history, 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."

AS THE CROW FLIES.
DUE WEST. TAVISTOCK TO PLYMOUTH.

The crow now leaves the moor, and sweeping
ing 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, Avho 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 west wind always brings wet weather,
    The east wind wet and cold together,
    The south wind surely brings us rain,
    The north wind blows it back again.

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