that the Norman Lady Chapel was still under construction.  A second body was identified as Guinevere, Arthur’s second wife.

Meanwhile, the abbey sought to rebuild what had been destroyed by fire, and this led to the great Gothic abbey church on the site at the time of my novel.  The bones of Arthur and Guinevere were reburied in the new church in 1278 in a ceremony important enough to be attended by King Edward I and Queen Eleanor of England.  Obviously, this tomb attracted pilgrims to the abbey and helped contribute to its great wealth.

Glastonbury was viewed by many people in the medieval period as the Isle of Avalon.  Although it is not actually an island, the town and its Tor is on a peninsula which rises out of the Somerset Levels like an island.  This contributed to the legend of King Arthur in Glastonbury.  After the Dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII, the tomb was destroyed.  Today, there is a sign in the grassy area where the quire once stood which indicates that the tomb of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere once resided there.

For more on the legends of King Arthur, click on
http://www.britainexpress.com/Myths/Glastonbury_King_Arthur.htm or on
http://www.britannia.com/history/arthur/abbey4.html .

Joseph of Arimathea was a disciple of Christ who made his cave-tomb available to house the dead body of Jesus after the Crucifixion.  There are extensive legends concerning Joseph of Arimathea making visits to England and Glastonbury.  The most basic is that he came after the Resurrection bringing the Holy Grail.  The Chalice Well near the Tor is involved in this legendary story.  The red colour which springs forth from this well is attributed to the blood of the Christ brought in the Holy Grail.  A variation has Joseph bringing two cruets, one containing blood of Jesus, another containing his sweat as shown in the picture on the right which is one of the stained-glass windows in Saint John the Baptist parish church in Glastonbury that tell the legends of Joseph of Arimathea.

Another feature of the basic legend has arisen in recent centuries.  It says that Joseph stood resting on Wearyall Hill on the southwest edge of Glastonbury.  When he brought down his staff hard onto the earth, it suddenly bloomed, becoming a hawthorn, which blooms every Christmas and May and sometimes in between.  The so-called Glastonbury Thorn is still part of modern folk-culture.  It has been featured on a British postage stamp, and a sprig of flowers from it is sent to the Queen of England every Christmas.  The Glastonbury Thorn on Wearyall Hill has been vandalised in recent years but copies of it are to be found in the abbey grounds and in front of the parish church of Saint John the Baptist as well as by the abbey tithe barn.

There are other legends about Joseph of Arimathea.  One is that he was the uncle of the Virgin Mary and brought his teenage nephew, Jesus, to Glastonbury.  We know that ancient peoples from the Mediterranean area got to Cornwall with the tin trade.  If someone sailed to Cornwall at that time, Glastonbury could also be reached by ship.  At high tide, the Bristol Channel reached all the way to Glastonbury.  This was before the Romans and the medieval monks began reclaiming vast areas of Somerset from the sea.  In Joseph’s time, such a voyage was feasible.

Another Joseph legend is that he led the first missionaries in bringing Christianity to Britain around 63 AD.  The abbots of Glastonbury used this story to enhance their claim to be the first monastery in England.  At the time of my story and in the next century, they were promoting some of these legends.  There is a well in the crypt of the Lady Chapel which was renamed Joseph’s Well, and I have used that well in my story.

For more on the legends about Joseph of Arimathea, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Arimathea or on
http://www.glastonburyabbey.com/joseph_of_arimathea.php or on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/thepassion/articles/joseph_of_arimathea.shtml .

Glastonbury Tor

September 26th, 2017 by ellenfoster

Glastonbury in 1397 is the setting for Joseph of Arimathea’s Treasure, the fifth novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery Series.  The dominant topographic feature of the entire area is Glastonbury Tor, a hill which rises 520 feet above the town and the Somerset Levels which surround it.  There is some evidence of Christian activity on the Tor even earlier than we know of its existence in the town.  It may also have been the location of a Romano-British shrine well before the Christian era.

Glastonbury Tor, as shown in the picture, plays a major role in my story.  Because of ties between Glastonbury Abbey and Cornwall and the Tor’s ancient importance to the Celts, I decided to include some Celtic characters in the story who have a keen religious interest in the Tor as part of the novel.  To do this, I have introduced two Druids, a man and his mother from a remote part of Ireland, who come to Glastonbury with a mission related to Glastonbury Tor.  A small Christian priory, Saint Michael’s, stood atop the Tor in 1397, and some interaction between the monks and the Druids plays out in Joseph of Arimathea’s Treasure.

Archaeology has produced finds from at least the Iron Age, so we know that the Tor has been occupied or visited regularly for millenia.  This has led to considerable speculation about its use by various groups including pre-Christian Celts, Romano-British people, Celtic Christians, Anglo-Saxon Christians in the pre-Norman Conquest period.  Since the Conquest, there are better records of the monastic developments on the Tor.  A 10th century chapel on the Tor was destroyed by a 13th century earthquake with the priory church being rebuilt in the 14th century.  Its tower remains today at the top of the hill.

In my blog posting of August 22, 2017, I discussed the Celtic Lake Village which was a few miles northwest of Glastonbury and the Tor.  It was regarded as being religiously significant by the Celts that at the time of the Winter Solstice the sunrise would appear to the Lake Villagers exactly over the Tor as would the southernmost moonrise of each year.  This is shown in the map on the right.

The same experience is true for an observer on Saint Edmund’s Hill which lies between Glastonbury Abbey and the Tor.  For such an observer, the sun not only appears to be rising from the peak at the winter solstice but can be seen briefly at six indentations going up the left side of the Tor.  The indentations are part of symmetrical terraces on the sides of the hill.  They are more obvious as one approaches the Tor from a distance.  The terraces may have been used in the medieval period by the monks for agricultural purposes, but no one knows how much they are natural or were created by human hands.  It is possible that they have some ancient, unknown ceremonial or religious meaning.  The terraces can be seen to form a winding path or a labyrinth, defining the Tor as a seven-tiered pyramid. My heroine, the Lady Apollonia, became interested in this ancient path and drew her version of it while climbing the Tor.

There are also connections made between the Tor and the legends of King Arthur.  The Tor is sometimes called the Isle of Avalon.  I will discuss these legends in my next posting.

The Druids in my story are leaders of the intellectual class of the Celts but they were leaders who ran across tribal lines in Celtic society.  The little that we know about them before the Christian era comes from Greek and Roman writers who were generally not very sympathetic with the Celts.  Before Celtic Christianity, the Celts had no written language, but Druids were the spiritual leaders of their people who preserved knowledge through their oral tradition.  Indeed, the training of a Druid is thought to have taken as long as two decades of his/her life.  The Druids were the philosophers, judges, teachers, historians, poets, musicians, astronomers, philosophers, prophets, priests, and political advisers.  Some became political leaders in Celtic society, but not all leaders of the tribes were Druids.

The mission of the two Druids in my story involves Tor burrs or eggstones.  These are hard oval or egg-shaped stones which can vary in diameter from a fraction of an inch to a few feet.  Their exact cause of formation is unknown, but it may be that the local iron-rich water percolating through the sand began to accrete around small modules that eventually grew into  the Tor’s eggstones.

For more on Glastonbury Tor, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Tor or on
http://www.glastonburytor.org.uk/introduction.html .