| perished through the long neglect of time. | declared in the Charter of St Patrick and the Deeds of the Britons. | |
| [After two pages of their doings we continue:] | ||
| The work of these men therefore was the Old Church of St Mary in Glastonbury, as antiquity has not failed faithfully to hand down through the ages of the past. There is also that written evidence of good credit found in certain places to this effect : The church of Glastonbury did none other men's hands make, but actual disciples of Christ built it. | By the work of these men therefore was the Old Church of St Mary in Glastonbury restored, as antiquity has not failed faithfully to hand down through the ages of the past. There is also that written evidence of good credit found at St Edmund's to this effect : The church of Glastonbury did none other men's hands make, but actual disciples of Christ built it ; being sent, to wit, by St Philip the Apostle, as was said above. | |
| Nor is this irreconcileable with truth : for if the Apostle Philip preached to the Gauls, as Freculfus says in the fourth chapter of his second book, it may be believed that he cast the seeds of his doctrine across the sea as well. But lest I should seem to cheat the expectation of my readers by fanciful opinions, I will leave disputable matters and gird myself to the narration of solid facts. | Nor is this irreconcileable with truth : for if the Apostle Philip preached to the Gauls, as Freculfus says in the fourth chapter of his second book, it may be believed that he cast the seeds of his doctrine across the sea as well. [After the story of a monk of St Denys, and a legend about the island of Glastonbury, and a discussion of the meaning of its various names, the narrative proceeds:] | |
| The church of which we speak … | The church of which indeed we speak … |
Here we have at the outset a notable discrepancy. The insertion in G. R.3 tells us that the names of the missionaries sent by Pope Eleutherus to K. Lucius are lost in the mists of antiquity. But in the De Antiquitate their names are given as Phagan and Deruvian, on the authority of the Charter of St Patrick and the Gesta Britannorum. Two alternative explanations of this discrepancy are open to us. We may suppose that William of Malmesbury came to mistrust the Charter of St Patrick which had been shown him at Glastonbury, and on second thoughts rejected its evidence altogether. Or we may suppose that the statement that the names of the missionaries were unknown is what he really wrote in the De Antiquitate; and that the Charter of St Patrick with all the information derived from it, was a later invention foisted into the original work.
Now William of Malmesbury does not elsewhere in his historical works refer to the mission sent by Eleutherus at the request of K. Lucius. He found it, of course, in the Chronicle (under A.D. 167),
