St Peters Abbey

Around the site of the present cathedral King Osric founded a monastery dedicated to St Peter in 679. It began as a community of monks and nuns ruled by Abbess Kyneberga, and its first few centuries were a little shaky. It had to be rebuilt in 823 by King Beornwulf, who turned it into a house for secular priests. These were thrown out by Cnut in 1022 and replaced with Benedictine monks who were slack and unpopular. In 1058 after a serious fire it was rebuilt by the Bishop of Worcester, who when he became Archbishop of York stripped and neglected it.

William the Conqueror saved the situation when in 1072 he appointed the able French monk Serlo as abbot. Serlo recruited more monks - they were down to two - and began rebuilding the abbey in the style of his native Normandy. It was consecrated in 1100 and the great pillars in the Cathedral nave date from this time.

Henry III had his coronation in St Peters in 1216, the only English monarch since the Conquest to be crowned outside London.

In 1327 Edward II was buried at the abbey after his murder at Berkeley Castle, and for the next two centuries pilgrims came bringing gifts for the monks and prosperity to the town. Their numbers were so great that the monks built extra lodgings for them, including the New Inn in 1430 (still open) and the Fleece in 1500.

During these years the abbey was continually restored and ornamented in the latest styles by an army of craftsmen; the 14th century fan tracery of its great cloister was the earliest in England. The cloister has a lavatorium where the monks washed and cubicles where they studied; lately it has doubled for the corridors of Hogwarts during the filming of Harry Potter.

By the 1470s the church had grown to its present size with a magnificent Perpendicular tower.

King Henry VIII and his new wife Anne Boleyn were entertained by the abbot of St Peter's in 1535; rather ungratefully he had dissolved the abbey by 1540. The church became the Cathedral of the new Protestant diocese and the first Bishop of Gloucester was appointed. In 1555 his daughter Mary Tudor burnt the second Bishop of Gloucester for his extreme Protestant views.

The Civil War was not kind to the Cathedral as it was the HQ of the Parliamentarian soldiers, who tended to use the tower for musket practice. The statues suffered at this time, but not the stained glass portrait of Pope Gregory, too high on the great East Window to be seen.