good. Here in Massachusetts, for example, it would shut up all the tippling places. Our law does not contemplate the licensing of any open bar, or of any grog shop in which the selling of liquor is the only real business. The licensing of every such place is a violation of law. If our law were enforced, no liquor would be sold to minors, nor to intoxicated persons, nor to habitual drunkards; and none could be sold on Sundays, nor between twelve o'clock at night and six in the morning. So far as these clauses are concerned the law is prohibitory. If these prohibitory clauses of the law were vigorously enforced, and if the meaning of the law with respect to the licensing of tippling places were also insisted on, a very large share of the mischief done by the sale of liquors would be prevented. The law could be enforced if decent people would half try, and if "leading" temperance folks would not hinder. The prohibitory clauses could not be perfectly executed, of course; no law is perfectly executed; but they could be made a great deal more stringent in operation than they now are. It could be made so dangerous to sell liquor to boys, and to intoxicated persons, and on Sundays, that few men would venture to do it. This would be an immense gain, and if our friends of the new departure secure the co-operation of temperance men and women in enforcing these express provisions of the laws, they will deserve well of the Commonwealth. They will not, by such measures, bring the millennium; that will not be produced by statute or proclamation; but they will do something toward clearing the way for it.

WASHINGTON GLADDEN.

GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH.*

IN taking the chair of this society for the second time, and in taking it in such a place as that where we are now met, I find the course of the opening address which you look for from the mouth of your President chalked out for me by the nature of the place itself. We have sometimes met in places of less historical renown, whose local story would hardly supply materials for an address of this. kind. In such places we are driven to say less of the particular spot where we were met, and more of the general subjects of our studies. It is otherwise in the place where we are come together to-day. Here, at Glastonbury, we have assuredly no lack of work before us, even if we keep ourselves to the history of Glastonbury only. It is not my business to-day to speak of the details of the history of Glaston

*Read as the President's opening address at the meeting of the Somerset Archæological and Natural History Society at Glastonbury, August 17, 1880. The main aspect of Glastonbury history here worked out more fully, was hinted at in the article on "The Shire and the Ga," in Macmillan for April, 1880.

Nor

bury, still less to speak of the details of its buildings. shall I have time to follow the history of Glastonbury for more than a few stages of its long historic being. And, as I feel no call to parade my ignorance by talking about what I do not understand, least of all am I tempted to hold forth on the geological peculiarities of the district. Still, the country has natural features which must force themselves even on an untechnical eye, and those natural features are closely connected with the history. More truly they are the key to the history, the causes of the history. I shall do best to keep myself to those features in local history and legends which are most distinctive, which are in truth altogether unique, and which give the spot on which we stand an historic character unlike that of any other spot.

We will ask, then, first of all, What is the history of Glastonbury? Every one can answer at once that it is the history of a great monastery. The history of Glastonbury is the history of its abbey. Without its abbey, Glastonbury were nothing. The history of Glastonbury is not as the history of York, or Chester, or Lincoln, or Exeter; it is not as the history of Bristol, or Oxford, or Norwich, or Coventry. It is not the stirring history of a great city or of a great military post. The military, the municipal, and the commercial history of Glastonbury might be written in a small compass, and it would very largely belong to modern times. The history of Glastonbury is a purely ecclesiastical history, a history like that of Wells and Lichfield, of Peterborough, and Crowland. Again, unlike the history of Wells and Lichfield, but like the history of Peterbough and Crowland, it is a purely monastic history. No one who has read the signatures to the Great Charter can fail to know that there have been bishops of Glastonbury; but Glastonbury looked on its bishops as only momentary intruders, and was glad to pay a great price to get rid of them. But even the short reign of the bishops did not affect the purely monastic character of Glastonbury; no one ever tried at Glastonbury, as was tried at Winchester, at Coventry, and at Malmesbury, to displace the monks in favor of secular priests. But again, among monastic histories, the history of Glastonbury has a character of its own which is wholly unique. I will not insult its venerable age by so much as contrasting it with the foundations of yesterday which arose under the influence of the Cistercian movement, which have covered some parts of England with the loveliest of ruins in the loveliest of sites, but which play but a small part indeed in the history of this church and realm. Glastonbury is something more than Netley and Tintern, than Rievaux and Fountains. But it is something more again than the Benedictine houses which arose at the bidding of the Norman Conquerer, of his house or of his companions. It is something more than Selby and Battle, than Shrewsbury and Reading. It is, in its own special aspect, something more even than that royal minster of Saint Peter, the crowning-place of Harold and of William,

