page_title: Glastonbury Abbey
section_title: Saxon era
hierarchical_section_title: Glastonbury Abbey / History / Saxon era
context_page_description: Glastonbury Abbey was a monastery in Glastonbury, Somerset, England. Its ruins, a grade I listed building and scheduled ancient monument, are open as a visitor attraction.
  The abbey was founded in the 7th century and enlarged in the 10th. It was destroyed by a major fire in 1184, but subsequently rebuilt and by the 14th century was one of the richest and most powerful monasteries in England. The abbey controlled large tracts of the surrounding land and was instrumental in major drainage projects on the Somerset Levels. The abbey was suppressed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII of England. The last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor on Glastonbury Tor in 1539.
  From at least the 12th century the Glastonbury area has been associated with the legend of King Arthur, a connection promoted by medieval monks who asserted that Glastonbury was Avalon. Christian legends have claimed that the abbey was founded by Joseph of Arimathea in the 1st century.
context_section_description: King Ine of Wessex enriched the endowment of the community of monks established at Glastonbury and reputed to have directed that a stone church be built in 712, the foundations of which form the west end of the nave. A glassworks was established at the site during the 7th century. Glastonbury was ravaged by the Danes in the 9th century. The contemporary reformed soldier Saint Neot was sacristan at Glastonbury before he founded his own establishment in Somerset. The abbey church was enlarged in the 10th century by the abbot of Glastonbury, Dunstan, the central figure in the 10th-century revival of English monastic life, who instituted the Benedictine Rule at Glastonbury. He also built the cloisters. Dunstan became Archbishop of Canterbury in 960. In 967, King Edmund was interred at Glastonbury. In 1016 Edmund Ironside, who had lost England to Canute but held onto the title of King of Wessex, was also buried there. Cnut's charter of 1032 was "written and promulgated in the wooden church at Glastonbury, in the king's presence".
  The medieval Glastonbury Canal was built about the middle of the 10th century to link the abbey with the River Brue, a distance of about 1.75 kilometres (1,900 yd). Its purpose is believed to have been to transport stone to build the abbey, but later it was used to transport produce, including grain, wine and fish, from the abbey's outlying properties. Much of the building stone came from the abbey's quarries at Doulting, accessed by way of the River Sheppey at Pilton. From the 11th century, the abbey was the centre of a large water-borne transport network as further canalisations and new channels were made, including the diversion of the Brue to access to the estate at Meare and an easier route to the Bristol Channel. In the 13th century, the abbey's head boatman transported the abbot in an eight-oared boat on visits to the abbey's nearby manors.
  During the Middle Ages, bone fragments of Saint Caesarius of Terracina were translated to Glastonbury Abbey.
caption: One of the earliest surviving manuscripts, now at the Bodleian Library, telling that Dunstan the abbot gave orders for the writing of this book
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