ace, and like the
Abbey of St. Peter at Westminster and the Cathedrals at Canterbury and
at Winchester, is in every respect a representative structure. "It
represents all the greatest influences in our social development, it
directly embodies in its memories both the Crown, at the time when the
Crown was a _primum mobile_ in politics, and all the estates of the
realm. It shows the Church as the keystone in which the various
thrusts of those contending masses met and balanced each other. It
exhibits in the Church patron the official link between things
spiritual and temporal. Its great lay potentates, Saxon or Norman,
either deduce their lineage from royal blood, or at once mix their own
with it, and renew again and again their touch of royalty by fresh
inter-marriages until the pedigree is absorbed into that of the
reigning or rival sovereign. The House, after blazoning a leading
name, often _the_ leading name of each successive period, after
scoring repeated Plantagenet affinities, at length shares the
internecine havoc of the York and Lancaster factions, and its last
scions which survived that havoc are cut off on the scaffold for the
crime of being too near the throne. But the almost princely rank of
these founders, patrons, and benefactors is their least claim to
historical remembrance. They are always to be found grouped in the
very focus where the light of history falls strongest, men of the
foremost mark for high trust and safe counsel for foreign strife, or
civil broil" (_Hayman_).

[Illustration: _Photo. R.W. Dugdale._
THE ABBEY GATEWAY.]

Thus in the four centuries after the Conquest we find Fitz-Hamon, the
second founder, connected by marriage with the great Norman soldier.
In the civil wars of Stephen, Robert Earl of Gloucester and Lord of
Tewkesbury, and his half-sister, Maud or Matilda, played the parts we
know so well. Again, Gilbert de Clare, who is buried in the Abbey, was
one of the chief signatories of Magna Charta. The last of the three
Gilberts de Clare fell at Bannockburn in 1314, at the age of
twenty-three. The heiress of the latter married a Despenser, a family
closely connected with Tewkesbury, two prominent members of which,
viz., the favoured ministers of Edward II., will be remembered as
by-words in history. Sir Guy de Brien, the valiant standard-bearer of
Edward III., was the second husband of the widow of the fifth Lord
Despenser, and, with her, helped to rebuild the choir, in the