which came to supplant Glastonbury as the burial-place of kings. Nay, it stands out distinct, as having a special character of its own, even among the great and venerable foundations of English birth, which were already great and venerable when the Conqueror came. There is something at Glastonbury which there is not at Peterborough and Crowland and Evesham, in the two minsters of Canterbury and the two minsters of Winchester. Those are the works of our own people; they go back to the days of our ancient kingship; they go back, some of them, to the days of our earliest Christianity; but they go back no further. We know their beginnings; we know their founders; their history, their very legends. do not dare to trace up their very foundations beyond the time of our coming into this island. Winchester indeed has a tale which carries up the sanctity of the spot to Lucius the King and Eleutherius the Pope; but legend itself does not attempt to bridge over the whole space, or to deny that, whatever Lucius and Eleutherius may have done, Cenwealh and Birinus had to do over again, as though it had never been done. The mighty house of Saint Alban, in its site, in its name, in the very materials of its gigantic minster, carries us back beyond the days of our own being in this land. But it is only in its site, in its name, in its materials, that it does so. If the church of Roman Alban was built of Roman bricks on the site of Alban's martyrdom, it was built by English and Norman hands; it was built because an English king had of his own choice thought good to honor the saint of another people who had died ages before his time. But there is no historic or even legendary continuity between the days of Alban the saint and the days of Offa the founder. It is at Glastonbury, alone among the great churches of Britain-we instinctively feel that on this spot the name of England is out of place -that we walk with easy steps, with no thought of any impassable barrier, from the realm of Arthur into the realm of Ine. Here alone does legend take upon itself to go up, not only to the beginnings of English Christianity, but to the beginnings of Christianity itself. Here alone do the early memories of the other nations and other Churches of the British Islands gather round a holy place which long possession at least made English. Here alone, alongside of the memory and the tombs of West-Saxon princes who broke the power of the Northman, there still abides the memory, for ages there was shown the tomb, of the British prince who, if he did not break, at least checked for a generation, the advancing power of the West-Saxon. The church which was the resting place of Eadgar, of his father and of his grandson, claimed to be also the resting place of Arthur. But at Glastonbury this is a small matter. The legends of the spot go back to the days of the Apostles. We are met at the very beginning by the names of Saint Philip and Saint James, of the twelve disciples, with Joseph of Arimathæa at their head. Had Wells or even Bath laid claim

