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Construction
Construction of Tewkesbury Abbey
abbey in Gloucestershire, England, UK
- 8th century – 12th century CE
- Europe
Construction
abbey in Gloucestershire, England, UK
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, Tewkesbury, commonly known as Tewkesbury Abbey, is located in the town of Tewkesbury in the ceremonial county of Gloucestershire, England. A former Benedictine monastery, it is now a parish church. Considered one of the finest examples of Norman architecture in Britain, it has "probably the largest and finest Romanesque" crossing tower in England.
Tewkesbury had been a centre for worship since the 7th century. A priory was established there in the 10th century. The present building was started in the early 12th century. It was unsuccessfully used as a sanctuary in the Wars of the Roses. After the dissolution of the monasteries, Tewkesbury Abbey became the parish church for the town. George Gilbert Scott led the restoration of the building in the late 19th century. The church and churchyard within the abbey precincts include tombs and memorials to many of the aristocracy of the area.
Services have been high church but now include Parish Eucharist, choral Mass, and Evensong. These services are accompanied by one of the church's three organs and choirs. There is a ring of twelve bells, hung for change ringing.
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 a gravel spit where the Severn and Avon rivers join. 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 Benedictine Cranborne Abbey in Dorset. In 1087, William the Conqueror gave the manor of Tewkesbury to his cousin, Robert Fitzhamon, who, with Giraldus, Abbot of Cranborne, 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 was wounded at Falaise in Normandy in 1105 and died two years later, 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. The victorious Yorkists, led by King Edward IV, forced their way into the abbey; the resulting bloodshed caused the building to be closed for a month until it could be purified and re-consecrated.
At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot, John Wakeman, surrendered the abbey to the commissioners of King Henry VIII on 9 January 1539. As a former monk of an endowed community, he received an annuity. This was the relatively large sum of 400 marks, but would have ceased when he was ordained as the first Bishop of Gloucester in September 1541. Meanwhile, the people of Tewkesbury saved the abbey from destruction. Insisting that it was their parish church which they had the right to keep, they bought it from the Crown 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. Restoration undertaken in the late 19th century under Sir George Gilbert Scott was reopened on 23 September 1879. Work continued under the direction of his son John Oldrid Scott until 1910 and included the rood screen of 1892.
Flood waters from the nearby River Severn reached inside the abbey during severe floods in 1760, and again on 23 July 2007.
The church itself is one of the finest Norman buildings in England. Its massive crossing tower is noted in Pevsner's Buildings of England to be "probably the largest and finest Romanesque example in England". Fourteen of England's cathedrals are of smaller dimensions, while only Westminster Abbey contains more medieval church monuments.
Tewkesbury Abbey's collection of stained glass spans from medieval to modern. In the choir clerestory are seven 14th-century windows dating from c.1338 - 1340. Proceeding clockwise from the north, the windows depict 1) Robert Fitzroy, Gilbert de Clare, Hugh Despenser the Younger and Robert Fitzhamon; 2) King David and four prophets; 3) King Solomon and four prophets; 4) The Last Judgement; 5) King Rehoboam and four prophets; 6) King Abijah and four prophets; and 7) William de la Zouche and three de Clare earls. Though the names of individuals involved in their manufacture are not recorded, stylistic analysis has linked these windows to a workshop operating in late 1330s to the 1350s across the West Midlands and West Country. The same workshop is thought to have produced glass for the cathedrals in Gloucester and Bristol.
The Victorian glazing at Tewkesbury Abbey includes an extensive series of windows by Hardman & Co., notably the great west window, installed in 1886 and depicting scenes from the life of Christ, and five windows illustrating Christ’s miracles, installed in 1888. Further Victorian glass in the aisles includes work by Heaton, Butler and Bayne. Two modern windows by Thomas Denny, installed in 2002 in the chapel of St Catherine and St John the Baptist, commemorate the 900th anniversary of the arrival of the Benedictine community in Tewkesbury and take as their theme the Benedictine motto to 'work is to pray'.
Notable church monuments surviving in Tewkesbury Abbey include:
The abbey's 17th-century organ – known as the Milton Organ – was originally made for Magdalen College, Oxford, by Robert Dallam. After the English Civil War it was removed to the chapel of Hampton Court Palace, where the poet Milton may have played it. It came to Tewkesbury in 1737. Since then, it has undergone several major rebuilds. A specification of the organ can be found on the National Pipe Organ Register.
In the north transept is the stupendous Grove Organ, built by the short-lived partnership of Michell & Thynne in 1885: The NPOR | The National Pipe Organ Register.
The third organ in the abbey is the Elliott chamber organ of 1812, mounted on a movable platform: The NPOR | The National Pipe Organ Register.
The bells at the abbey were overhauled in 1962 and the ring is now made up of twelve bells, cast by John Taylor & Co of Loughborough. A semitone bell (Flat 6th) and extra treble were also cast by Taylor of Loughborough in 1991 and 2020 respectively, making a total of 14 available for change ringing.
The Old Clock Bells are the old 6th (Abraham Rudhall II, 1725), the old 7th (Abraham Rudhall I, 1696), the old 8th (Abraham Rudhall I, 1696) and the old 11th (Abraham Rudhall I, 1717).
The abbey bells are rung from 09:30am to 10:30am every Sunday. They are also rung on certain Sundays before Evensong. Practice takes place each Thursday from 7:30pm to 9:00pm.
The churchyard contains war graves of two World War II Royal Air Force personnel.
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 Almonry barn, 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 cathedral close, for the area surrounding the abbey is protected from development by the Abbey Lawn Trust, a registered charity originally funded by a United States benefactor in 1962.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Tewkesbury Abbey”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.