And Did These Sandals Walk Upon England’s Mountains Green?

This past week, the news-wire services and newspapers have been carrying a story with headlines like ‘Jesus May Have Visited Britain, Film Suggests.’ This was from the Daily Telegraph, but as there are also Scottish and Westcountry connections, we also get more parochial headlines like ‘Jesus May Have Visited Britain, Says Controversial Scots’ and ‘Did Jesus Visit The Westcountry?’. The controversy-loving Daily Mail, perhaps encouraged by the number of viewer comments to its online edition (v. popular with expats in the US etc), followed up its story ‘Jesus May Have Visited Glastonbury With His Uncle, According To New Film’ the next day with the more challenging ‘Was Jesus Taught By The Druids Of Glastonbury? New Film Claims It Is Possible He Came To England.’ It actually went out on Reuters UK’s newswire flippantly headlined ‘Did Jesus Headline Glastonbury Before Springsteen?’ (The ‘Glastonbury’ Festival is actually held some miles away, in some farmer’s fields at Pilton.) I think it’s fair to say, from Google News results, that the story has gone right around the world.

All this is occasioned by the premiere this weekend, at London’s British Film Institute, of a documentary titled And Did Those Feet? Produced and directed by a former BBC religious-affairs correspondent, Ted Harrison, it features the theories of the Revd. Dr. Gordon Strachan, a lecturer (on the history of architecture) at the U of Edinburgh. Dr Strachan is not really all that familiar a name as an author in this field, though I suspect this will now change. He is in fact already the author of several books in this subject area, going back to Christ And The Cosmos (1985), followed by Jesus The Master Builder: Druid Mysteries And The Dawn Of Christianity (2000), Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space (2003), The Bible's Hidden Cosmology (2005), and The Return Of Merlin: Star Lore And The Patterns of History (2006). He has a particular interest in early ‘cosmic’ mathematical measurements of the sort usually associated with Pythagoras, arguing the Britons were anything but the ignorant barbarians pro-Roman English historians so often make them out to be. Dr. Strachan has a doctorate in theology from U of Edinburgh as well as a history degree from Oxford, is a Church of Scotland minister, and in the 1980s became Director of the Church of Scotland's century-old Sea Of Galilee Centre at Tiberias.

In other words, a centuries-old fringe theory of British church history has suddenly acquired a veneer of respectability. The film isn’t available yet i.e. on DVD. Given its 45-minute running time, I suspect it’s got a distribution deal with an overseas cable network, probably in the USA for a showing at Xmas or Easter. (The US has more commercials time per hour – British docus usually run 50 or even 52 mins.) However, Dr. Strachan’s 300pp Jesus The Master Builder: Druid Mysteries And The Dawn Of Christianity covers similar ground. (Published in 2000, it’s out of print, and won’t be reprinted till Sep 2010 - it’s by a small Edinburgh publisher - but the interested reader can chase up copies via resellers.) To quote from the publisher’s blurb on Amazon:

The activities of Jesus before the start of his ministry at the age of thirty have been the subject of much speculation. Did he travel beyond the bounds of Palestine in his search for wisdom knowledge? Where did he acquire the great learning which amazed those who heard him preaching and enabled him to cross swords in debate with Scribes and Pharisees? A number of legends suggest that Jesus travelled to the British Isles with Joseph of Arimathea, who worked in the tin trade. With these legends as his starting point, Gordon Strachan uncovers a fascinating network of connections between the Celtic world and Mediterranean culture and philosophy. Taking the biblical image of Wisdom as the 'master craftsman', Strachan explores the deep layers of Mystery knowledge shared between the Judaic-Hellenic world and the northern Druids -- from the secret geometry of masons and builders, which Jesus would have encountered in his work as a craftsman in Palestine, to the Gematria or number coding of the Old and New Testaments.

