his own apostolic hands. For when St David came with his seven bishops thinking to consecrate the church of Glastonbury, the Lord Himself appeared to him in a vision by night and told him that He the Great High Priest had long ago dedicated the little church of wattles to the honour of His Ever-Virgin Mother.
It might indeed be supposed that of all our English monasteries none had its actual history so thoroughly explored and so well authenticated as Glastonbury Abbey. For early in the twelfth century its story was written by the famous pen of William of Malmesbury, and his work was continued by two monks of the house, Adam of Domerham who brought it down to A. D. 1291, and John of Glastonbury who abbreviated the narratives of both his predecessors and carried on the history to the end of the fifteenth century. But it has become the fashion to throw aside William of Malmesbury's Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury as a careless piece of work hastily put together to flatter the vanity of the Glastonbury monks when, for some reason which remains obscure to us, the great historian had for a time taken up his abode in their house. Nothing that the credulous fathers told him was too puerile for him to record as history while he ate their bread; and when he was gone they took his book and loaded it up with fresh fictions, so that it has no value left for serious students. This adverse judgement has seemed to be confirmed by the discovery of a tenth-century list of the English abbots of Glastonbury, which cannot be reconciled with William of Malmesbury's list in the De Antiquitate.
The names and sequence of the early abbots must be reserved for a special investigation. At present we are concerned with the general character of the book, and more particularly with the earlier portion of it. The only edition for critical purposes is contained in the first volume of Hearne's Adam of Domerham, which appeared at Oxford in 1727. Hearne had already sent to the press the main portion of his John of Glastonbury when through the good offices of Thomas Parne[1] he was enabled to borrow from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, the manuscript of Adam of Domerham—the unique copy, as he says, though large extracts were also contained in Cox Macro's Register which Tanner had borrowed for him. The De Antiquitate precedes Adam of Domerham's work in the Cambridge manuscript, and had already been edited from it by Gale in his Scriptores Quindecim (Oxford, 1691). But Gale, as Hearne says, used other people's eyes, and sleepy ones at that. Moreover he had
- ↑ Thomas Parne was fellow of Trinity College in 1720, and University Librarian from 1734 to 1751.
