Tewkesbury Abbey, which outranks in size ten of the twenty-eight English cathedrals, is one of the most illustrious churches in the United Kingdom. Unlike most of the larger monastic establishments, it was under the control of a succession of great families whose deeds and misdeeds form no small part of the history of England. Fitz-Hamon, kin to the Conqueror, swept away what buildings of the old Saxon abbey he may have found there, and erected the magnificent Norman church which still awes the beholder. The ashes of Fitz-Hamon, who died in 1107, rest near the High Altar. The next lord of Tewkesbury to be buried in the Abbey was Gilbert de Clare, one of the signers of Magna Charta. The name of his father, Richard de Clare, headed the list, and one of the seven copies of the Great Charter was deposited in the Abbey. Every lord of Tewkesbury after Gilbert de Clare was interred in this church, which, for the next two hundred and fifty years, until the lordship of Tewkesbury was absorbed into the Crown, grew ever more splendid with costly monuments. The widow of Gilbert de Clare married the brother of Henry III, Richard, Duke of Cornwall, but although she thus became a countess of many titles and one of the first ladies of the land, she asked, in dying, to be buried beside the husband of her youth in Tewkesbury. To this her second husband would not agree, but he was magnanimous enough to send her poor, homesick heart back to the Abbey in a silver vase, which was duly placed in Earl Gilbert's marble mausoleum. The De Clares of Tewkesbury, Earls of Gloucester and Hereford, were a warrior race. The second Gilbert, called the Red Earl, fought both with Simon de Montfort, and against him, and the third Gilbert, his son, fell at Bannockburn. By his early death the lordship of Tewkesbury passed from the De Clares, who had held it for nearly a century, to the young earl's brother-in-law, Hugh le Despencer. This new Earl of Gloucester had succeeded Piers Gaveston in the perilous favour of Edward II. When Roger de Mortimer, by the unhallowed aid of Queen Isabel, triumphed over the king, the elder Despencer, a man of ninety, was hanged at Bristol, and his son, Hugh le Despencer, crowned with nettles, was swung from the gallows fifty feet high, in a hubbub of mockeries and rejoicings, at Hereford. His widow collected the scattered quarters of his body, exposed in various towns, and interred them in the Abbey under a richly carved and coloured monument. The Despencers, though no longer Earls of Gloucester, held the lordship of Tewkesbury for wellnigh another hundred years, cherishing and beautifying the fabric of the church and adding lavishly to its memorials of bronze and marble and to its treasure of chalices, copes, and jewels.