A Somerset historian likewise records that in addition to the Holy Thorn there grew in the Abbey churchyard a miraculous walnut tree, which never budded forth before the feast of St. Barnabas, namely, the 11th of June, and “on that day shot forth leaves and flourished like its usual species.” This tree is gone, but another “of the commonplace sort” stands in its place. “It is strange,” we read, “to say how much this tree was sought after by the credulous; and though not an uncommon walnut, Queen Anne, King James, and many of the nobility of the realm, even when the times of monkish superstition had ceased, gave large sums of money for small cuttings from the original.” The walnut tree, however, never vied with the Holy Thorn in popularity. The “Athenian Oracle” (1690) wriggled out of the difficulties attending a belief in the budding of the hawthorn tree with characteristic ingenuity, and supplied an example that most of us would gladly imitate. To an inquirer who asked for information and an opinion, the “Oracle” replied (none too grammatically), “All that Mr. Camden says of it is, that if any one may be believed in matters of this nature, this has been affirmed to him to be true by several credible persons; it was not in Glastonbury itself, but in Wirral Park, hard by it; however, this superstitious tree, true or false, was cut down in the last reforming age, though it seems they did not make such root and branch work with it but that some stumps remained, at least some branches or grafts out of it were saved, and still growing in the same country; though whether they have the same virtue with the former, or that had any more than any other hawthorn, we don’t pretend to determine any more than the forementioned historian.” The belief in the tree and the knowledge of its peculiar properties were so wide-spread that Sedley’s verse on Cornelia, who “bloomed in the winter of her days like Glastonbury Thorn” was easily understood. Bishop Goodman, writing to the Lord General Oliver Cromwell in 1652, said he could “find no naturall cause” either in the soil or other circumstances for the extraordinary character of the tree. “This I know,” said the prelate, “that God first appeared to Moses in a bramble bush; and that Aaron’s rod, being dried and withered, did budde; and these were God’s actions, and His first actions; and, truly, Glastonbury was a place noted for holiness, and the first religious foundation in England, and, in effect, was the first dissolved; and therein, was such a barbarous inhumanity as Egypt never heard the like. It may well be that this White Thorne did then spring up, and began to blossome on Christmas day, to give a testimony to religion, and that it doth flourish in persecution,” and so forth. Infinite meanings and significances could be extracted from the legend, that fantastic casket of man’s art and devising which is made to enshrine the small pure pearl of truth.