The Fall of Glastonbury Abbey: Richard Ovenden (1539)
Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books by John Cairns.
The 1530s were a period of profound religious change in England as reformers sought to bring down the old Catholic structures and replace them with the new pillars of Protestantism. In doing so, they unleashed a wave of violence and destruction of epic proportions.
In this episode with Bodley's Librarian Richard Ovenden, we head back to a dramatic event in Tudor history. It came in 1539 when the focus of Thomas Cromwell’s religious reforms was turned on Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset.
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As well as being a decade of religious reform, the 1530s were years of huge cultural loss. In the process we remembered today as the Dissolution of the Monasteries, churches were stripped of their Popish decoration, the art of previous centuries was decimated, and many people lost their lives.
The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. (Wiki Commons)
This was iconoclasm on an unprecedented scale. It was overseen by commissioners sent by King Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who orchestrated the whole process from his position at the side of the throne.
The vast wealth of the Church was shared out by the great and the good, silverware was melted down, images whitewashed over, while the doors of the great medieval monastic libraries were thrown open, leaving their precious books to the mercy of ignorance and greed. Many books were ripped up and the pages used to line shoes or wrap butter, others were destroyed – thrown down wells or onto bonfires.
Richard Ovenden tells this, and many other, haunting stories, Burning the Books, A History of Knowledge Under Attack. As the head of one of the greatest libraries in the world, The Bodleian in Oxford, Richard is a leading expert on knowledge preservation and wrote this book as a response to the defunding and loss of libraries (773 in the previous decade) and the shocking destruction of the Windrush Generation’s landing cards by the Home Office in recent years.
In this episode we witness the fall of Glastonbury Abbey. Known today for its midsummer music festival, throughout the medieval era Glastonbury had been better known for having the largest monastic foundation in all England. In a few short months, this great building, with all of its contents, was reduced to a stone quarry. Its abbots head was placed outside on a gate spike.
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Click here to order Richard Ovenden’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: Summer, 1539. The last of the halcyon days at Glastonbury Abbey.
Scene Two: Early Autumn, 1539. The visit of the Commissioners and the trial of Abbot Whiting.
Scene Three: Late Autumn, 1539. The formal dissolution of the Abbey and the beginning of the dispersal of the library.
Memento: St Dunstan’s Classbook (have a look at it below)
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Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Richard Ovenden
Production: Maria Nolan
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About Richard Ovenden
Richard Ovenden is the 25th Bodley’s Librarian (since the post was set up in 1600) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Since 1987 he has worked in a number of important archives and libraries, including the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland (as a Curator of Rare Books) and in the University of Edinburgh, where he was Director of Collections. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford. His writing has been frequently published in major newspapers and online platforms. He was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to libraries and archives.
Burning the Books, A History of Knowledge Under Attack, is out now and was recently shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Map showing the location of Glastonbury Abbey
Background Map: Wiki Commons
Detail from St. Dunstan's Classbook, Homily on the Invention of the Cross
You can browse the full manuscript at the Bodleian Library Online.
The Bodleian Library, Oxford
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