Tewkesbury.

The little town of Tewkesbury, which numbers about 5500 inhabitants, and is one of the most cheerful and bustling, and withal one of the most picturesque towns in England, occupies a remarkable situation. Not remarkable in the scenic way, for a more nearly level stretch of very often flooded meadow lands you will not see for miles. The site of Tewkesbury is close upon, but not actually on, the confluence of England’s greatest river, the broad and turbid and rather grim Severn, with the Avon. All around, but in grey and blue distances, are hills: the Cotswolds, the Bredon Hills, the greater Malverns, and the yet greater, but more distant Welsh mountains; but the Severn and the Avon flow through levels that extend considerable distances. When those two rivers—so different in every respect; in size, in character, and in the very colour of their waters, the Avon being clear and bright, and the Severn a sullen, dun-coloured waterway—unite to flood these low-lying lands the only way to travel comfortably about the neighbourhood is by boat. Tewkesbury is at all times particularly old-world and quaint, and it makes on these occasions an excellent substitute for Venice. This peculiarity, or rather this contingency, let us say, perhaps explains the at first sight rather singular fact that the town should have been built on the Avon, half a mile from its junction with the Severn, and not upon the larger river at all. It looks like a wanton disregard of the advantages that the Severn navigation would bring to the town, with riverside wharves and quays; but those who selected the site probably considered the Severn to be too dangerous a river, and so set their town back half a mile or so from its banks. A consequence is that the external trade of Tewkesbury has always been negligible, and to-day, although the text-books tell you of its industry of making shirt-fronts—“particularly stiff shirt-fronts”—and the olden one of flour-milling, which is carried on by Avonside, the scale of their activities has never become large.

The founding of Tewkesbury is said to have been the work of a seventh-century religious Saxon named Theoc, who established a church here; but the Roman station, Etocessa, was here first, and although the place-name is supposed to derive from Theoc, by way of “Theocsbyrig,” and the Domesday version, “Teodechesberie,” too little is known of him for us to take much interest in it. It is rather interesting, however, to consider that, the site being among water-meadows, and that the land at the confluence of Severn and Wye is called “the Ham,” how very near Tewkesbury was to being called “Tewkesham.”

The monastery that was thus seated by the two rivers became a flourishing Benedictine house, and after its full share of the early adversities of fire and sword, famine and flood, it resulted in the building of the grand Abbey church, which is still the greatest architectural glory of the town. The re-founder of the monastery and builder of this noble and solemn example of Norman architecture was Robert Fitz Hamon, Earl of Gloucester, the greatest of the early Lords Marchers of Wales, and overlord of Glamorgan, who died in 1197, fighting in foreign wars. He had seen so many post-mortem bequests go wrong and never reach their intended destination that he determined to perform his re-founding of monastery and church in his own lifetime. Both were well advanced when he died, and the Abbey was finally consecrated in 1223; a remarkable example of expedition for those times. I do not propose to narrate the story of the Abbey, which has no such picturesque and fantastic falsehoods as that of Evesham. The monastery ran its course and was suppressed with others by Henry the Eighth, and the Abbey church was saved by the townsfolk, who paid the King the equivalent of £5000 for the site and fabric. And so it remains to us to this day, more venerable by lapse of time, minus its Lady Chapel, and with evidences of the puritan zeal of rather more than a hundred years later than Henry’s great reform; but it is yet the veritable building of Fitz Hamon’s and of the generations that succeeded him.

You cannot see this great Abbey church to advantage from the town. It is only from the open meadows by the Severn, and its tributary brooks, where the little town is to be guessed at by the evidence of a few roofs and chimneys, that its great scale and solemn majesty are fully apparent. There the great central Norman tower and the magnificent and unique West Front of the same period are seen in their proper relation with the surroundings. The long outline is very like that of St. Albans, but 237 feet less; St. Albans Abbey being 550 feet long, and Tewkesbury 313 feet.

