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.”
[Picture: High Street, Tewkesbury]
The 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!”
[Picture: The “Bear” Inn and Bridge, Tewkesbury]
The 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.”