Glastonbury chair

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Glastonbury chair is a 19th century term for a late 16th century wooden folding chair, usually of oak, possibly based on a chair made for the last Abbot of Glastonbury, England. It was devised for use in churches before pews became common.

GORDON BROWNING was the last maker of the Glastonbury chair. A consummate worker in wood, he delighted in telling the story of the history of the chair he exported around the world.

It was made originally in Britain from a description brought back from Rome in 1504 by Abbot Bere to Glastonbury Abbey, and was produced by John Arthur, a monk who was the treasurer and carpenter at the abbey. The result is thought to have been the first domestic chair seen in Britain. Arthur perished on Glastonbury Tor in 1539, hung, drawn and quartered alongside his master, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, during the dissolution of the monasteries. The Abbot sat on a Glastonbury chair during his trial at Wells, where one of the two original surviving examples can still be seen.

The second chair remained in St John's Church in Glastonbury until it found its way by an unknown route into the collection of Horace Walpole's Gothic pile Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Middlesex. When the contents were sold at the beginning of the century, the then vicar of Glastonbury, the Rev Lionel Lewis, made an impassioned speech telling the bidders the chair belonged in Glastonbury. Nobody bid against him. He took it back to Glastonbury and it is still in St John's Church today.

Browning had lived in Glastonbury for 80 years by the time of his death, with a brief break during the Second World War, when he was employed making aircraft frames in Bristol. His son Clive said, "When my father was asked if he had lived all his life in Glastonbury, he loved to say - not yet."