The near view of the West Front and its great and deeply-embayed Norman window, filled not unsuitably with the Perpendicular tracery of three hundred years later, is no disillusionment; it is, after the glorious West Front of Peterborough, one of the most striking compositions of the kind in England, and the flanking Norman tourelles and spirelets have by contrast the most delicate appearance.Entering the building, a massive Norman nave is seen, singularly like that of Gloucester cathedral, and no doubt designed by the same hand. The same massive but disproportionately lofty columns, with dwarfed triforium and clerestory, proclaim a similar origin. The columns are Fitz Hamon’s work, and the clerestory above, and the stone-vaulted roof are the additions of over two centuries later, when the builders had grown more daring and risked a heavy stone roof in place of the former flat wooden one. Fitz Hamon’s transepts also remain and his choir, in its essentials; although in the same Decorated period which witnessed the addition of the clerestory and stone vaulting to the nave the Norman choir was remodelled. To this period belong the seven windows filled with splendid old stained glass, representing all good benefactors, from Fitz Hamon onwards, praying for heavenly grace, but clinging to their ancient heraldic cognisances of long descent as tenaciously as though the authority of Garter King-at-Arms and all his fellow-kings and pursuivants extended to Heaven, and St. Peter was authorised to admit to the best places only those who could display these patents of gentility. It is glorious old glass, more than much damaged and time-worn, but still splendid in design and colour.

Behind the choir still runs the semi-circular ambulatory, as on the old Norman plan, but the Lady Chapel has disappeared. Here too are some of the ancient chapels formerly clustered about the east end. Here are some mouldering swords, deeply bitten into by Time’s teeth, from the battlefield of Tewkesbury. Fitz Hamon’s chantry is not of his period: it was rebuilt more than three hundred years later; proof that he, and the health of his immortal part were kept in mind, and incidentally showing us that not all gratitude is, as cynics would declare, “a lively sense of favours to come.”

High Street, TewkesburyThe so-called “Warwick” chantry, built 1422 by Isabel le Despencer in memory of her first husband, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Abergavenny, is in the last, and most elaborated style of Gothic architecture and decoration. There are many other monuments: including the beautiful one of Hugh le Despencer and his wife Elizabeth. Their splendidly sculptured alabaster figures lie there with a calm indifference contrasting with his violent end, for he was executed in 1349, at Hereford. So often did the great nobles of those centuries suffer from the headsman’s axe and with such frequency did they die on the battlefield that it became a matter of pride to declare how rarely they ended peacefully and of old age, in their beds. It was almost a slur upon one’s personal character to pass in this way, when one might in the last resource join some desperate rebellion and be handsomely slain; or at the very least of it, be taken and properly beheaded.

These philosophical and historical considerations bring one, by a natural transition, to the Battle of Tewkesbury, fought in the meadows to the south of the town on May Day 1471. The place where the fight raged fiercest was close by the Gloucester road, in the field still called “Bloody Meadow,” whose name it is understood the town council, in the interests of the rising generation, are keenly desirous of seeing changed to something more respectable.

If you have never been to Tewkesbury, the battle will be a little unreal to you. You may know perfectly well “all about the war, and what they killed each other for,” and you may even be a partisan of either White Rose or Red, and may throw up your cap for those rival Houses of York or Lancaster; but if you have never visited the scene where this great fight raged, it will remain shadowy. But in Tewkesbury town, whose streets are still astonishingly rich in old timbered houses that stood on the morning of that great clash of arms where they do now, it is a vital thing.

It was the last desperate venture of the Lancastrians, stricken to the ground on many an earlier occasion, but always hitherto recovering, to try conclusions again, for sake of right. At Towton, Blore Heath, Hexham, and other places they had been slaughtered, and such victories as Wakefield, in which the Yorkists were decimated, were of no permanent value. Only a month before Tewkesbury they had been signally defeated at Barnet, and their cause apparently broken; but here again the party was re-formed. Queen Margaret, whose devotion and sorrows are among the most pitiful records of history, had come from France with her son, Prince Edward, the young hope of the Red Rose. Gathering a force at Exeter, they advanced towards the midlands, hoping to join hands with Welsh sympathisers. But the treacherous Severn, coming down from those Mortimer borderlands where the White Rose had ever been strongest, proved itself on this occasion the most useful ally of the Yorkists. It was in flood and prevented that junction of the two Lancastrian armies whose combined force might have given them the day and changed the course of the nation’s story.

