high value for the history of Wessex, and especially for the progress of the gradual conquest of Somerset by the West Saxons;[1] and we shall be even surprised at the patient investigation to which the great historian submitted them: there is perhaps hardly a parallel in mediaeval history to the task which he undertook and carried through.
William of Malmesbury tells us that in the Great Church at Glastonbury there was a painting which gave the names of three British abbots—Worgret, Lademund, and Bregored.[2] Moreover one of the 'pyramids' outside the Old Church was inscribed with the names of Hedde episcopus, Bregored, and Beoruuard. He further knew of Worgret from an ancient charter of a king of Domnonia whose name was no longer legible.[3]
Haeddi was the bishop of Winchester, who translated the body of St Birinus from Dorchester, and held the undivided episcopate of Wessex from 676 to 705. William of Malmesbury identifies the 'Beoruuard' of the pyramid with 'Berwaldus', who, he tells us later, succeeded Abbot Hemgisl and ruled the abbey from 705 till 712. If he is right in his conjecture that the pyramid contained the bones of the persons named thereon, the absence of Beorhtwald and Hemgisl, Beorwald's predecessors, will be explained by the fact that the former became archbishop and was buried in St Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury, while the latter rested, as he tells us presently, in the Old Church itself.
The first English abbot, according to William of Malmesbury, was Beorhtwald (Berchtwald, Brihtwald), who afterwards became abbot of Reculver and then succeeded Theodore in the archbishopric of Canterbury. The statement has been questioned, but for reasons which are not convincing.[4] William of Malmesbury had seen a Glastonbury charter in which K. Coenwalch in the 29th year of his reign (i.e. 671 or 672) granted land at Ferramere (i.e. Meare) to Abbot Beorthwald. A late copy of this charter survives, and it is
- ↑ Many of these charters have been used to good effect, though not always with adequate knowledge or sufficient caution, in Early Wars of Wessex, Major and Whistler (1913), pp. 49 ff.
- ↑ It is possible that we have a trace of Bregored in the 'Bregredeswere' of the bounds of Butleigh in K. Egbert's grant of 801 (B. C. S. 300).
- ↑ W. of Malm., De antiquitate Glaston. ecclesiae (published by Hearne in his Adam of Domerham), pp. 48 f.; cf. p. 46. The passage occurs in the insertion in the third edition of the Gesta Regum (G. R.3), pp. 28 f.: there we find the spelling Worgrez.
- ↑ Cf. Stubbs, Pref. to Gesta Regum, vol. II, p. xxiv: 'His identification of abbot Berhtwald with the archbishop who succeeded Theodore is a mistake of grievous rashness.'
