[royal family] glastonbury, roslyn and the grail

Prince William and friends

I was puzzling over the significance of Glastonbury for William and Roslyn Chapel for the Queen but now it’s a bit clearer.

Sothely glastenbury is the holyest erth of england. loseph Ab Arimathia, with his sone losefes, went into Fraunce to seynt Phylyp and he sent Joseph and his sone with others into Brytayne & at last they came to a place then called Inswytryn, nowe called glastonburye (Prose Life of Joseph [1516]; ed. Skeat, pp. 33-4.)

In the late twelfth century Joseph's name turns up in the French Grail romances when, in an early continuation of Chretien de Troyes' unfinished poem Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, it is narrated that the nebulous object described by Chretien is none other than the very dish in which Joseph collected Christ's blood after the Crucifixion - the elusive Grail is seen in the continuation as a relic from the Crucifixion.

Shortly before 1200 Robert de Boron wrote a five-part sequence of poems concerning the complete history of the Grail and its travels from the Holy Land to Britain. Later, in Perlesvaus, it’s related that Joseph collected the Holy Blood at the time of the Crucifixion and was later imprisoned by the Jews for burying Jesus.

Miraculously escaping from prison Joseph travelled to Britain where he became the ancestor of an unbroken line of valiant knights. When Perlesvaus departed from this castle he took Joseph's body with him on the red-cross ship which carried him to the Other World.

Read on for some snippets about our royals and other goodies …