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The Abbey Chronicle records that the first Christian worship was brought to the area by Theoc, a missionary from Northumbria , who built his cell in the mid-7th century near on a gravel spit where the Severn and Avon rivers join together. The cell was succeeded by a monastery in 715, but nothing remaining of it has been identified. In the 10th century the religious foundation at Tewkesbury became a Priory subordinate to the Cranbourne Abbey in Dorset. In 1087 William The Conqueror gave the manor of Tewkesbury to his cousin Robert Fitzhamon , who, with Giraldus, Abbot of Cranbourne, founded the present abbey in 1092. Building of the present Abbey church did not start until 1102, employing Caen Stone imported from Normandy and floated up the Severn. Robert Fitzhamon died at Falaise in Normandy, in 1102, but his son-in-law, Robert Fitzroy , the natural son of Henry I who was made Earl Of Gloucester , continued to fund the building work. The Abbey's greatest single later patron was Lady Eleanor le Despenser, last of the De Clare heirs of the FitzRoys. In the High Middle Ages Tewkesbury became one of the richest abbeys of England. The market town of dwellings in Church Street. The Abbey now sits partly isolated in lawns, like a cathedral in its Close , for the area surrounding the Abbey is protected from development by the Abbey Lawn Trust, originally funded by a United States benefactor in 1962 {Link without Title} . One of its most distinguished abbots was Alan , the biographer of Thomas A Kempis . The churches' 17th-century Organ was originally made for Magdalen College , Oxford; after the Civil War it was removed to the chapel of Hampton Court Palace after the Civil War. It came to Tewkesbury in 1737. The Abbey has its own choir which sings weekend services. Weekday evensongs are sung by the choir of the Abbey School, Tewkesbury which was founded for this purpose in 1973 by Miles Amherst. Construction time-line:
After the and was never rebuilt. Some restoration undertaken in the 19th century under Sir Gilbert Scott included the Rood Screen that replaced the one removed when the Abbey became a parish church. What remains is one of the finest Norman buildings in Britain. Famous graves in the abbey
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