The Yorkists, commanded by Edward the Sixth, came up from the direction of Cheltenham and found their opponents drawn up on the “plains near Tewkesbury,” as Shakespeare has it, in the Third Part of Henry the Sixth. The battle was lost to the Lancastrians partly through their being deceived by a pretended flight of the troops commanded by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and in a great measure by quarrels among themselves. Their ranks were broken and the battle was continued and ended by fighting and heavy slaughter in the streets of the town. Finally the defeated Lancastrians took refuge in the Abbey church, from which they would have been dragged had not the monks in solemn procession prevented it. Shakespeare adopts Holinshed’s account of the death of Prince Edward.

Holinshed tells us that proclamation being made that a life-annuity of £100 should be paid to whoever brought the Prince, dead or alive, and that, if living, his life should be spared, Sir Richard Crofts brought him forth, “a fair and well-proportioned young gentleman, whom, when King Edward had well-advised, he asked him how he durst so presumptuously enter his realm with banner displayed, whereupon the prince boldly answered, saying, ‘To recover my father’s kingdom and heritage from his grandfather to him, and from him after him to me lineally descended’; at which words King Edward thrust him from him, or (as some say) stroke him with his gauntlet, whom directly George, Duke of Clarence; Richard, Duke of Gloucester; Thomas Grey, and William, Lord Hastings, that stood by, cruelly murdered; for the which cruel act the more part of the doers in their latter days drank the like cup by the righteous justice and due punishment of God. His body was homely interred in the church of the monastery of the black monks of Tewkesbury.”

The thanksgiving of the next day, Sunday, held by the Yorkists in the Abbey was one of those services in which the victors in a battle have always adopted the Almighty as a partisan. In the same time-honoured fashion the King of Prussia, delighting in the defeats of the French in the war of 1870–71, was in the habit of exclaiming “Gott mitt uns,” and sending pious telegrams to the Queen, caricatured by the humorist of the time—

“Rejoice with me, my dear Augusta,
We’ve had another awful buster;
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below—
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

The “Bear” Inn and Bridge, TewkesburyThe thanksgiving was followed next day by a ruthless, cold-blooded massacre of those who had been hiding in the town. On the Tuesday the great nobles, leaders in the fight, were executed, and the Yorkist vengeance was complete.

The nodding old gabled houses of Tewkesbury—many of them nodding so amazingly that it is surprising they do not fall—include a number of ancient inns: the “Wheatsheaf” and the “Bell” prominent among them. The “Bell,” hard by the Abbey and the old flour-mills, has a bowling-green and owns associations with Mrs. Craik’s once-popular story, John Halifax, Gentleman: which, I believe, was considered eminently a tale for the young person. “No,” said a bookseller long since, in my own hearing, to a hesitating prospective purchaser, “it is not a novel: it is an improving story, and may be read on Sundays.” I do not know what is read by the young person nowadays, either on Sundays or week-days, but I am quite sure it is not John Halifax, Gentleman, and I am equally sure that the young person will in these times resent any choice made for him or her, and read or not read what he or she chooses. But the monument to Mrs. Craik in the Abbey is inscribed to the author of the book, and as it is evidently a great source of interest to visitors, John Halifax is perhaps not quite so out-of-date as we suppose him to be.

The “Hop Pole” and the “Swan,” in their present form, belong to a later age; the first being the house where Mr. Pickwick and his friends made merry and drank so astonishingly. But the “Old Black Bear,” as you leave the town for Worcester, is easily the most picturesque of all; in itself and in its situation by the rugged old Avon bridge. The sign was, of course, originally that of the “Bear and Ragged Staff.”