Glastonbury is a name that conjures many images and associations. Steeped in Arthurian history and legend by the notable historical talents of William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales, and remediated through different manifestations of story-telling and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, it remains a real place, just this side of the fantasy landscape of Camelot. The site of the abbey lies at the core of this imagined topography, and has attracted a series of archaeological investigations in the course of the twentieth century that have both fired and fed mythical readings of place. It is these excavations that are critically reviewed in this important new study, which also seriously engages with the archaeology of the post-conquest abbey for the first time.
Generously endowed by royal patrons from the seventh century, the Benedictine house had become the second richest monastery in the country by the time of the Dissolution. Although most of its medieval fabric disappeared at this time, the ruins of the church and the surviving abbot's kitchen are very visible testimony to the lifestyle of its lord and the grandeur of its buildings.
In terms of project management alone, the authors have presented themselves with a considerable challenge, aiming to review the primary evidence from all of the various excavation campaigns, much of which has been previously inaccessible. It is also clear that the extant finds are only a part of the material recovered from these excavations: earlier listings include material that has now disappeared.
The volume is ordered into three introductory chapters addressing the chronology of excavations; the results of new geophysical survey, which proved an important tool in refining the precise locations of the archaeologists’ trenches; post-excavation methodology; and a general review of the abbey in its setting. These are followed by four chapters dealing with the sequence of buildings in different areas of the site, a review of finds and a final chronology and discussion. A digital archive has also been created through the Archaeology Data Service (http://dx.doi.org/10.5284/1022585), which provides some additional material including a detailed image catalogue of the artefacts. The report generally avoids critique of the different strategies used to explore and record the site over the decades, accepting that they are of their time; this is a constructive approach that at least partly spares the reader from a lengthy dissection of detail.
Archaeological interest, driven by its most influential investigator, Ralegh Radford, has mostly focused on the earliest phases of the site and his published interpretation that meshed history and legend with the archaeological record, in a sequence of identifiable building episodes. For Radford, this sequence began with an early British monastic community, succeeded by an Anglo-Saxon royal foundation of the late seventh century that was later reformed and rebuilt by Dunstan in the tenth century, along classic Benedictine claustral lines. By the twelfth century, the monks were very actively engaged in the production of their own history, famously excavating the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere in 1191; Radford believed he had successfully located the site of this pioneering archaeological endeavour.
Scrutiny of the archive has tempered this narrative, revealing the tenuous nature of the evidence that underpins it, but also adding much to our understanding of the post-conquest monastery, which also had an interesting and dramatic history. The first major re-planning along orthodox Benedictine lines is now attributed to Henry of Blois (d. 1171), long-serving abbot and bishop, whose great abbey, constructed in the mid-twelfth century, was almost entirely destroyed by a fire in 1184. We learn that its replacement was, presumably intentionally, decoratively conservative, respecting the architectural authority of its predecessor. Furthermore, lesser rebuilding projects continued into the fifteenth century.
There are some benefits of working on old material in the twenty-first century. The artefact studies are new and of much interest, demonstrating the advances made in both scientific analysis and specialist knowledge in recent decades, and the increasing precision that this facilitates. The tile report by Harcourt, for example, confidently identifies different production sites based on fabric analysis as well as typology, demonstrating the way in which the abbey acted as a node for the regional distribution of styles of paving; she can identify a heraldic group precisely linked to the marriage of Edmund, Earl of Cornwall in 1272. Baxter, in his review of the Romanesque architectural sculpture, argues that it is linked stylistically to comparable material at Winchester and elsewhere through the person of Henry of Blois, who commissioned the cloister arcade from which many of the fragments seem to derive.
One of the most interesting archaeological discoveries at Glastonbury is surely the evidence for Anglo-Saxon glass working, first identified under the later medieval cloister in 1955 by Radford, who attributed it to the tenth century. Radiocarbon dating has now convincingly demonstrated that the kilns are linked to the monastery established by King Ine in the late seventh century. Wilmott and Welham's appraisal of the archive has now identified five furnaces, where glass cullet from the eastern Mediterranean and possibly also from local Roman sites was recycled into both vessels and window glass, as part of Ine's building project.
The volume is extremely well produced, with numerous colour phase plans to assist in understanding the interpretation of the often bewildering stratigraphy; although considerable care has been taken with these, many are still quite hard to follow. Overall, a good job has been made of a tough challenge, but there can be little doubt that Glastonbury still retains some of its secrets. Fortunately, there is still quite a lot of archaeology left below ground for future generations to explore.
