lost in the mists of the past, and the frequency with which St Phagan and St Deruvian meet us in the opening sections and at later points in the De Antiquitate as we read it to-day. We remember also that, whereas he attributed to the labour of these missionaries the building of the Old Church at Glastonbury, the De Antiquitate says that by their labour the church was restored, its original building being assigned to actual disciples of the Lord. Moreover we have seen reason for believing that the Charter of St Patrick, on which the De Antiquitate, as we have it, relies for the information which thus directly contradicts the statements of William of Malmesbury, was not known to the historian, and indeed cannot reasonably be supposed to have been written till many years after his death.
The account which William of Malmesbury, in the great insertion in the third edition of his Gesta Regum, has given us of the earliest history of Glastonbury is exceedingly cautious. 'Annals of good authority' tell of missionaries sent into Britain by Pope Eleutherus at the request of K. Lucius. Their names we do not know, but tradition assures us that they built the Old Church of St Mary at Glastonbury. There are indeed writings which take it back still further to actual disciples of Christ: and this is not impossible; for, if Freculfus was right in saying that St Philip the Apostle preached in Gaul, he may have sent some of his followers across the sea.
It is not conceivable that the man who wrote this non-committal statement, almost all the words of which are found embodied in the second section of the De Antiquitate, could have written only a few years before the remaining portion of that section or any part at all of the first section as it now stands. The words 'Tradunt bonae credulitates annales' form a perfectly adequate opening to an Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury. The writer courteously refers to the traditional accounts of the origin of the church, but he is anxious to get forward as quickly as possible to the declared purpose of his work. He has been irritated by the monstrous assertion of Osbern, the late precentor of Canterbury, that the first abbot of Glastonbury was St Dunstan in the tenth century. His examination of the abbey muniments has provided him with record evidence, as we call it to-day, of at least nineteen earlier abbots of the English line alone; he has found the names of three British abbots before their time; and the grave of St Patrick, still visited by Irish pilgrims, leads him to accept the local belief that the hermits who for many generations had dwelt in the neighbourhood of the Tor were first gathered into community by the Apostle of the Irish. The abbots of Glastonbury, therefore, though some of their
