From Gloucestershire Notes and Queries.

TEWKESBURY FROM AN ARTIST'S POINT OF VIEW.---In the Magazine of Art (August, 1887), pp348-354, under the head "An Old English Town," Mr.J.Pendrel Brodhurst has written respecting Tewkesbury from an artistic point of view; and the article is well illustrated with engravings from Mr.J.Sowden-- --We have pleasure in laying three of the paragraphs before our readers:--

In a remote corner of Gloucestershire, in a pastoral valley where mingle the waters of the Avon and the Severn, the two classic streams of the western midlands, lies the ancient and decaying town of Tewkesbury. Peaceful and forgotten sleeps the old town now, amid its rich level meadows, sometimes irrigated overmuch by the swollen rivers, and its belts of orchards, fragrant with the perfume of fruit that is ripening. It is a luxurient, fertile, amply-timbered land, this little wedge of Gloucestershire, overlapped by rich Worcestershire and that country of rough cider and rosy cheeks through which flows the romantic, many-twisting Wye. It has all the sylvan charms of the farther midlands, added to the languorous variety conferred by many streams of water. For here there flow not only the stately Severn, with its traditions of great salmon and its memories of the Welsh hills, and the poetical Avon, which surely must have quickened much that was within him who once dwelt within sound of its ripple, but also two little local streams which are picturesque in all save nomenclature. It is impossible to go into ecstacies over streamlets with such names as the Carrant and the Swilgate; yet they count for somewhat in brightening the landscape immediately surrounding Tewkesbury. Their currents are not swiftly moving; but they are excellent foils for the wider, stronger, statelier waters of the two rivers which have looked upon the making of so much history.

Whoever shares my passion for pastoral scenery---so tender, and so homely, and so legendary---cannot but be enchanted with a distant view of Tewkesbury. Sheer out of the wooded plain, as if from the very midst of the watered meadows, rises the massive, pinnacled tower of the ancient Abbey of the Virgin, while just above the trees can be seen the roof-line of its long and graceful nave. For many a mile across the valley is this grey landmark visible. Sometimes too it is audible; for the bells of Tewkesbury have that soft, rippling, musical note (rarely found in this country, where the office of bells is to make a noise), which so readily floats across a champaign* country. Upon a nearer approach, old red-tiled houses are seen nestling beneath the towering abbey in irregular groups, backed and almost surrounded by the trees which abound so thickly in this happy quiet valley. Here there is no distant hum, as of the progress of many men, such as you hear when you look from afar upon a great city; for Tewkesbury is little more than a village of some five thousand inhabitants. At the end of its streets of tall, gabled houses you step into meadows, and find yourself wandering at once by the banks of rivers, or along narrow, high-banked lanes, glorious with wild flowers and thickly grown with ferns.They who go into ecstacies over the white, well-trimmed lanes of the south, have never seen the wilder hedgerows and the ruddier soil of Stafford, Warwick, or Hereford. It is one of the chief charms of a little country town, that while you labour in a street you may sniff the perfume of the fields and the scent of the hedgerows. Of the stateley grandeur of Tewkesbury Abbey, as seen from the farther bank of the Severn, a characteristic sketch appears on the following page. Belted in with trees, it seems at a short distance, to stand solitary in its dignified and beauteous age, the one immutable thing in the midst of change. Now the majestic tower looks upon nothing but peace; yet in the meadow beneath its shadow the crown of England was finally lost to the House of Lancaster, and twice, long afterwards, it looked out upon the capture by Rounheads of this loyal little town.

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The glory of Tewkesbury, and one of the finest architectural possessions of the west, is the Benedictine Abbey of the Virgin, hard by the field still called "Bloody Meadow," whereon "this summer son of York" so brilliantly shone upon that fateful day in 1471. At Tewkesbury there was an inversion of the usual order of things: instead of the town growing up around the abbey, there is reason to suppose that the town existed first. There was a religious house there at a very early date; but the abbey, whose church is now the parish church of the town, was founded by Robert Fitz-Hamon about the end of the eleventh century. He was the first of the many exalted personages who were destined to be buried there---many of them his own descendants. For the lords of Tewkesbury and patrons of the abbey were of the very salt of the earth---De Clares, Despencers, and Beauchamps; all names of might in their day, and full of great memories now. The King-maker became possessed of the united inheritances of those three families by his marriage with the Lady Anne Beauchamp; but he brought no luck to Tewkesbury. His daughter Isabel, who succeeded him in the patronage of the abbey, was the wife of "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence;" and both of them are buried here. The abbey derives most of its outward dignity from its beautiful arcaded Norman tower, which rises to a height of more than 130 feet. Within, the church is very grand and massive, and of great size. The work is a remarkable blending of the Norman with the finely decorated achievements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.