Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/332

322[March 6, 1869] , tradition, and philosophy, that our language was far more Anglo-Saxon than our blood. At all events—if I were not sure—I would admit, like Sir Roger de Coverley, "that there was much to be said on both sides."

crow now leaves the moor, and sweeping over the vale of the Tavy alights on the nearest roof of Tavistock, that thriving town among the hills, and sees Dartmoor Tors grey in the distance. On the ruins of the abbey the crow rests to gather traditions of the old abbots—good, bad, and indifferent. The abbey was dedicated to St. Rumon, a forgotten Cornish bishop, whose anatomical relics were brought here by the founder, Ordgar, a Saxon alderman, who held all Devonshire, and every town or city between Frome and Exeter. He was father of Elfrida, the wife of King Edgar. Ordgar's son, Ordulph, completed and endowed this abbey. Ethelred confirmed its privileges; so by degrees the chancel walls grew, and the nave roof spread, and the tower rose, and the great windows bloomed into colour, and the organ's music vibrated through the aisles, the incense fumed, the boys' voices rose to heaven, and the piety of those ages perpetuated itself in that great casket of stone. Then faith grew chill, and wealth corrupted the heart of the chief religious house in the two western counties, and it became the abode of dissolute and revelling monks, fat, cyder-swilling creatures, shunned by the honest people and dreaded by the virtuous. Abbot Livingus, the friend of Canute, who rebuilt the abbey that Sweyn and his Danes had burnt, would have shuddered at such inmates; the learned and pious Aldred, who offered the golden chalice at the Holy Sepulchre, who brought home the sacred palm branch from the Jordan, and who afterwards consecrated both Harold and his slayer, the Conqueror, would have spurned such sons of Belial from the shrine of St. Rumon.

As day by day the old faith grew colder, the pictures and emblems, once so useful as appeals to the senses of unlettered worshippers, degenerated into mere inducements to idolatry. The Tavistock abbots grew rich, proud, and dissolute; discipline grew slack in the convents. Abbot John de Courtenay loved hunting better than preaching, and the monks ran riot; Abbot Cullyng, also deposed by the Bishop of Exeter, connived at private feasts of the monks, and permitted them to appear in Tavistock as gallants of the period, in buttoned tunics and long beaked Polish boots. The vengeance of Heaven found at last the fitting hand. Cromwell, Earl of Essex, destroyed part of the abbey. Henry the Eighth confiscated the other, and bestowed it on Lord John Russell, his favourite, to whose descendant it still belongs. It was worth nine hundred pounds a year then. Since then it has been parted among various devastators. The Bedford Hotel stands on the site of the chapter house, the refectory is a Unitarian chapel, the north gateway is a public library. The still house adorns the vicarage grounds. The abbey, bad as were its inmates, deserved a better fate, if it were only for the fact that the second printing press in England was set up in its precincts.

Just outside the town, on the new Plymouth road, the crow alights on the old gateway of Fitzford—an old Cavalier mansion, of which this entrance alone remains. It was one of this family from whom the well near Princes Town, on Dartmoor, is named—Sir Richard Grenville, one of King Charles's generals, who married the Lady Howard, the heiress of Fitzford, and inherited the property. This lady, the legend says, had previously removed three husbands, and tradition holds her as specially accursed, and still punished for her crimes in the place where they were committed. Transformed to a hound, she is condemned nightly to run from the old gateway of Fitzford House to the park at Okehampton between midnight and cockcrow, and to return to Tavistock with a single blade of grass in her mouth. She will be released when in this slow way all the grass in the park has been picked.

In 1645, Tavistock was visited by Prince Charles, while Plymouth was being invested by his father's army, and the gay lad is said to have always remembered, with horror, the continued wet weather at the town by the banks of the Tavy; still it is nothing to Dartmoor, where the Atlantic vapours are perpetually condensing on the cold tors, and the local rhyme is,

The crow searching through Tavistock, soon finds St. Eustace Tower, a spot upon which it is worth alighting; because in this church are preserved gigantic bones said to be those of Ordulph, the son of that Alderman Ordgar who founded Tavistock Abbey. Great stories (in every sense) are told of the Saxon champion. When he came to Exeter with King Edward the Confessor, he is said to have grown enraged at the absence of the porter who should have opened the city gates. Leaping off his horse he wrenched the bars out with his hands, and dragged down parts of the city wall. Then driving in the hinges of the gate with his strenuous feet, he burst in the opposing door. Ordulph is said to have been in the habit of bestriding a river ten feet broad that ran near the house, and chopping off with his knife the heads of deer and oxen, with as much sang-froid as gardeners lop celery.

Tavistock is specially proud of her greatest son, Drake, "the old warrior," as Devonshire country people quaintly call him, who was born at Crowndale, one mile to the south-west, at a house long since removed from the crow's sight. His favourite residence was Buckland Abbey