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Christianity, Plurality and Vernacular Religion in early Twentieth-Century Glastonbury: A Sign of Things to Come?*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank Brendan Macnamara, whose paper at the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religion Conference, Dublin, 10–12 May 2013, ‘Wellesley Tudor Pole and the Glastonbury Phenomenon: The “Celtic”; Dimension of Pre-First World War Religious Discourse in Britain’, renewed my interest in this period of Glastonbury’s history and Paul Fletcher, Archivist, Chalice Well, Glastonbury for his invaluable assistance in relation to Tudor Pole’s contribution to the Dean’s Yard Meeting.
References
1 Articles that outline and advocate this broader, more inclusive view of religion include Yoder, Don, ‘Toward a Definition of Folk Religion’, Western Folklore 33 (1974), 2–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Primiano, Leonard, ‘Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife’, Western Folklore 54 (1995), 37–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bowman, Marion and Valk, Ülo, ‘Introduction: Vernacular Relion, Generic Expressions and the Dynamics of Belief’, in eidem, , eds, Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief (Sheffield, 2012), 1–19 Google Scholar.
2 See especially McNamara, Brendan, ‘The “Celtic” Dimension of Pre-First World War Religious Discourse in Britain: Wellesley Tudor Pole and the Glastonbury Phenomenon’, Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religion I/I (2014), 90–104 Google Scholar; Hopkinson-Ball, Tim, Tlie Rediscovery of Glastonbury: Frederick Bligh Bond, Architect of the New Age (London, 2007)Google Scholar; Carley, James, Glastonbury Abbey: Tlie Holy House at the Head of the Moors Adventurous (Glastonbury, 1996)Google Scholar; Benham, Patrick, Tlie Avalonians (Glastonbury, 1993)Google Scholar.
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28 The precise circumstances of the sale and subsequent acquisition of the abbey by the Bath and Wells Diocesan Trust tend to be contested (Carley, Glastonbury Abbey; Benham, Avalonians), but there appears to have been a feeling that the site, once on the market, should be acquired by the Anglican Church in some form – possibly in response to the strong Catholic presence (including a convent and a seminary) in the town, as well as Downside’s titular claim on Glastonbury.
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36 John Duncan’s 1913 painting Saint Bride can be viewed at: <http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/D/3210/artist_name/John%20Duncan/record_id/2464>.
37 For instance, the blessing, ‘Deep peace of the running wave to you, Deep peace of the flowing air to you, Deep peace of the quiet earth to you’, frequently presented as an ‘ancient Celtic blessing’, was in fact written by William Sharp under the name Fiona Macleod, and published in the Pagan Review during 1895.
38 Much of the information for this section comes from Benham’s Avalonians, a classic account of the early ‘alternative’ history of Glastonbury; McNamara’s ‘Religious Discourse’ adds valuably to the scholarship of this period.
39 Benham, , Avalomans, 15 Google Scholar.
40 St Brigit is also known as St Brigid and St Bride; in the Glastonbury context, those who specifically connect her with the pre-Christian Celtic goddess tend to refer to her as Bride.
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47 As McNamara (‘Religious Discourse’, 92) points out, Wilberforce’s biographer G. W. E. Russell recorded that ‘[h]e communed with “Spooks” and “Swamis” and “Controls’”: Basil Wilberforce: A Memoir (London, 1918), 120 Google Scholar.
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49 Ibid.
50 Glastonbury, Chalice Well Trust Archive, Dean’s Yard transcript, 1907, 10–12. Handwritten title on cover page:‘20 Dean’s Yard July 20 1907’. Authorship of transcript unknown, but believed to have been donated to Chalice Well by Rosamond Lehmann, with whom Tudor Pole co-authored A Man Seen Afar (London, 1968): personal communication from Paul Fletcher.
51 This included helping to save Abdul Baha, the eldest son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, contributing to an important ongoing link between Bahá’ís and Glastonbury: see Abdo, Lil, ‘The Bahá’í Faith and Wicca – A Comparison of Relevance in Two Emerging Religions’, Pomegranate: Tlie International Journal of Pagan Studies II (2009), 124–48Google Scholar.
52 This continued on the BBC Home Service until the mid-1950s.
53 Quotation from Chalice Well website: <http://www.chalicewell.org.uk/index.cfm/glastonbury/HistoricalArchive.Articles/category_id/2>, accessed 24 November 2013.
54 Personal communication from Paul Fletcher.
55 For a full account of Buckton’s life, see Cutting, Tracy, Beneath the Silent Tor: Tlie Life and Work of Alice Buckton (Glastonbury, 2004)Google Scholar.
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60 Bond, Frederick Bligh, The Gate of Remembrance: The Story of the Psychological Experiment which resulted in the Discovery of the Edgar Chapel at Glastonbury (Oxford, 1918)Google Scholar. In addition, Bligh Bond published, with Thomas Simcox Lea (an Anglican cleric best known as a naturalist), A Preliminary Investigation of the Cabala contained in the Coptic Gnostic books and of a similar Gematria in the Greek text of the New Testament … (Oxford, 1917) and Tlie Hill of Vision: A Forecast of the Great War and of Social Revolution with the Coming of the New Race, gathered from Automatic Writings obtained between 1909 and 1912, and also, in 1918, through the Hand of John Alleyne, wider the Supervision of the Author (Oxford, 1918).
61 Preface to Bligh Bond, Company of Avalon, quoted in Benham, Avalonians, 206.
62 Bond, Bligh, Tlie Mystery of Glastonbury (1930), quoted in Matthews, John, ed., A Glastonbury Reader (London, 1991), 209 Google Scholar.
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66 See Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds, Tlte Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar, especially David Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–1977’, 101–64.
67 See Bowman, Marion, ‘The Holy Thorn Ceremony: Revival, Rivalry and Civil Religion in Glastonbury’, Folklore 117 (2006), 123–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for debate about earlier practices Lewis was claiming to revive.
68 For fuller detail of the history and development of this ceremony, see ibid.
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78 71.6% self-identified as Christians in England and Wales in the 2001 Census; 59% in the 2011 Census.