This fragment was part of an ornate group hand-carved to decorate the choir stalls of Gloucester Cathedral in the late fourteenth century. Originally positioned right at the top of the stalls’ elaborate wooden structure, the tracery was almost certainly taken down and replaced during Gilbert Scott’s major restoration of the cathedral and the choir stalls in 1873. As an historical matter, according to the Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestraie, “Abbot Adam de Stanton… built the great vault of the choir, at vast expense, with the stalls there on the Prior’s side [north range], from the offerings of the faithful flocking to the King’s tomb.” Unfinished at his death, the stalls were completed under the abbotcy of his successor Thomas Horton.
