한국서양중세사학회

A small rural town in Somerset, England, Glastonbury has gained its reputation as a major Arthurian site within Britain’s mythical geography since the late twelfth century, and it still enjoys the reputation nowadays. This paper aims to follow and investigate how Glastonbury earned such title, sharpening focus on the history of benedictine Glanstonbury Abbey. The crux of this paper is that the connection between King Arthur and Glastonbury is the consequence of the abbey’s deliberate, persistent, and extended investments as ways to cope with its multiple crises in post Norman Conquest period, both financial and ecclesiastical, that threatened its time-honored existence and legacy as one of the oldest Christian monasteries in England and, arguably, in Europe. The undertaking began in the onset of the twelfth century by commissioning noted historians, including William of Malmesbury and Caradoc of Llancarfan, to produce chronicles that would embellish the monastery and its founding fathers and legends. By the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when Gerald of Wales was working on his two chronicles, the abbey had King Arthur as its most famous and generous benefactor whose body it had just recently exhumed in its own ground, and it also gained another name Avalon, a Celtic otherworldly site to which the mortally wounded Arthur was claimed to have been carried off after the Battle of Camlan. Glastonbury’s legacy as the most important Arthurian site in England appears to have flourished, as the mid-15th century Thomas Malory and the late twentieth-century Marion Z. Bradley testify, though it sometimes has done so in unorthodox, ground-breaking twists.