To return to the film, I took the blog-post title from the film’s title (itself the first line of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ verse querying the so-called “holy legend”), plus the producer’s press-quoted comment ‘there is nothing specific by way of archaeological finds; Jesus's shoe has not turned up'. I suppose they mean a sandal (when sandals suddenly became popular in the late-60s, they were nicknamed ‘Jesus boots’). But this to me (and perhaps anyone else who has seen Monty Python’s Life Of Brian) is just asking for trouble. I’d guess the producer-director, as an experienced BBC religious-affairs correspondent, is offering a disclaimer in anticipation of the predictable backlash. But this metaphor (shoe or sandal for item of hard evidence) is an unfortunate phrase, given the way religious relics representing personal items (usually bones or bits of cloth) accumulate around popular church legends. As far as I know, no British church at present claims to possess Jesus’s sandals in support of the legend, which is probably just as well (cf the ongoing controversy over the Turin Shroud). Over the past century, there have been various books looking for the possible footprint or track of a holy visit, mainly around Glastonbury and Cornwall, listing local legends. Here, I thought we could look at what the real possibilities might be for such ‘sandals’ i.e. items of hard evidence that would be convincing than a shoe or bit of cloth.

For example, Dr Strachan’s Jesus The Master Builder mentions a Scots tiein to the story, Pontius Pilate’s supposed Caledonian mother. This is a legend associated with a very old yew tree in a churchyard at Fortingall in Perthshire. It says Pilate’s father was a Roman legionary or (since the Roman occupation was a century later) an ambassador posted nearby, and Pilate was “born in its shade and played there as a child.” But although the yew tree may well be over 2,000 years old, what does that prove? I don’t know of any codex i.e. ancient manuscript which might document the legend, leaving this as a dead end – by itself it’s not any kind of evidence. Similarly, there is in Glastonbury Abbey grounds a sacred tree, the Holy Thorn, about which I wrote about a year ago [The Thorny Matter Of Glastonbury], as well having a Glastonbury webpage up for several years, so won’t bother with further here.

The main item the press coverage mentions is the legendary ancient church which the producer says lies buried under Glastonbury Abbey. This is indeed mentioned in ancient sources, the earliest accounts of the British church and of how Christianity was established years before Rome even invaded, and centuries before it adopted Christianity itself. Of course it’s not likely Channel 4’s Time Team are going to be allowed in with a JCB backhoe-digger to excavate any part of the Abbey grounds, so we can only consider this evidence of the early accounts. The early [1st-C AD] founding date and/or the Glastonbury site are both mentioned in accounts by ‘respectable’ writers, like St Gildas [fl. c500], and this is summarised in modern books by Geoffrey Ashe and others. But because the Abbey’s own official history, by William of Malmesbury, a 12C monk, doesn’t mention this controversial claim in the surviving [corrupt] 13C text of its first edition, the story is dismissed by sceptical historians as an interpolation by the monks to promote the mediaeval-pilgrimage tourism trade in souvenir relics etc. The film’s producers mention how when St Augustine was sent to southern England to convert the locals c600 AD, he wrote to the Pope [Gregory the Great] about the old church, ‘built by the hand of the Lord himself.’ The version given by William of Malmesbury in his Chronicle Of The Kings Of England, which does not cite Augustine, has several extra words: “…no other hands but those of the disciples of Christ” - which is a bit more realistic. (If you’ve ever tried to build even a simple cabin by yourself, you’ll know you need more than one pair of hands.)

The filmmakers argue that Jesus could have visited to learn from the Druids as they possessed ancient astronomical knowledge. The press articles say the film “looks at the maths involved in structures such as Stonehenge and the standing stones in Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, and relates it to mathematics in the Bible, medieval cathedrals and the modern-day credit card." The producer adds Jesus “would have come to learn what was being taught about astronomy and geometry which was being taught at "universities" run by druids at the time." He evidently didn’t learn the Druid religion however – there is no congruity between reported Druid beliefs (e.g. taking omens from trees, transmigration of souls into animals etc) and his proto-Christian teachings which broke away from the rabbinical upbringing of Jesus’s own society. And as far as megalithic mathematics goes, the Stonehenge builders lived thousands of years before the Druids, whose secret ‘colleges’ took (according to Caesar) up to 20 years to complete – you weren’t allowed to take notes either. (And these secret schools would have scarcely been open to outsiders, like a modern university).
But in this field, when you’ve got a theory to sell, you don’t let details like that stop you. Instead, you take a set of genuine but separate mysteries and package them up into a single grand theory you can sell first to the publisher or film-TV distributors, and then the general reader, as a sort of general simplified theory of everything iconic to do with the country’s past. Then you issue a press release about your product, which today’s’ downsized, and thus always-content-hungry, news organisations are happy to publish almost verbatim (if you compare the news stories, they’re virtually identical).

