But apart from the general excitement, Tavistock had its own special atmosphere of stirring influences, both from the past and in the present. The inscribed stones in the vicarage garden show that the country was occupied by a Gaelic tribe of Celts early in the Roman times. But the town owed its fame, and probably its very existence, to the great Benedictine monastery, founded by Earl Ordulf, and sanctified by the relics of St. Rumon in the days of Edgar the Peaceable. For almost six centuries it had reflected, and even, for a short while, directly influenced, through its abbots, the changeful course of England’s progress. Two of its earlier abbots were leading statesmen, as well as active prelates. Lyfing, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, was Canute’s fellow-traveller to Rome in 1026, and the staunch friend of the patriotic Earl Godwin. Aldred, also Bishop of Worcester, and then Archbishop of York, was the wise counsellor of Edward the Confessor and of Harold, and the brave rebuker of William I.; he was the great church-builder and church-reformer of his time, and he was the first English Bishop to visit Jerusalem.
Our later abbots often illustrate public feeling, though they could not guide it as these two had done. Thus the general confusion at the close of Henry III.’s reign found such a bad sample in our monastery that Abbot John Chubbe was suspended in 1265, and deposed in 1269. The growing luxury and indifference of the fourteenth century was seen too plainly in Abbot John de Courtenay, who was reproved by the good Bishop Grandisson, in 1348, for neglecting his duties to the abbey and alienating its property, whilst he kept dogs for hunting. Bishop Brantyngham’s strong injunctions to Abbot Thomas Cullyng, in 1387, to restore discipline and to keep the monastic rules, show that disorder and dissipation had been tending from bad to worse.
But there is a brighter side to this picture of the past, and most of our abbots were more learnedly or more clerically disposed. Some had been slowly collecting a good library—an early promise of the present Public Library, the best, for the size of the town, in the West of England. Others had fostered the “Saxon School,” probably founded in the early days of the thirteenth century, and still represented by the Grammar School. In the spring of 1318, under Abbot John Campbell, Bishop Bronescombe consecrated the Parish Church, which had been rebuilt in the beautiful Decorated style of the day; and in the autumn of the same year, he came again to consecrate the Conventual Church, which, in its grand proportions, was almost a rival of Exeter Cathedral. Under Robert Bonus, in 1325, was established the Guild of the Brothers and Sisters of the Light of St. Mary in the Parish Church; and in 1370, Abbot Stephen Langdon showed his concern for the good of the town by appealing to the faithful to help in restoring the stone bridge over the rude waters of the Tavy. John Denyngton probably rebuilt much of the Abbey in the Perpendicular style then in vogue; and he certainly added to his own dignity and to that of his monastery by gaining the permission of Henry VI., in 1458, to apply to the Pope, Pius II., for the privilege of wearing the pontificalia. This, our first mitred abbot, like his predecessor, Allan of Cornwall, two hundred years earlier, had come back to Tavistock from presiding over the dependent Priory of Tresco, in the Isles of Scilly. Abbot John Banham was more ambitious than Denyngton; in 1513 a grant of Henry VIII. made him a spiritual peer, as Baron Hurdwick, and four years later, a bull of Leo X. exempted him from episcopal visitation. It was probably to Banham that the abbey owed an honour more considerable and more in keeping with the spirit of the age—the setting up within its precincts of the first printing-press in the West of England.
But the glory of our abbey had scarcely reached its height, before it faded suddenly and for ever. Anticipating the blow which shattered the larger monasteries in the spring of 1539, our abbot, John Peryn, not emulous of the fate of the abbots of Glastonbury, Woburn, and Fountains, assembled his twenty monks in the Chapter-house on March 20th, and then and there resigned all their claims into the hands of the King. For this ready surrender they were rewarded with their lives and various pensions. With his pension of £100 a year, the abbot withdrew to Stonepost, in West Street, and was probably the “Sir John Peryn” who, in 1543, was paid £6 as “Jesus’ Priest.”
When William Browne was a lad, middle-aged men must have known the last Abbot of Tavistock; and old people could recall—the poorer sort with regretful sighs, the good old times, when the frequent services still sounded from the Abbey Church, and the monks distributed alms at the arched gateway, beneath the present library. Even Browne himself, a child of the Renaissance, who hated superstition and loved the Pagan mythology, could grudge the misuse of sacred buildings; and amongst other evils done by the Tavy in flood, he tells us how the stream—
Here, as our wicked age doth sacriledge,
Helpes downe an Abbey.
But though he was fond of Chaucer and our older poets, and though he felt the influence of the stately ruins that surrounded his school-house, he loved nature more than art, and was too full of present life to care very much for the past. As a boy with boys, he would spend his holidays breaking away from
An Orchard, whence by stealth he takes
A churlish Farmer’s Plums, sweet Peares or Grapes;