King Arthur

by Christopher Hibbert

Yet the monks’ story is likely true. In 1934, an archaeological team digging in the abbey ruins came across the base of King Arthur’s shrine, and in 1962, another team identified another grave the monks claimed to have dug up. It is possible that it was Arthur’s grave and that it originally had been marked by the stone slab the monks discovered, but over the years had been covered by earth and lost to view. The cross could have been placed beneath the stone when the grave was marked as Arthur’s in the tenth century when St. Dunstan was Abbot. Experts contend that its lettering could have been done then; the placing of lead crosses in graves was a common tenth-century practice. This evidence makes the story more complicated, as other Glastonbury claims were quickly discredited. Geoffrey Ashe, a well-known writer on the Arthurian legend, has pointed out: “The bones of St. Patrick and St. Dunstan were denounced as spurious by indignant voices from Ireland and Canterbury. But the Welsh made no comment on the depressing exhumation of their national chief. They offered no alternative legend, they produced no counter-Avalon [indeed, no place in Britain other than Glastonbury ever has claimed to be the Isle of Avalon], such an acquiescent hush has its own eloquence. It hints at a longstanding tradition of Arthur’s death and interment in the monastery, not widely familiar, but so fully accepted . . . that once the secret was out the English assertions could not be denied.”