The Trials of Cider-making Plant at Glastonbury. 765 
" island valley of Avilion, 
Where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow, 
Nor ever winds blow loudly, but it lies 
Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, 
And bowery hollows, crowned with summer sea," 
within the precincts of Glastonbury Abbey, and hard by the 
kitchen of the great ruined monastery, itself scarcely injured 
by the lapse of five centuries since Abbot Breynton's cooks first 
served its four gigantic fireplaces, and before the evil days when 
Thomas Cromwell's iron hand fell, at the bidding of Henry's 
appetites, upon the monasteries of England." 
" Sir," said one of the unexpectedly numerous visitors, 
attracted to an exhibition' which proved full of local interest, 
f I pay a yearly visit to, and am greatly interested by your 
splendid annual country meetings ; but I would cheerfully give 
up .ill coming Shows of the Royal Agricultural Society of 
England if, instead, I might see Glastonbury Abbey once again 
in working order, and tenanted, as before the Reformation, by 
Abbot, Prior, and Monks." 
Even in decay, these great ecclesiastical buildings appeal to 
the least imaginative mind, and the speaker in question was, 
probably, not the only man who, cider-mug and bread and 
cheese in hand, found the " Abbot's kitchen," appropriately 
serving as a refreshment-room during the trials, suggestive of 
speculation as to what agricultural England was like when, 
Feudalism being discrowned, the Church was both king and 
landlord in Britain, while Industrialism, the present reigning 
monarch, was, as yet, an impossible dream. 
No slugs in the service of agriculture (Thomas Cromwell's 
Commissioners of Inquiry notwithstanding) were the Glaston- 
bury monks at one period of their career, — witness the labours 
which, embanking the river Brue, previously in almost per- 
petual flood, reclaimed the " Island of Apples " itself from a 
swamp, and laid the foundations of what is, now, some of the 
richest pasture land in the West of England. 
And did they make cider, too, they of the 
" good bellyful, 
The warm serge, and the rope that goes all round " 1 
Yes — and that, probably, by means of machinery easily matched 
in Somersetshire to-day, but, probably also, of a quality now 
only to be found in " Maister's bar'l." And how do their ghosts 
regard that " science " which has harnessed the " divil's oan 
team " to the row of mills and presses marshalled beside the 
" Abbot's kitchen," or these moderns, in grey suits and pot-hats, 
" weighing and measuring," with chronograph and indicator, the 
performances of each machine? Much, probably, aa the 
