I have a new camera… I loved my old one, but it was slow and sometimes the pictures looked dull unless in brilliant sunshine… so I got a new camera! First photo was of my beloved, but then we went out and first outside photo had to be lichen!
And then I found a tree… lots of lichen!
And then I found the corner of a ruined abbey wall… sprinkled with lichen!
These were taken at Glastonbury Abbey; it was probably started in the seventh century by King Ine of the West Saxons, and then enlarged three hundred years later by St Dunstan. By 1086, twenty years after the Norman conquest, it was the richest Abbey in the country. Throughout the Middle Ages there were more and more religious foundations of monasteries, friaries and convents until in 1536, there were more than 800 in Britain. Glastonbury became famous in the thirteenth century as the reputed burial site of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, Camelot supposedly being Glastonbury itself.
Henry VIII started a great dissolution of these often wealthy establishment as part of his change of the faith of Britain from the sway of Rome to control by the Church of England. By 1541, there were none left, and over 10,000 monks and nuns had been displaced. The buildings now belonged to the Crown and were used to raise finance; they were stripped of their treasures and valuables, and sold or leased. Glastonbury Abbey was not spared.
Read Dissolution by C.J. Sansom to get a fictional insight into these events…
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dissolution-Shardlake-Book-C-Sansom-ebook/dp/B003O86FM2/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
…or look at Glastonbury Abbey’s web-site:
http://www.glastonburyabbey.com/
Lois Elsden 