Tewkesbury Abbey

Saturday
Today we headed down to the Gloucester area to spend a couple of days with my sister Janet and her husband Stuart. Stuart sings with the Tewkesbury Choral Society, and in the evening they were performing Mozart's Requiem  at Tewkesbury Abbey, so we all went along to hear the performance.
The Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Tewkesbury is the second largest parish church in the country and a former Benedictine monastery. 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 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.  In the High Middle Ages, Tewkesbury became one of the richest abbeys of England. 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 from King Henry VIII 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!

One year ago: Black-bellied plover