like Jacob, leant in worship on the top of his staff on Wearyall Hill, the rod took root and became a thorn tree, which blossomed every year as surely as the Feast of the Nativity came round.  The “Holy Grail” (the cup of blessing from the Last Supper), which Joseph brought with him, he buried at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, and from the place of its sepulchre gushed forth the Bloody Spring, which may be duly inspected to this day.  The pilgrims made more friends than disciples, and the king, after a dilatory conversion, set apart for the maintenance of the newcomers “twelve hides of land.”  Here the evangelists possessed their souls in patience and built for worship a little shrine of wattle and daub, which was many generations afterwards found intact when fresh missionaries came to re-evangelise the islanders.  Round this vetusta ecclesia gathered the subsequent glories of the monastery.  This long-cherished tradition enshrines sufficient fact to justify Glastonbury’s claim to be “the only tie still abiding between the vanished Church of the Briton and the Church of the Englishman.”  Its authentic history begins with its foundation as a monastery by that ecclesiastically-minded layman, King Ina (688-726), who built a church here and dedicated it to St Peter and St Paul.  Dunstan, himself a Glastonbury man, by the austerity of his conduct and the vigour of his administration, made the fame of this early religious house.  With the coming of the Normans grander ideas prevailed.  Abbots Thurstan (A.D. 1082) and Herlewinus (1101-20) both projected buildings of some pretensions, but Henry of Blois, brother of King Stephen, abbot in 1126, was the first great builder.  Henry’s church was a fabric of much magnificence, but it completely perished in a fire in 1184, and Henry II., in one of his occasional fits of piety, charged himself with its rebuilding, and entrusted the work to his chamberlain Ralph, who, upon the site of Joseph’s legendary shrine, erected the present beautiful chapel of St Mary (c. 1186).  With the death of the king the work languished, for no funds were forthcoming from the empty pockets of his “lion-hearted” successor; and it was not until 1303 that the great church whose ruins still survive was finally dedicated.  Even then the fabric was not complete.  It took two centuries to add the finishing touches.  Abbot Sodbury (1322-35) vaulted the nave, and it was left for one of his successors, Walter Monington (1341-74), to fill in the vaulting of the choir.  Not content with the already considerable dimensions of the church, Monington extended the chancel two bays eastwards; and Abbot Bere (1493-1524) added another chapel, and propped the tower by inverted arches.  Characteristic traces of the respective periods may still be observed.  Until the Reformation the abbey had a career of unrivalled influence and splendour.  It yielded precedence only to St Albans, and the abbot was said never to travel abroad with a retinue of less than 100 retainers.