proclaim the word of life and preach the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and on each of them he devoutly laid his right hand; and over them he appointed, it is said, his dearest friend, Joseph of Arimathea who had buried the Lord. They arrived in Britain in the sixty-third year from the Incarnation of the Lord, and the fifteenth from the Assumption of the Blessed Mary, and preached the faith of Christ with all confidence.'[1]
The king gave them an island on the borders of his country, surrounded by woods and thickets and marshes, called Yniswitrin. Two other kings in succession, though pagans, granted to each of them a portion of land: hence the Twelve Hides have their name to the present day. These saints were admonished by the archangel Gabriel to build a church in honour of the Blessed Virgin. They made it of twisted wattles, in the thirty-first year after the Lord's Passion and the fifteenth after the Assumption of the glorious Virgin. Since it was the first in that land, the Son of God honoured it by dedicating it to His Mother. 'Now that all this was so, we learn alike from the Charter of St Patrick and from the writings of the seniors. One of these, the historian of the Britons, as we have seen at St Edmund's and again at St Augustine's the Apostle of the English, begins as follows:
'There is on the boundary of western Britain a certain royal island. … Here the first neophytes of the Catholic law among the English found by God's guidance an ancient church, built, as it is said, by no human skill, but made ready by God for the salvation of men, which afterwards the Maker of the heavens … shewed that He had consecrated to Himself and to Mary the Holy Mother of God.'[2]
After the death of the first settlers the place became a lair of wild beasts, until it pleased the Blessed Virgin that her oratory should come again to the remembrance of the faithful: which happened on this wise:
How St Phagan and St Deruvian converted the Britons to the faith, and came to the Isle of Avalon.
Annals of good authority record (Tradunt bonae credulitatis annates) that Lucius the king of the Britons sent to Pope Eleutherius asking for Christian teachers.[3] So honourable a request deserves to be compared with the action of K. Ethelbert in later days, who hospitably received the Roman missionaries, though not himself prepared to accept their teaching. There came, then, these two holy men, Phagan and Deruvian, and preached the word in Britain in A.D. 166. When they came to the Isle of Avalon they found the church, 'built, as it is said, by the hands of the disciples of
- ↑ De Antiq., pp. 4 f. So large a quotation has been given at the outset in order that a reader who is familiar with the artistic style of William of Malmesbury may consider whether such writing as this is likely to have come from his pen. It is tempting to attach a running criticism to this analysis; but it will be better to reserve what has to be said to a later point.
- ↑ De Antiq., pp. 6 f. The quotation is from the Life of St Dunstan by the Saxon priest B: Memorials of St Dunstan (Rolls S.), pp. 6 f.
- ↑ An ancient hand has written in the margin: 'For this chapter see the whole of the fourth book and most of the fifth of the Brute (Chronicle).' Another early hand adds a note on Joseph of Arimathea and his son Josephes, referring to the Deeds of K. Arthur, and mentioning Lancelot of the Lake, the Round Table, and the Holy Grail.
