and the almost adjacent town of Street. Here the river is crossed by an old bridge, vulgarly called "Pomparles Bridge," though its true name is Pons Periculosus. The origin of the name is unknown; but the position of the bridge is suggestive, for it is near the foot of Weary All Hill, in full view of the tree planted to commemorate St. Joseph's Holy Thorn, and in former times a sentry stationed near this tree could see and attack any stranger coming to the bridge.
The name of this bridge, so strangely recalling the Pont Perileux of the Romances, may possibly have been handed down from a time not far distant from that in which the priest-kings of Avalon challenged strangers after the fashion of the priest-kings of Nemi. The Latin name need not have been given originally by the monks, as though there are no traces of Roman occupation in Glastonbury itself, there are a few such traces in the surrounding country, and Street is the Roman strata. The name might be, however, the translation of a native appellation.
This does not exhaust all the possibilities. We find in the Perlesvaus (which alone of the Romances professes to have originated in Glastonbury Abbey) and in the Conte del Graal, as well as in the various Lancelot legends, accounts of a Graveyard Perilous which faintly echo the account of William of Malmesbury of the haunted cemetery of Glastonbury Abbey. Miss Weston has localized this place in the North of England; but if a ghostly graveyard full of unknown horrors were, as she suggests, a necessary part of the initiation terrors, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that there was more than one of these places! The Graveyard of the Conte del Graal, though unlocalized, is connected with Glastonbury by indirect implications. It is in a country which was, like Glastonbury, sacred to the Mother of God; it is in an orchard (vergier) near the settlement of some religious; and it is near that Chastel Orguelleux which the Elucidation prologue associates with the Perilous Bridge. And here the mention of the Perilous Bridge brings us to a point invariably overlooked.
A very vague local tradition says that each entrance to Avalon was guarded by a chapel and a holy well; and a few
