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shadowy and anonymous beginnings did not satisfy the later church. An ancestor of heroic and antiquemold was demanded, and gradually the figure of Joseph came to be accepted as the original apostle to the Britons.
    Historical evidence he cannot claim. After a minute survey of all the surviving evidence the indisputable Bishop Stubbs concluded that any reference to apostolic preaching in Britain during the first century A.D. must “rest on guess, mistake or fable.” Joseph of Arimathea was the fable agreed upon.
    It took such hold that by the end of the Middle Ages Joseph had become officially recognized as the founder of the British church. One can put one’s finger on the very moment when it happened. In the year 1431 at the Council of Basle, precedence in seating and other sensitive matters of protocol were determined by the antiquity of the churches of the respective countries. The English cited Joseph as establishing their claim for precedence. In a furious quarrel with the Spanish delegates, carried on for days in resounding Latin rhetoric, the English insisted that Joseph had arrived in Britain before James in Spain, that everyone knew James in fact had been killed before he ever got to Spain, that Glastonbury provided tangible evidence of Joseph’s presence in England, and that, regardless of how small a corner of the country he had converted, it was not the quantity but the antiquity of the conversion that was at issue. To buttress their claim the Bishops of London and Rochester who headed the English delegation drew up a memorial stating:
    “… it is certain that in England, as may be ascertained from very ancient books and archives, in particular the archives of the notable abbey of Glastonbury in the diocese of Bath, that Joseph of Arimathea, with twelve companions, was carried to England, escaping either from the persecution of Herod or from that of Roman high officials in Judaea. In that place (England) he preached what he had seen and heard of Christ; and so preaching he converted numberless English people. And from them he acquired many and countless things which were brought to him by those converted to the faith. These things helater left to a church of Christ erected by him at the time when Peter was preaching the faith at Antioch. The church built by Joseph became afterward the seat of a monastery with the rank of abbey, and that noteworthy abbey and monastery has been preserved, praise to Christ Himself, to this day.”
    In this memorial we have stumbled on that crucial point at which fable is converted into history.
    The mainspring of the development of the Joseph legend lay in the ever-present British jealousy of Rome; in the urge to claim for the church in Britain an antiquity antedating that of Rome. In the person of Joseph England’s desire to by-pass Rome and to trace the sources of its faith directly to the primary source in the Holy Land could be satisfied. Immediately after the Norman conquest the theory of a personal apostle to the Britons, a witness of, indeed an actor in, the drama of the crucifixion and resurrection, coming direct from Palestine to bring the word, first appears. Now everything Saxon was in its turn contemned by the Norman conquerors, while Celtic culture enjoyed a revival. The Arthurian cycle bursts into full bloom, transmuting the great champion of Celtic Britain and the knights of the Round Table into heroes of the age of chivalry. With it is entwined the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail, and into the leading role steps the onetime member of the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem, Joseph of Arimathea.
    As chroniclers and poets from the twelfth to the fifteenth century borrowed, added, and embroidered upon one another’s versions, the legend grew in dignity and detail, acquiring tangible evidence along the way, until the whole curious tangle of Gospel, Apocrypha, Celtic folklore, and French romance became an ineradicable part of the national tradition. By 1464 John