to such an illustrious antiquity, their claims might have been laughed to scorn by the most ignorant; at Glastonbury such claims, if not easy to prove, were at least not easy to disprove. If the Belgian Venta claims ten parts in her own Lucius, the isle of Avalon claims some smaller share in him. We read the tale of Fagan and Deruvian; we read of Indractus and Gildas, and Patrick and David, and Columb and Bridget, all dwellers in or visitors to the first spot where the Gospel had shone in Britain. No fiction, no dream, coulá have dared to set down the names of so many worthies of the earlier races of the British islands in the Liber Vitæ of Durham or of Peterborough. Now, I do not ask you to believe these legends; I do ask you to believe that there was some special cause why legends of this kind should grow, at all events why they should grow in such a shape and in such abundance, round Glastonbury alone of all the great monastic churches of Britain. And I ask you to come on to something more like history. Elsewhere even forged charters do not venture to go beyond the days of Æthelberht. But Glastonbury professed to have a charter dating, as far as chronology goes, only from the days of Ethelberht, but which claimed, truly or falsely, to belong to a state of things which in Kent would carry us back before the days of Hengest. In one page of his history William of Malmesbury records a charter of the year 601 granted by a king of Damnonia whose name he could not make out, to an abbot whose name--will our Welsh friends, if any are here to-day, forgive him? -at once proclaimed his British barbarism.* Then follows a charter of 670 of our own West-Saxon Cenwealh. Then follows one of 678 of Centwine the King, then one of Baldred the King, then the smaller and greater charters of Ine the glorious King. Except the difficulty of making out his name, there is nothing to hint that any greater gap parted the unknown Damnonian from Cenwealh than that which parted Cenwealh from Centwine, Baldred, and Ine. One, to be sure, is King of Damnonia, another is King of the West-Saxons. But that might be a mere change of title, as when the King of the West-Saxons grew into the King of the English. The feeling with which we read that page of William of Malmesbury's History of Glastonbury is the same as that with which we read one of those lists of Emperors in which Charles the Great succeeds Constantine the Sixth, with no sign of break or change. It is the feeling with which we read those endless entries in Domesday, from which we might be led to believe that William the Conqueror was the peaceful successor of Eadward the Confessor. In this, as in ten thousand other cases, the language of formal documents would by itself never

* See the alleged charter in Gale's edition, 308. Hearne, 48. The date is given as 601, the king is described as "Rex Domnoniæ," and it is added, "Quis Iste rex fuerit scedulæ vetustas negat scire." There is a curious marginal note in Hearne's edition.

lead us to understand the great facts and revolutions which lurk beneath their formal language.

But we must stop to see what legends and documents prove as well as what they do not prove. We need not believe that the Glastonbury legends are records of facts; but the existence of those legends is a very great fact. I will not as yet search into the genuineness of either the Damnonian or the West-Saxon document. They are equally good for my purpose, even if both of them can be shown to be forgeries. The point is this. Compare Glastonbury and Canterbury. We have no legends tracing up the foundation of Christ Church or Saint Augustine's to the days of the Apostles, or to the days of any Roman emperor or British king. Instead of such legends we have a bit, perhaps, of genuine history, at all events of highly-probable tradition, which seems to show that, in setting up new churches for men of English race, some regard was paid to the still-remembered sites and ruins which had once been the churches of men of Roman or English race. * In most places we do not find even this much of remembrance of the state of things which had passed away; at Canterbury we do find this much. But this is widely different from the absolute continuity of the Glastonbury legends, in which Joseph of Arimathæa and Dunstan appear as actors in different scenes of the same drama. So again, at Canterbury no monk of Christ Church or Saint Augustine's, not the most daring forger that ever took pen in hand, would have dared to put forward a charter of Vortigern in favor of his house, immediately followed by a charter of Hengest. In Kent at least the temporal conquest of the Briton by the Jute, the spiritual conquest of Jute by the Roman, were too clearly stamped on the memories of men, they were too clearly written in the pages of Bæda, to allow of any confusion about such matters. There at least men knew that, if the reign of Woden had given way to the reign of Christ and Gregory, the reign of Christ and Cæsar had once given way to the reign of Woden. There at least the great gulf of Teutonic conquest still yawned too wide for either legends or documents to bridge it over. But here, in the isle of Avalon, legends and documents go on as if no such gulf had ever yawned at all. The truth is that this unbroken continuity cf legends-it matters not whether true or false-of documents-it matters not whether genuine or spuriousis the surest witness of the fact that in the isle of Avalon Teutonic conquest meant something widely different from what it meant in the isle of Thanet. In our Glastonbury story Teutonic conquest goes simply for nothing. My argument is that it could not have gone for nothing, even in the mind of an inventor of legends or a forger of documents, unless it had been, to say the least, something much less frightful on the banks of the Brue than it was on the

*See Bæda, 1, 33.