Glastening

Glastonbury, descended from the eponym Glast, whose descendants are called Glastings and their city of Glastingaburg. Genealogy of Glast's descendants is given in Harlean genealogies. Here he is the father of Morweil, and the eleventh from Morweil is Idnert ap Morien, the last of the line. The pedigree ends:

Unum [read unde] sunt Glastenic qui uenerunt [per villam] que vocatur Loytcoyt.

Where did the Glastings come from, a city called Loytoyk .

A later version of the pedigree is found in the expanded Hanesing Hyun treatise, one version of which ends:

Oddyna y Glastyniaid a dyfodd o Gaer Lwydkoed i Gaer a elwir yr awr honn Aldüd.

Where did the Glastonians come from Gaer Luidcoid in a city called Aldyud.

The vague story of Glast and its creation, Glastonbury, is told in interpolation in William Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae. Here Glast is incorrectly called Glasting, and his eleven descendants (whose names are correctly indicated, except for minor differences) are mistakenly considered his brothers, great-grandchildren of Kunedda. Then he says:

Hic est ille Glasteing, qui [venit] per mediterraneos Anglos, secus villam quae dicitur

Escebtiorne.

This is the Glasting that came through the Midlands of the Angles , otherwise a city called Escebtiorn.

Correspondence with earlier text is close if we accept the words in "[]" and cut out the words "mediterraneos Anglos, secus" in the second version. Other differences are Glasting for Glastenik, Esebtiorne for Loytkoyt and Glasting as a personal name. "Esceb" = "bishop" (modern Welsh "esgob"), and Lichfield, who was an episcopate, may well be meant.

Here we are told that Glast was the great-grandson of Kuneda , and it is interesting to note that Glass up Elno, from the Dogweiling line, was also the great-grandson of Kuneda. The identity of the two was proposed by EB Nicholson. Next is the interpolation:

[Glasting], following his pigs to Wellis [Wells], and from there through a hopeless and watery path called “Sugewege,” that is, “The Pig's Way,” he found his pig near the church we are talking about [Glastonbury], under apple tree, from where we got to the point that the apples of this apple tree are called "Ealdcyrcenas epple", that is, "Apples of the Old Church". For the same reason, a pig was also named, which, remarkably, had eight feet, while the other sows had four. Therefore, Glasteing, after entering this island, saw that it abounds in many, began to live in it with his whole family and spent his life there. And from his offspring and the family that followed him, this place is said to have been populated.

It can be seen that a simple wording from the Harlean genealogies was supplemented by the legend of pig farming and the introduction of apple trees. The latter is probably due to the late identification of Glastonbury as the island of Avalon and the explanation of Avalon as the island of apple trees.

• Glast
• Morweil up Glast ^[1]
• Morien ap Morweil ^[2]
• Botan Ap Morien ^[3]
• Morgan ap Botan ^[4]
• Morchen ap Morgan ^[5]
• Morphinidd ap Morhen ^[1]
• Meruidd ap Morphinidd ^[6]
• Kadfor Ap Meruidd ^[7]
• Kadur ap Kadfor ^[8]
• Morien ap Kadour ^[2]
• Idnert or ednived

• Glastening: Dynastic Origins
• Glastenning
• Glastening Dynastic Origins of Somerset's Celtic Kings
• Bartrum, Peter C. A Welsh Classical Dictionary: People in History and Legend up to about AD1000 . National Library of Wales, 1993. p. 322-323.