[Greek:  O Petros ... ehis Bretannian paraginetai.  Entha do cheirotribosas [sic] kai polla ton hakatanomaton hethnon eis ton tou Christou pistin epispasamenos ... kai pollous toi logoi photisas tos charitos, ekklaesias te sustesamenos, episkopous te kai presbuterous kai diakonous cheipotonhesas, dodekatoi etei tou Kaisaros authis eis Romen paraginetai.][391]

["Peter ... cometh even unto Britain.  Yea, there abode he long, and many of the lawless folk did he draw to the Faith of Christ ... and many did he enlighten with the Word of Grace.  Churches, too, did he set up, and ordained bishops and priests and deacons.  And in the twelfth year of Caesar[392] came he again unto Rome.”]

The ‘Acta Sanctorum’ also mentions this tradition (filtered through Simeon Metaphrastes), and adds that St. Peter was in Britain during Boadicea’s rebellion, when he incurred great danger.

E. 6—­The ‘Synopsis Apostolorum,’ ascribed to Dorotheus (A.D. 180), but really a 6th-century compilation, gives us yet another Apostolic preacher, St. Simon Zelotes.  This is probably due to a mere confusion between [Greek:  Mabritania] [Mauretania] and [Greek:  Bretannia].  But it is impossible to deny that the Princes of the Apostles may both have visited Britain, nor indeed is there anything essentially improbable in their doing so.  We know that Britain was an object of special interest at Rome during the period of the Conquest, and it would be quite likely that the idea of simultaneously conquering this new Roman dominion for Christ should suggest itself to the two Apostles so specially connected with the Roman Church.[393]

E. 7.—­But while we may possibly accept this legend, it is otherwise with the famous and beautiful story which ascribes the foundation of our earliest church at Glastonbury to the pilgrimage of St. Joseph of Arimathaea, whose staff, while he rested on Weary-all Hill, took root, and became the famous winter thorn, which

    “Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord,"[394]

and who, accordingly, set up, hard by, a little church of wattle to be the centre of local Christianity.

E. 8.—­Such was the tale which accounted for the fact that this humble edifice developed into the stateliest sanctuary of all Britain.  We first find it, in its final shape, in Geoffrey of Monmouth (1150); but already in the 10th century the special sanctity of the shrine was ascribed to a supernatural origin,[395] as a contemporary Life of St. Dunstan assures us; and it is declared, in an undisputed Charter of Edgar, to be “the first church in the Kingdom built by the disciples of Christ.”  But no earlier reference is known; for the passages cited from Gildas and Melkinus are quite untrustworthy.  So striking a phenomenon as the winter thorn would be certain to become an object of heathen devotion;[396] and, as usual, the early preachers would Christianize the local cult, as they Christianized the Druidical figment of a Holy Cup (perhaps also local in its origin), into the sublime mysticism of the Sangreal legend, connected likewise with Joseph of Arimathaea.[397]