As the traveller, in modern times, passes swiftly along the Great Western line between Weston and Bridgewater, he may see, on his left, a round conical hill, rising abruptly from the flat plain, a plain which was once a sea, a hill which was once an island. This is Glastonbury Tor. Fair and beautiful it looks in the summer sunlight, but it was once the scene of the foul judicial murder which we have endeavoured to describe.[21] FOOTNOTES [19] “While he was waiting for the hangman, he was questioned again by Pollard as to the concealment of plate, but he had nothing more to say, and would accuse neither himself nor others, but thereupon took his death very patiently.”--_Blunt._ [20] This letter is authentic, spelling and all. [21] See Note G. Death of Abbot Whiting. CHAPTER VIII. _ON THE TRACK._ “We grieve not o’er our abbey lands, e’en pass they as they may, But we grieve because the tyrant found a richer spoil than they; He cast aside, as a thing defiled, the remembrance of the just, And the bones of saints and martyrs he scattered to the dust.” _Neale._ It was in vain that Bishop Latimer besought the tyrant, mad after the spoils which a venal parliament had given him, to let at least _some_ of the monasteries remain as the houses of learning. Few countries could boast of such shrines as those which adorned like jewels the shires of England--but all were ruthlessly sacrificed, from the fane which rose over the mighty dead at Battle, to the humblest cell which but sheltered half-a-dozen poor brethren or sisters. Such was the value of the noble library at Glastonbury that Leland, an old English antiquarian, tells us, when first he beheld it, “The sight of its vast treasures of antiquity so struck me with awe, that I hesitated to enter.” Yet we learn from Bale, that such noble collections were sold to grocers for waste paper, and that he knew a man who had bought for that purpose two large monastic libraries at the dissolution, and added that he had been using their contents for ten years, and had hardly got through half his store. So strongly built were many of the Abbeys, that they had to be blown up with gunpowder, after they were stripped of all that could be sold; the lands were given to greedy favourites, Cromwell himself is said to have secured thirty Abbeys, and the ready money was spent at court in gambling and dissolute living. So, in a few years, all the wealth which flowed into the hands of the crown was dissipated, and instead of the remission of taxation, by the hope of which many had been bribed to assent to the fall of the monasteries, the burdens laid upon the people were heavier than before. * * * * *