Gloucester Cathedral

Interesting facts

The church began as a minster founded around 679 by Osric, King of the Hwicce, with his relative Kyneburg as its first abbess.

When Abbot Serlo arrived in 1072, the community had dwindled to just two monks and eight novices.

At Henry III's coronation in 1216, his mother's bracelet is said to have served in place of a crown.

One of its windows, dating from about 1350, is said to show the earliest known image of golf, some 300 years older than any Scottish one.

The Great Cloister was designed between 1351 and 1377 by Thomas de Cantebrugge, and its south walk holds carrels where monks studied and wrote.

In the Second World War, Robert Curthose's effigy was placed on the hidden Coronation Chair and both were buried under sandbags; the Great East Window was dismantled.

In 2016, at 927 years old, it became the oldest cathedral in the UK to have solar panels installed on its roof.

In 2015 Rachel Treweek was installed here as the first woman to become a diocesan bishop in the Church of England.

The central tower rises about 69 metres, and the cathedral is some 128 metres long.

The abbey unusually commissioned its own history, written by Walter Frocester, who in 1381 became its first mitred abbot.

Why it is worth it

Gloucester Cathedral is best understood as two buildings wearing one skin. The heavy Norman church begun by Abbot Serlo in 1089 still stands underneath — you feel it in the squat round piers of the nave — but in the fourteenth century the monks wrapped its eastern half in a lattice of tall, thin Perpendicular tracery, as if a stone cage had been lowered over the Romanesque walls. The money for that makeover came largely from one tomb: Edward II, murdered at nearby Berkeley Castle in 1327, was buried here under an elaborate canopied shrine, and the abbey's fortunes rose with the pilgrims and royal gifts that followed.

Three things deserve most of your time. The quire, with its dense net of ribs and bosses overhead, ends in the Great East Window, which was the largest window in the world when it was finished around 1350 and still holds much of its medieval glass. Edward II's canopied tomb lies beside it. Then walk out to the Great Cloister: its fan vaults, designed in the second half of the fourteenth century, are the earliest surviving in England, and the lacy corridors are the ones film audiences know from the first, second and sixth Harry Potter films. Look also for the painted bog-oak effigy of Robert Curthose, William the Conqueror's eldest son, and the misericords under the choir seats, one of which shows men chasing a ball.

History has a habit of passing through. William the Conqueror held his Christmas court in the chapter house in 1085 and there set the Domesday survey in motion; the nine-year-old Henry III was crowned in the abbey in 1216. When Henry VIII dissolved the monastery he kept the church and made it the cathedral of a new diocese in 1541. In the Second World War the Coronation Chair from Westminster Abbey was hidden in the crypt, one of only four apsidal cathedral crypts in England. The central tower, finished in the fifteenth century with four delicate pinnacles, is visible across the whole city.

Getting there

The cathedral stands in the north of Gloucester's old centre, about 0.3 km from the heart of the city; Gloucester railway station serves the city. The nearest major airport is Bristol Airport (BRS), about 63 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Gloucester Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of St Peter and the Holy and Indivisible Trinity and formerly St Peter's Abbey, in Gloucester, England, stands in the north of the city near the River Severn. It originated with the establishment of a minster, Gloucester Abbey, dedicated to Saint Peter and founded by Osric, King of the Hwicce, in around 679.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Gloucester Cathedral

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia