Tewkesbury Abbey

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Tewkesbury Abbey from the east

The Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Tewkesbury in the English county of Gloucestershire is the second largest parish church in the country and a former monastery.

1 Architecture
2 Notable monuments
3 Construction time-line
4 History
5 Abbey precincts
6 Abbots
7 Choirs
8 References

[edit] Architecture

The church itself is one of the finest Norman buildings in England. Its massive crossing tower was rated "probably the largest and finest Romanesque tower in England" by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner. Fourteen of England's cathedrals are of smaller dimensions, while only Westminster Abbey contains more medieval church monuments.

[edit] Notable monuments

1107 - when the abbey's founder Robert Fitzhamon died in 1107, he was buried in the chapter house while his son-in-law Robert FitzRoy (an illegitimate son of King Henry I), Earl of Gloucester, continued building the abbey
1375 - Edward Despenser, Lord of the Manor of Tewkesbury, is remembered today chiefly for the effigy on his monument, which shows him in full colour kneeling on top of the canopy of his chantry, facing toward the high altar
~1395 - Robert Fitzhamon's remains were moved into a new chapel built as his tomb
1471 - a brass plate on the floor in the center of the sanctuary marks the grave of Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, the son of King Henry VI and end of the Lancastrian line, who was killed in the Battle of Tewkesbury - the only Prince of Wales ever to die in battle.
1477 - the bones of George, "Butt of Malmsey" Clarence, (brother of Edward IV and Richard III) and his wife Isabelle (daughter of Richard "the Kingmaker" Neville) are housed behind a glass window in a wall of their inaccessible burial vault behind the high altar
<1539 - the cadaver tomb which Abbot Wakeman had erected for himself is only a cenotaph, because he was not buried there
Also buried in the abbey are several members of the Despenser, de Clare and Beauchamp families, all of whom were generous benefactors of the abbey

[edit] Construction time-line

23 October 1121 - the choir consecrated
1150 - tower and nave completed
1178 - large fire necessitated some rebuilding
~1235 - Chapel of St Nicholas built
~1300 - Chapel of St. James built
1321-1335 - choir rebuilt with radiating chantry chapels
1349-59 - tower and nave vaults rebuilt; the lierne vaults of the nave replacing wooden roofing
1400-1410 - cloisters rebuilt
1438 - Chapel of Isobel (countess of Warwick) built
1520 - Guesten house completed (later became the vicarage)

[edit] History

The Chronicle of Tewkesbury records that the first Christian worship was brought to the area by Theoc, a missionary from Northumbria, who built his cell in the mid-7th century near on a gravel spit where the Severn and Avon rivers join together. The cell was succeeded by a monastery in 715, but nothing remaining of it has been identified.

In the 10th century the religious foundation at Tewkesbury became a priory subordinate to the Cranbourne Abbey in Dorset. In 1087, William the Conqueror gave the manor of Tewkesbury to his cousin, Robert Fitzhamon, who, with Giraldus, Abbot of Cranbourne, founded the present abbey in 1092. Building of the present Abbey church did not start until 1102, employing Caen stone imported from Normandy and floated up the Severn.

Robert Fitzhamon died at Falaise in Normandy, in 1102, but his son-in-law, Robert FitzRoy, the natural son of Henry I who was made Earl of Gloucester, continued to fund the building work. The Abbey's greatest single later patron was Lady Eleanor le Despenser, last of the De Clare heirs of FitzRoy. In the High Middle Ages, Tewkesbury became one of the richest abbeys of England.

After the Battle of Tewkesbury in the Wars of the Roses on 4 May 1471, some of the defeated Lancastrians sought sanctuary in the abbey, but the victorious Yorkists, led by King Edward IV, forced their way into the abbey, and the resulting bloodshed caused the building to be closed for a month until it could be purified and re-consecrated.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the people of Tewkesbury saved the abbey from destruction in 1539: Insisting it was their parish church, which they had the right to keep, they bought it for the value of its bells and lead roof which would have been salvaged and melted down, leaving the structure a roofless ruin. The price came to £453.

The bells merited their own free-standing belltower, an unusual feature in English sites. After the Dissolution, the bell-tower was used as the gaol for the borough until it was demolished in the late 18th century.

The central stone tower was originally topped with a wooden spire, which collapsed in 1559 and was never rebuilt. Some restoration undertaken in the 19th century under Sir Gilbert Scott included the rood screen that replaced the one removed when the Abbey became a parish church.

The churches' 17th century organ was originally made for Magdalen College, Oxford. After the Civil War it was removed to the chapel of Hampton Court Palace and came to Tewkesbury in 1737.

[edit] Abbey precincts

The market town of Tewkesbury developed to the north of the abbey precincts, of which vestiges remain in the layout of the streets and a few buildings: the Abbot's gatehouse, the Abbey Mill, Abbey House, the present vicarage and some half-timbered dwellings in Church Street. The Abbey now sits partly isolated in lawns, like a cathedral in its close, for the area surrounding the Abbey is protected from development by the Abbey Lawn Trust, originally funded by a United States benefactor in 1962 [1].

[edit] Abbots

One of its most distinguished abbots was Alan, the biographer of Thomas a Kempis.

[edit] Choirs

The Abbey possesses, in effect, three choirs. The Abbey Choir sings at Sunday services, with children (boys and girls) and men in the morning, and adults in the evening. Schola Cantorum is the (somewhat tautologically) re-branded former Abbey School Choir, that sings at weekday Evensongs; it consists of boys and men (different from those in the Abbey Choir). The Abbey School, having been founded in 1973 by Miles Amherst, was closed in 2006, leading to the boys re-locating their studies to Dean Close Preparatory School in Cheltenham.