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paving tiles are specially mentioned. The most interesting thing about the tiles recently discovered is that they were apparently in situ, actually on the floor of the Great Church. Detached tiles or portions had previously been thrown up in digging graves,1 but to find them undisturbed in their original place, close inside the great wall of the nave, was a much more valuable piece of evidence. These tiles are most interesting, some really beautiful. Most are in red and white terra-cotta or clay, but some are in a dark greenish brown, with slightly iridescent glaze; all are five inches square. Some have the figure of a bishop, vested, with hand upraised in benediction, probably intended for St. Rumon. Others have a lion in a central ring surrounded by fishes swimming, intended, Mr. Kempe considered, to symbolise the grant of the Scilly Isles by Henry I and his son Reginald, Earl of Cornwall. Some have a large single fish, others a curious serpent-like creature with large head, while others have a shield that appears armorial and may be intended for the chevrons of Clare. These are not foreign tiles but English, most probably made within the precincts of the Abbey; they have been pronounced by the experts of the British Museum to be of the early part of the fourteenth century, so they were probably in place when the church was dedicated in 1318 that church of which we have lately seen a portion of one of the great walls, ornamented with delicate and dainty designs of a somewhat earlier date, 2 only a fragment, but enough to settle the vexed question of its actual position. For we know now that the beautiful arch above ground is part of the Cloister adjoining the great south wall of the nave; the church therefore lay between the arch and the Parish Church. It had been previously authoritatively stated to be the north wall of the Abbey Church, which it was presumed lay south of it, stretching across the New Road to the Bedford Hotel.

The fact that a little excavation has proved so much, encourages the hope that future excavation may settle for ever all that is now uncertain.

A. J. Kempe, in Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1830.

2 Circa 1240, Mr. C. R. Peers, Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries.

SOME NOTES ON TAVISTOCK HISTORY.

FIRST SERIES.

BY J. J. ALEXANDER, M.A., J.P.

(Read at Tavistock, 22nd July, 1914.)

I. IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

VERY little is known about Tavistock in pre-Saxon times, but it may have been even then a place of some importance. The ancient British trackway, which connected Exeter with the extreme West, passed through it; and as the first sheltered spot beyond Dartmoor, with comparatively easy means of communication northward and southward along the fertile lands which adjoin the Tamar, it must have formed a convenient halting-place on the primitive western route.1

The researches of Professor Rhys and other ethnologists have shown that in those early days the population of the south-western peninsula contained a substantial proportion of the two oldest surviving native races, the Ivernians and the Goidels. It is therefore unnecessary to assume, as some have done, an Irish invasion or settlement in order to account for the inscribed stones of Goidelic origin which have been discovered in this neighbourhood. These stones, which have already been fully described by other writers, merely go to prove that before the end of the sixth century the Christian religion was professed among the Goidels of this region.3

At some time between 812 and 815 (recent writers like Professor Oman fix it at about 814) the Saxon conquest of Devon was completed by Egbert.4 East and Central

1 Trans., XXI, p. 136.

2 Celtic Britain (Rhys), p. 218.

3 Trans., XLII, pp. 475–502.

4 England before the Norman Conquest (Oman).

Devon certainly, and North Devon probably, had been conquered long before. The traditions of fighting around Tavistock, while they rest on slender foundation, lead us to think-a thought also suggested by the greater size and more regular form of the south-western Devon hundredsthat this portion of Devon was one of the last to yield to the Saxons, and that we are this year commemorating, as nearly as we can judge, the eleventh centenary of the coming of our English ancestors to this place.

Twice after 814 Egbert was obliged to march through Devon in order to restrain the turbulence of the West Welsh, over whom he seems to have claimed suzerainty.1 On the second of these occasions they were allied with the Danes against him. At Gafulford (probably Galford near Lew Down) in 825, and at Hingston Down near Calstock in 838, he was victorious over these Cornishmen, whom he reduced to subjection. It would appear that he, or one of his successors, found it necessary to establish military strongholds or stocks on the Cornish border for the prevention of raids. This is the most likely origin of the name Tavistock, which was primarily a hillside camp north-east of the present town, and nearly a mile from its centre. 3

2

During the next 150 years this fortified place and the surrounding land seems to have been attached to the office of alderman and military governor of Devonshire. Alderman Ordgar, a rich and powerful nobleman, had a residence here in the days of King Edgar; in 964 his daughter Elfthryth became that monarch's second wife and some four years later the mother of Ethelred the Unready. Down in the valley close by were the graves of her mother and one of her brothers. 4

Just then a great monastic revival was taking place throughout England. The leaders in the movement were Dunstan, who in 960 had become Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ethelwold, who three years later was consecrated Bishop of Winchester. We may reasonably suppose that these prelates would eagerly seek the support of so important a magnate as Ordgar, and incline his mind to the erection of a monastery near the spot where his wife and son lay buried.

