Tewkesbury Abbey
— — the Norman tower the town bought back.
Not only on a wall.
“The great Norman abbey church of Saint Mary the Virgin, beside the meeting of the Severn and the Avon. Consecrated in 1121, it would have come down at the Dissolution like the rest, but the townspeople bought the church from the Crown for £453 and kept it. The tower has stood ever since.
Tewkesbury Abbey, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tewkesbury Abbey, formally the Abbey Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, stands in the Gloucestershire market town of Tewkesbury at the confluence of the Severn and the Avon. The present church was consecrated in 1121 under abbot Giraldus, with Robert FitzHamon as founding patron. Its central crossing tower, at roughly 46 metres, is the tallest surviving Norman tower in England. The nave columns rise about 9 metres in unbroken cylindrical drums, a distinctively English Romanesque scheme. The abbey survived as a parish church after the Dissolution; the monastic buildings beside it did not.
The fabric is largely Caen limestone brought across the Channel from Normandy, set with local oolite. The west front is dominated by a single recessed arch over six orders, one of the most ambitious Romanesque facades in the country. Inside, the choir vault was rebuilt in the fourteenth century with elaborate lierne ribbing and roof bosses bearing the suns and stars of York. The Despenser stained glass in the chevet, also fourteenth-century, is among the most complete medieval glass cycles to survive in any English parish church, with seven windows largely intact.
On 4 May 1471 the Battle of Tewkesbury was fought in fields immediately south of the abbey precinct, ending the Lancastrian cause in the Wars of the Roses. Edward of Westminster, the seventeen-year-old Lancastrian heir, was killed in the rout and is commemorated by a brass set in the choir floor. Several Lancastrian leaders sheltered in the abbey itself and were taken from it two days later. A Medieval Festival held each July re-enacts the battle on the original meadow, drawing some twenty thousand visitors over the weekend.