Of the place of this glorious Abbey in our own English history much might be written, and in fact it has been a difficult task to steer a course which, while avoiding too much history, should show that the history is there. In all the great events of history down to the end of the fifteenth century Tewkesbury Abbey has its place, 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.]