History of Glastonbury Abbey

omas Moyle, who arrived there without warning on the orders of Thomas Cromwell. The abbey was stripped of its valuables and Abbot Richard Whiting (Whyting), who had been a signatory to the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII the head of the church, resisted and was hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor on Glastonbury Tor on 15 November 1539.

Decline

After the Dissolution, two of the abbey's manors in Wiltshire were sold by the Crown to John Thynne and thereafter descended in his family, who much later became Marquesses of Bath. The Thynnes have preserved many of the abbey's Wiltshire records at Longleat up to the present day. The ruins of the abbey itself was stripped of lead and dressed stones hauled away to be used in other buildings. The site was granted by Edward VI to Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset who established a colony of Protestant Dutch weavers on the site. When Seymour was attainted in 1551, the abbey site reverted to the crown, but the weavers remained until they were removed in the reign of Queen Mary. In 1559 Elizabeth I of England granted the site to Peter Carew, and it remained in private ownership until the beginning of the 20th century. Further stones were removed in the 17th century, so that by the beginning of the 18th century the abbey was described as a ruin. The only building to survive intact is the abbot's kitchen, which served as a Quaker meeting house. Early in the 19th century, gunpowder was used to dislodge further stones and the site became a quarry. The Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882 stopped further damage to the site and led to the first historical and archaeological surveys.

Modern history

The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey were purchased by the Bath and Wells Diocesan Trust in 1908. The