Chipping Campden & Tewkesbury Abbey is a Cotswold town in Gloucestershire. A rich wool trading centre in the Middle Ages, Chipping Campden enjoyed the patronage of wealthy wool merchants (also wool church). Since 1610 the town has been home to a championship of rural games, which later turned into Robert Dover's Cotswold Olympick Games. The games began somewhere between 1604 and 1612 and have continued on and off to the present day. The games were organized in 1612 during the reign of James I of England on Dover's Hill in the town of Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. The games were originally organized by attorney Robert Dover as a protest against the growing Puritanism of the day. In 1963 the Games were once again re-established and continue to the present day. The Heart of England Way is a long distance walk of around 100 miles through the Midlands of England. It passes through the counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire-the Beacon Way, Staffordshire Way, Arden Way, Cotswold Way, Oxfordshire Way, and Thames Path. Places to visit locally include: Kiftsgate Court and Hidcote Manor Garden (owned by the National Trust), near Mickleton (3 miles); Blockley; Broadway; Stow-on-the-Wold; Winchcombe; and, further afield, Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick Castle.The Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, one of the finest Norman buildings in England, is the second largest parish church in England, having become so at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Fourteen of England's cathedrals are of smaller dimensions; only Westminster Abbey contains more medieval tombs. The Chronicle of Tewkesbury 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 (Jurassic limestone) imported from Normandy and floated up the Severn; a popular building material for abbeys and structures done in the Norman Romanesque style. One of its most distinguished abbots was Alan, Benedictine Abbot of Tewkesbury, the biographer of Thomas Becket a Kempis. In the struggle between Thomas Becket of Canterbury and Henry II, he was a strong supporter of Thomas. As a result, he went to Tewkesbury as abbot where he was out of Henry's way. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is set in a company of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
After the Battle of Tewkesbury in the Wars of the Roses on May 4 1471, some of the defeated Lancastrians sought sanctuary in the abbey, but the victorious Yorkists, led by King Edward IV, forced their way into the abbey, and the resulting bloodshed caused the building to be closed for a month until it could be purified and re-consecrated. A 1471 brass plate on the floor in the center of the sanctuary marks the grave of Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, the son of King Henry VI and end of the Lancastrian line, who was killed in the Battle of Tewkesbury - the only Prince of Wales ever to die in battle.