GLASTONBURY ABBEY, standing on the borders of British territory, ruled successively by British, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman abbots, visited by Irish clerics, patronized alike by British, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman lords, constituted for many years an international clearing-house of culture. Like all famous institutions, Glastonbury has accumulated through the years a great body of legend, some of it so fantastic as to arouse in historians a disposition to regard every Glastonbury tradition as manufactured propaganda and every Glastonbury charter as a forgery. Glastonbury's preeminence in monastic imposition cannot be denied, and yet the very stones of its structure proclaim a genuine and distinguished existence, and certainly its importance to English literary culture is no mirage. Through the historian William of Malmesbury, Glastonbury was closely connected with a circle of writers, including Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Caradoc of Llancarvan, who were attempting to construct a complete history of England on a grand scale.1 Encouraged and supported by royal influence, the abbey consistently increased its claims upon the imagination of the English public by appropriating to itself the traditions of ecclesiastical and secular heroes. At least one of these traditions that of King Arthur reached final literary form in the Perlesvaus (early thirteenth century) with the definite impress of its Glastonbury origin still upon it.2 We know, of course, that when the secular literature of England at length found its way into manuscripts it appeared as a mixture of diverse elementsGermanic, Romance, Celtic, Classical, Oriental. We also know from the very nature of things that the process by which these elements were blended into a national literature had been going on for a long time in the homes of the folk, in the halls of nobles and kings, and especially in the great monastic centers. The importance of Glastonbury Abbey to this process lies in the fact that it was a meeting-place for the principal elements of English literary culture and that it maintained close relations with other centers of culture and with the governing class -relations which made it a distribution point whence the blended national traditions of Saxons, Irish, and Welsh were communicated to the intellectual life of Norman England.