glastonbury tor king arthur under painting

He actually describes seeing it with his own eyes, and finds that the skeletal remains revealed a large man:įor when his shin-bone was placed beside the shin of the tallest man of the locality, whom the abbot pointed out to me, and set on the ground alongside his foot, it came three big fingers’ width above his knee. Gerald of Wales seems convinced that this was the body of King Arthur. One was a man and the other a woman, while space was left for a third body, but “here there was found a blonde tress of woman’s hair, with its shape and colour intact, which, as a monk snatched at it with a greedy hand and lifted it up, immediately crumbled completely into dust.”

Later on in his account he gives more details, such as noting that two bodies were buried at least sixteen feet deep.

Here too a leaden cross, placed under a stone, not above it as is the custom in our days, but rather fixed below, which I have seen, for I have touched these letters carved there, not raised or projecting but turned inwards towards the stone, contained: ‘Here lies buried the glorious king Arthur and Guinevere his second wife in the Isle of Avalon.’ Buried deep in the earth in a hollow oak and indicated by wonderful, almost miraculous, signs, and it was brought into the church with honour and deposited becomingly in a marble tomb.

Glastonbury tor king arthur under painting