The story is told that Sir Francis and Sir Bernard,—the latter the head of the Ash family—had a heated quarrel over the matter in the presence of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Bernard objecting to the navigator assuming the wyvern gules.
"Well," said Bess, "I will give Sir Francis a new coat, a ship in full sail, with the wyvern turned head over heels at the poop."
But Sir Bernard was too important a man to be offended; she thought better of it, and gave Sir Francis the noble coat of a fess wavy between two pole stars.
The story is pronounced to be apocryphal.
Sir Francis became possessor by purchase of Buckland Abbey (1581), which is not only beautifully situated, but is interesting. It is, in fact, the cruciform abbey church converted into an Elizabethan mansion. The nave has been floored, and the drawing-room upstairs is in it; the hall below is also in part therein. There is here some splendid plaster-work. The choir was pulled down and a kitchen wing built at right angles. In the grounds are some remarkably fine tulip trees.
Buckland Monachorum Church is large, Perpendicular, but cold, and has a naked, unfurnished look internally from being without its screen.
There are two points on no account to be missed by a visitor to Tavistock, and both can be combined in one drive or walk—the Raven Rock above the Virtuous Lady Mine, opposite the point where the Walla falls into the Tavy; the other the better known Morwell Rocks. The former, hardly inferior to the other, but less known, is reached from the Bere Alston road.
At Morwell is the hunting-lodge of Abbot Courtenay, cousin of Bishop Grandisson, and appointed by him to Tavistock Abbey. It was a very unsatisfactory appointment. He alienated the property of the abbey, and allowed its buildings and discipline to fall into decay, and got the monastery into a debt equivalent to twenty thousand pounds of our money. All he cared for was sport, like the jolly monk in Chaucer's Prologue.
The quadrangle, which was in a singularly untouched condition, with hall and butteries and kitchens, was somewhat wantonly mutilated some fifty years ago and turned into farmhouse and cottages.