1 Oman.

2 D. and C. Notes and Queries, VII, p. 192.

3 Baring-Gould (Introduction to Homeland Handbook).

4 Ethelred's Charter.

Ordgar died in 971, and there is no trustworthy evidence that the monastery was ever begun during his lifetime. Perhaps like David of old he was obliged to leave the great task to his successor. What we do know is that in or before 981 the Abbey was completed by Ordulph, surviving son of Ordgar, and received in that year a charter from his nephew King Ethelred. Building in those days was carried on in a leisurely fashion, and there is nothing to contradict the widely believed tradition that Ordgar began to build in 961; but the designation of the Abbey as "Ordulph's minster" in the Saxon Chronicle of date 997, the omission of all mention of Ordgar's name from the recital of Ethelred's grant in a charter of inspeximus, and the general chain of circumstances narrated in the last two paragraphs, impel us to fix a later date than 961 for the foundation.

We are not concerned so much with the story of the monastery, which has already been told many times, as with that of the small cluster of houses which was gradually growing under the shadow of its walls. For Tavistock was not yet a town; it is not mentioned as such in Domesday Book. It was not even the head of a hundred, but was included in the Hundred of Lifton; and in size and importance it was overshadowed by Lydford, which was one of the four Domesday towns of Devon.

By the reign of Henry I, somewhere between 1114 and 1120, and therefore at a date of which we may without any great impropriety imagine ourselves to be celebrating the eighth centenary, Tavistock had grown sufficiently to warrant the monks in seeking, and the king in granting, a charter constituting it a market town and the head of a hundred shorn off from the Domesday Hundred of Lifton.

In the documents of Edward I's reign it is usually described as a borough, and in 1295 it received the privilege of sending two members to Parliament, a privilege not always eagerly desired, as each constituency was

pelled to pay the wages and travelling expenses of its own members. A few years before (1281) it had been constituted a stannary town.

In the fifteenth century Tavistock had a thriving and prosperous woollen trade, and was noted for the manufacture of certain cloths known as "Tavistocks," which were legalised and protected by laws passed in 1467 and several times subsequently. Perhaps the town may have

gained about this time a higher municipal status; nearly all references to the chief burgess prior to 1467 describe him as prepositus"; between 1467 and 1539 the only extant allusions to him, five in number, call him maior."

Through the stages of British trackway station, ninthcentury Saxon stockade, tenth-century monastic settlement, twelfth-century market community, fourteenthcentury parliamentary borough and fifteenth century manufacturing centre, the medieval history of this town can be traced from the scanty materials available in a dim and shadowy, but still intelligible way.

To prevent confusion it should be clearly remembered that the name Tavistock has at least five different geographical meanings. (1) As has been shown, it was primarily given to a military stronghold, situated in a district or manor then probably known as Hurdwick (a name which in these later days is retained by a farm of 112 acres about one mile N.N.W. of Tavistock Church). (2) The name was about 981 transferred to the Abbey and its surroundings, which ultimately attained the rank of a borough, having an area of 325 acres, with the river Tavy as its south-eastern boundary and, oddly enough, not containing the old Saxon stronghold of Ordgar's time. (3) Between 1114 and 1120 a Hundred of Tavistock was formed, which included the present parishes of Milton Abbot and Brentor. (4) In Plantagenet times a Parish of Tavistock, comprising the borough and the manors of Hurdwick (which till 1885 included the detached hamlet of Cudliptown, now in Peter Tavy), Ogbear and Morwell was constituted from the southern portions of the Hundred. This ecclesiastic parish, with Cudliptown excluded, became in 1832 the Reform Act borough, with an area of about 11,500 acres. (5) The present Civil Parish or Urban District was set up in 1898 and now contains 1621 acres (1551 acres before 1911, when a boundary extension took place), or about five times the area of the older borough.

Modern legislation has applied the name to other areas, such as the Parliamentary Division, the Poor Law Union, the Rural District, and the Petty Sessional Division, but the five areas already given are sufficient for purposes of historical study.

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