The producers announce therein, ‘we are opening up a fascinating new insight into early Christianity.' As to when Jesus’s visit might have been, they say it could be as a boy with his uncle, returning at age 12 when he astounded the temple officials with his precocious questions and responses. There are certainly claims JC came here as a lad, brought by his tin-trading uncle. On the other hand if this seems too unlikely (at odds with the account in Luke 2:39-52, where young JC is only missing a day or so before his temple visit), “he may have made the visit when in his teens or 20s and used his earnings as a carpenter to fund it.” The producers are obviously hedging their bets here. But there is a story of Jesus working in southern Britain as an adult, as a carpenter, a story the Church Of England has officially promoted since at least the 12th century, and continues to promote to this day, complete with holy relic on public view. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll review this lesser-known legend next time.

The Thorny Matter Of Glastonbury

Last time, I said we would take a look at the Coelbook's account of the 'thorny matter of Glastonbury', a pun that reflects the inherently prickly nature of the subject. For the so-called Glastonbury legends of the holy thorn tree being planted there by Joseph of Arimatheia etc are not, as some academics would have you believe, entirely the invention of eccentric Edwardian vicars promoting the 'British Israelite' idea, or of New Age hippies with woolly ideas. (In 1994, I attended a U. Of Bristol course on Glastonbury archaeo-history, in which the professor referred to such types as “the enemy” who would “try to get you to believe anything,” and who had “ruined the place.”)
The claim that Christianity arrived in Britain via Glastonbury in the 1st-C AD was part of a more general longstanding claim by the Church Of Britain that it was older, and thus had precedence over, the Church Of Rome. Though the original Celtic Church Of Britain was legislatively replaced by the formative English or Saxon Church in 664, the claim was backed by certain early bishops and saints who wrote church history, and maintained until at least the 15th C. (At some point Glastonbury acquired the epithet “Roma Secunda.”) The claim was followed by England setting up its own church, separate from Rome, in Henry VIII's Reformation and Dissolution of the 1530s-40s, which saw Glastonbury looted of its treasures and its last abbot hanged from the Tor by Henry's tame church officials.
The Coelbook's survival, as mentioned previously, was credited by its guardians due to its being spirited away after the disastrous Glastonbury Abbey fire of 1184, which the preface claims was arson by the king's minions to purge the place of its heretical, mystical texts. Nothing is known of the circumstances of the 1184 fire, which destroyed the original wattle church (by then encased to preserve it) and the old Saxon Abbey. But within a few years, the Abbey was certainly promoting itself as a place holding other kinds of treasure. It became a destination for pilgrims wanting to see the graves and relics of various celebrities. This included an ancient (deep-down) hollow-log coffin excavated during rebuilding in 1191, attributed to legendary Arthur on the basis of the inscription on a lead cross supposedly found atop the grave. (The inscribed cross, with a suspiciously explicit text carved in anachronistic early-medieval Latin, is pictured in our sidebar.) Arthur is not mentioned in the Coelbook, and the Abbey itself in its earliest surviving official history makes no mention of him.
Nevertheless, the basics of the JoA legend are there in the works of the Abbey's two-time chronicler William Of Malmesbury, a monkish librarian. He mentions “documents of no small credit” as his source; these have never been identified, but I can't help wondering if we now have a candidate, for the handwritten Coelbook collection was supposedly then stored in the Abbey.
Mediaeval kings had a strained relationship with Rome, with the threat of the Pope excommunicating England looming up repeatedly from King John onwards. The king at the time of the 1184 fire, Henry II, had a precarious relationship with Rome, coming to a head in 1170 when he intemperately incited his barons into a fatal attempt to seize his Archbishop, Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral over the Xmas holidays. Henry himself was excommunicated and there was nearly civil war. In the end, Henry had to do public penance, walking barefoot in a sack-cloth through Canterbury and being scourged by 80 monks. I can well understand how he would have wanted to head off any more trouble with Rome. As far as I know, Henry has never been implicated by historians in the 1184 fire, though his insistence on having the Abbey magnificently rebuilt at his own personal expense might be construed today as suspicious.
Now, to the Coelbook's account of the arrival of Christianity in Britain, via Glastonbury.
--The account says that Joseph and his party sailed on a “ship of Tarsis” (cf the Bible's “ships of Tarshish”) a year after the Crucifixion, which other evidence here indicates as AD 30+1 = AD 31, though a later reference says they had various disasters and delays en route and didn't actually arrive until the 3rd year, ie AD 33. (Church historian St Gildas the Wise, whose account is the only contemporary account to survive from the Dark Ages, said Christianity came to Britain in the latter part of the reign of Tiberius, who died AD 37). The party sailed around Cornwall (there are several familiar place-names) to Siluria [S. Wales] and thence east to the place beyond Sabrin [Severn, Latin Sabrina] called Summerland [Somerset]. Reaching the Kingdom of Arviragus - reputedly the brother or anti-Roman Silurian war-leader Caractacus or Caradoc - (here called “Caradew”), they “came under the mantle of the High Druid of the south whose ear was inclined towards them,” and so they were given land near “the Isle of Departure.”
Glastonbury was an Iron Age tidal port, with traces of a stone wharf found below Wearyall Hill where in local legend JoA planted his staff. But it turns out this is not what Isle of Departure means: the text says it was where the dying are taken to be prepared for death, with the lake a kind of looking-glass portal into the Otherworld - an aspect of British Celtic belief mentioned in other sources. (“Here was the resting place for the souls of the dead, where they received their last sustenance before passing through the glass wall”.) This offers an alternative new explanation for the ancient references elsewhere to Glastonbury as Ynys Witrin or “Isle Of Glass.” There is a description of the women who tend the dead and dying as living in houses on stilts, ie in a “lake village”, something which is archaeologically attested nearby.
A second passage, by one 'Aristolas,' says when Joseph of Abramatha [sic] arrived, he found the king in need of advice, for his own head priest, Trowtis, Chief of the Druthin, “was away at the meeting place of his god, where he came in a wondrous way every nineteen years. There, the ceremony lasted three moons.” (This of course is where we came in, so to speak, with this reference to an apparent Iron Age survival, described by a Greek traveller, of the rites of Apollo at a centre like Stonehenge or Avebury every 19th year - see earlier post “The Lost City of Apollo”). The king lets Joseph meet with Trowtis “at the place now called Henmehew, because of the strange tree that grows there.” Here we may have our first reference to the Glastonbury Thorn, whose surviving offspring [see photo] have been classed either as “a Palestinian variety” or more recently as a hybrid hawthorn.

