Between 1971 and 1978 the BBC used to dramatise a ghost story every year under the title "A Ghost Story for Christmas". The first five entries in the series were all based upon tales by that great master of the genre, M. R. James. "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", first shown in 1974, was the fourth of these. John Bowen, who adapted the story for television made many changes to James' plot. In the original the old monastery where the treasure is hidden was in Germany; here it is in England. (The film was shot in and around Wells, Somerset). James's protagonist Somerton, described by him simply as an "antiquary", here becomes a clergyman and an Oxford professor of Medieval History. (He is also given the Christian name Justin; James simply referred to him as "Mr Somerton"). Bowen also invented two important characters, Somerton's young friend and pupil, Lord Peter Dattering, and Peter's widowed mother, and the scene in which Somerton exposes two fraudulent mediums.
Somerton has been researching the history of a ruined monastery in the area and tells Peter of a legend that a former Abbot concealed a vast sum in gold somewhere in the monastery grounds. With Peter's help he deciphers a number of clues to the location of this treasure, starting with a series of mysterious inscriptions in a stained-glass window in a local church. Somerton also discovers warnings that Abbot Thomas, who appears to have been a less than holy man, may have appointed a supernatural guardian to watch over his hoard, but as he takes a rationalistic, sceptical attitude towards the paranormal, he disregards them.
This is not my favourite of the "Ghost Story for Christmas" series, and I think that this is because it is a difficult story to adapt for the screen. The ghost in James's original story was something capable of being perceived through the sense of touch rather than sight or hearing, so it is easier to describe it on the printed page than it is to find an equivalent in an audio-visual medium like television. Moreover, the ghost only features at the very end of the story, most of which is given over to the intellectual process of working out the clues to the whereabouts of the treasure. Bowen probably inserted the scene with the fake mediums because this brings some action and excitement to a story in which these qualities are otherwise lacking. Compared to such excellent fare as "A Warning to the Curious" or "Lost Hearts", "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" is really not very scary, which means that it is not very effective as a ghost story. 6/10
Some goofs. The story is set around 1850, but when Somerton and Peter are looking down from the tower (actually the tower of Wells Cathedral) we can see an estate of houses of obviously twentieth-century design and a rugby pitch; at this period the game was still only played at Rugby School. Somerton and Peter are supposedly fluent in Latin phrase, but they interpret the phrase "decem millia" (which actually means "ten thousand") as "two thousand". During the séance scene Somerton exposes the falsity of the mediums by showing that their "spirit guide", supposedly a priest from the time of the Wars of the Roses, was unable to understand Latin or French. Certainly, all priests at this period would have been required to know Latin, but there was no requirement to speak French, which had died out as a spoken language in England about a hundred years earlier.
