I took Jake to Glastonbury. We climbed the tor.
I was surprised to find Henry McCulloch up on the summit with Maynard and a pair of binoculars.
“I come here every year”, he says, “to prove old legs can still make it to the top”.
From the top of the conical tor, you get a 360” view. On a good day you can see for miles.
People stand up there trying to read a countryside seen from this new perspective. “I think that must be Baltonsborough.” “Could that be the motorway over there?” “Is that a squall coming this way?”
Some meadows were still flooded. I see white dots on brown water. Swans.
A group of schoolchildren from a European country, – I did not recognise the language – were standing around the plaque on the side of the ruined church and one of them was painstakingly reading it, skipping parts of it, stopping now and then to say a few words or answer a question.
“I guess Glastonbury is famous to them because of the music festival”, said Henry.
The leader spelled out : “The – last – abbot – of – Glastonbury – was – hanged – on – the – tor”. I heard one of them questioning her, then making a remark that made the others laugh.
Jake was observing them with interest.
“Little do they know that they are reading about the formation of a powerful new nation state”, said Henry. “The monasteries were slack, unproductive assets, loyal to a distant pope. Henry seized their wealth, switched them into his own treasury, or into new educational establishments.”
As for Richard Whiting, the abbot, who was 78, I told Jake I had read that they hung, drew and quartered him, dismembered his body and displayed the body parts in Ilchester, Bridgwater, Wells and Bath. He had resisted the dissolution. The king’s commissioners said they had found writings contesting his right to divorce Catherine of Aragon and charged him with treason.
Henry McCulloch said: “I guess that was the way they showed the common people that the Act of Supremacy was real. Judicial murder was the order of the day.”
Jake said: “If they left bits of his body out, how did they stop dogs and cats and birds from getting to them?”
“That’s history for you,” said Henry, “always more questions”.