The local sub-king, who has reluctantly received them due to Arviragus's influence, sets up a priestly debate, held “in the place called Nematon” (a nemeton is a Druid-style sacred grove) over whether to allow the strangers to stay on some unhealthy swampland by the lake village at the edge of the tidal port, thinking they will be refused even that. But Joseph, “called Ilyid by the people here” (this probably means just a man of Judea, the J being pronounced outside of modern English as an I- or Y, cf German Yiddish) carries the debate. So the king “gave the strangers land beside the Summerhouse of the King, which could be reached by ships. Inland from here, the gifted land extended to the tree now called the Great Oak which still stands, and thence to the hill south of the residence where Ilyid, being wearied, rested against a great stone. Beyond this was an avenue of standing trees and oak trees placed one and one, and the gifted land came up against this. It extended southward to the holy vineyard which was fenced about. The fruit of these vines was small and bitter in the mouth. The strangers built huts for shelter on the hillside, high enough to be free of the tides. … Ilyid persevered and while later the people still would not believe that The God of whom he spoke was more powerful than their gods, they would sit around and listen to his stories.
“Now, when the strangers were granted the land, the Druthin disputed this with the king and said that they wanted a divine sign that their gods approved. Ilyid said, "Give me but half a year". At the witnessing of this the Druthin set up a holistone and Ilyid struck his staff into the soil to mark the covenant. The following Eve of Summer there was a gathering and it was found that a small green shoot was coming up from the ground beside the staff, which was an offshoot of the staff. The king decreed that this was a sign that the land accepted the strangers, but these took it as a sign that what they taught fell on fertile ground and would take root.”
The party argued that if they “could they live where no one else could because of the spirits, then their holiness would be established before all the people. The strangers were sorely tried by the Druids, but the spirits troubled them not. Nor did the sickness of the place come upon them, and the people wondered.” The king's niece, known as Islass the Dreamer, who worked on the Isle of Departure, and “was sacred to the guardian of this place” became the first convert, and was evidently given care of “the secret of the Holy Hawthorn. What this may be, none can know now. It is said that when the Druthin murmured against the staff of Ilyid, she placed a twig in water and it flowered. Here, in this holy place, under the direct guidance of God, our father founded the first church in Britain. It is said it was not built by human hands, which is true, and from here shall come that which will be the salvation of mankind in the years to come. Here was the resting place for the souls of the dead, where they received their last sustenance before passing through the glass wall. From here ran the old road to the place of light….”
… Well, this is all fascinating, but there are problems when you try to plot these and other topographical details out on the historical map of Glastonbury. (For example, the Lake Village apparently stood on the other side of the valley from Wearyall Hill.) My notes from that 1994 uni course are sketchy, and I think a field trip is called for, before we take this any further.

Blake At 250 – The Unsolved Mystery

This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake, and there are various ‘Blake At 250’ academic conferences, commemorative walks, and so on. It remains to be seen whether there will be any explanation of the greatest mystery of his career: what was the inspiration for his poem beginning, “And did these feet in ancient time /Walk upon England’s mountains green….?” This allusion to what is known as England’s ‘Holy Legend’ – that Christ visited England – has never been adequately explained. Where did he get this from? He doesn’t seem to be making it up, simply alluding in passing to an event he has evidently heard about, and asking if it could really be true. How much he expected readers or listeners to grasp of the allusion is impossible to answer. Blake’s work is famously esoteric (I recall some four decades ago carrying around a paperback of his poetry for months, hoping to make sense of it by dint of perseverance.) It’s been said before that millions sing these words as part of England’s ‘alternative national anthem’ Jerusalem without even understanding the allusion to the Holy Legend. But where does this incredible legend actually come from?
Some years ago I came across a 1989 article by A.W. Smith in the Folklore Society Journal which tried to trace the legend back to its source, and couldn’t. There were plenty of local ‘holy visit’ legends around the southwest coast, maintained by Cornish tin miners, but none could be dated back very far. The writer concluded it was all an invention … of the British Israelite Movement. Certainly a proponent of this theory, that the British were descended from a lost tribe of Israelites, was a vicar of Glastonbury who wrote a book on the Holy Legend. But this was in the 20th century.The British Israelite Movement is thought to date back to around Blake’s time, or even to the 17C Puritans, but did the Puritans really just invent it?
There are some aspects of the mediaeval Glastonbury Abbey legends of the founding of Christianity in Britain which suggest it goes right back to the Dark Ages. Representatives of the mediaeval British Church sought precedence over that of Rome (which sounds dangerous) on the grounds their church was established by Christ’s disciples, in the last years of the reign of Tiberius – which would put it within five years of the Crucifixion. The reliable mediaeval historian William Of Malmesbury, though he could not get any details, refers to the discovery of "documents of no small credit, which have been discovered in certain places to the following effect: ‘No other hands than those of the disciples of Christ created the church of Glastonbury.’ "The idea Christ’s disciples came to England (presumably fleeing the Romans, who had not invaded Britain) of course does not mean Jesus did too. The tin-miner’s version of the legend have Jesus visiting with his ‘uncle’, Joseph of Aramatheia, who became a major figure in the Arthurian Romances as keeper of the Grail. The rationale is that Joseph knew Britain from his trips as a tin merchant, and on one of his trips he had brought his nephew, the boy Jesus, but there seems no way of ever documenting this. The Bible says nothing about Jesus ‘s life between ages 12 and 30. The Vulgate Bible gives Joseph as nobilis decurio and a decurion was a term often used for an official in charge of mines. (Cornish tin-miners folklore had a saying and song that "Joseph Was A Tin-Man and the miners loved him well.")
There have been claims Blake was a kind of honorary Druid who was indoctrinated into an esoteric, i.e. secret oral tradition. But this is not only unprovable, the poem ‘outs’ the supposed secret in a way that implies others would grasp the allusion. The legend is so radical it may be there is reluctance to tackle it. But it would be something if for Blake’s 250th someone could produce, if not new evidence, at least a coherent explanation.