Tavistock
Tavistock is located within West Devon local authority area. Historically it formed part of Tavistock Hundred. It falls within Tavistock Deanery for ecclesiastical purposes. The Deaneries are used to arrange the typescript Church Notes of B.F.Cresswell which are held in the Westcountry Studies Library. The population was 3420 in 1801 5841 in 1901 . Figures for other years are available on the local studies website. In the valuation of 1334 it was assessed at £09/00/00. The lay subsidy of 1524 valued the community at £46/04/02. In 1641/2 750 adult males signed the Protestation returns. It is recorded as a borough from 1105 and was incorporated in 1682. It had parliamentary representation from 1330-1885. A turnpike was established in 1762. The community had a grammar school from 1552. A market is recorded from 14c.-1985.
A parish history file is held in Tavistock Library. You can look for other material on the community by using the place search on the main local studies database. Further historical information is also available on the Genuki website. Sources for family history can be found on the Tavistock Family History page.
Maps: The image below is of the Tavistock area on Donn's one inch to the mile survey of 1765.
On the County Series Ordnance Survey mapping the area is to be found on 1:2,500 sheet 105/8 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 105NE
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is SX480740. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet SX47SE, 1:25,000 mapping: sheet Explorer 108, Landranger (1:50,000) mapping: sheet 201. Geological sheet 337 also covers the area.
Illustrations: The image below is of Tavistock as included in the Library's illustrations collection. Other images can be searched for on the local studies catalogue.
A fair is known from: 14c.-1935. [It is intended to include the local section from The glove is up! Devon's historic fairs, by Tricia Gerrish, by kind permission of the author].
Extract from Devon by W.G.Hoskins (1954), included by kind permission of the copyright holder:
TAVISTOCK is the most delightful town in West Devon, and perhaps the most attractive of all the inland towns of the county. Much of it is built of a green volcanic ash from quarries at Hurdwick, about 1 1.5 m. N. of the town, a stone which also appears frequently in the medieval churches of the surrounding countryside. The town stands mostly on the N. side of the river Tavy, itself a decorative feature of the town-scene, and at the E. end of a large parish-known as Tavistock Hamlets which extends all the way to the Tamar. The scenery of the parish is of great variety and beauty, not excluding the abandoned mining landscape at Blanchdown on the W., above the Tamar. This is another of those great Devonshire parishes, so full of views, attractive old houses, and fascinating history, in which one can happily spend a week of exploration. Tavistock has, too, been fortunate in its historians. Few aspects of its varied history have not been adequately dealt with (see the Bibliography).
The town is essentially the product of its two owners: Tavistock Abbey from the 10th century to the 16th, and the earls and Dukes of Bedford from the 16th century to the 20th. The abbey created the town; the Russells gave it its present appearance and character. Between them they owned the town from 974 until 1911.
A small community existed here before the abbey came. On the hillside about 1 m. NE. of the town is an irregular earthwork known as the Trendle, which has yielded evidence of a late Celtic settlement. Later, possibly in the early 8th century, the Saxons occupied the lower ground beside the brawling Tavy, and founded the stoc that gives the place its name. By the time the Benedictine Abbey was founded about the year 974, a hamlet existed at Tavistock, with its own chapel, which stood near the NW. corner of the present inner market.
The establishment of the abbey, which became the largest and wealthiest in the South-West, naturally gave a great impetus to the village. In 1105 the abbot obtained for it a weekly market, which is, still held on Fridays, and in 1116 a three-day fair was added, on the eve, feast, and morrow of St. Rumon (29-31 August). Some time before 1185, probably during the abbacy of Walter (1155-68), the final step was taken of detaching an area of some 325 acres from the vast rural manor in order to set up a borough. The immediate stimulus to the creation of a borough was almost certainly the "tin rush" of these years when the virgin deposits on the SW. edge of Dartmoor, not many miles away, proved to be the largest European source of tin. So began the borough of Tavistock which continued uninterruptedly until it was deprived of its municipal status in 1885, and so began its equally long, but considerably more interrupted, mining history. For a very short period (1682-8), Tavistock was an incorporated borough with a mayor.
From 1295 down to 1868, with occasional interruptions, Tavistock was also a parliamentary borough, represented by two members. In 1868 the two were reduced to one, and in 1885 the borough was disfranchised and merged with a county division. The Russells (earls, and later Dukes, of Bedford) had acquired the borough, together with a vast estate round about, at the Dissolution of the abbey in 1539. From the beginning they exerted a strong political influence. The local man who had sat for the medieval borough gave way to relatives, personal friends, or political associates of the noble patrons; but not until the 17308 did the Russell influence become paramount and the town a true pocket borough. The long dominance of the Russells in the Whig influence is apparent down to the present day in the continuing Liberal tradition of the constituency, though the strong force of Devon nonconformity has also been a considerable factor. (See D.A. 42 (1910), 258-77; 43 (1911), 371-402; 69 (1937), 260-4.)
Tavistock was interested in tin mining from the 12th century onwards. In 1305 it was established, or re-established, as one of the three stannary towns (Ashburton and Chagford being the other two) where all tin raised in Devon was to be weighed, stamped, and put on sale. The Devonshire tin trade had practically disappeared by the early 17th century, but by then the ancient cloth industry of the town had become considerable and decay was averted. When in turn the cloth trade decayed, from the early 18th century onwards, copper mining developed opportunely to take its place. Though there had been earlier attempts, mining began in earnest in the 1790s and reached its peak in the early 1860s when the famous Devon Great Consols mine at Blanchdown was at the peak of its production as one of the richest copper mines in the world. This mine closed down in 1901. It has left behind a vast, broken landscape, extending for some 2 m. along and above the Tamar. The site, together with that of other mines in the district, will be found on the 2l-inch map (sheet 20/47), and should be explored for its fantastic and desolate beauty, the silent haunt of buzzards, foxes and grass-snakes. In its later days the Devon Great Consols concentrated on the production of arsenic, for which the ovens and long ducts remain. Only Graham Sutherland or John Piper could do justice to this romantic scene, quite unlike anything else in Devon.
In order to convey the copper ore cheaply from the Mary Tavy mines and others, a 4 m. canal was constructed from Tavistock to a point 240 ft. above Morwellham quay, which was then reached by an inclined plane. The canal barges were loaded on to trolleys, which ran down the grooved rails of the plane, controlled by a windlass and chain, to the quay on the Tamar where ships of 200 tons could lie. The cutting of the canal was done largely by the labour of French prisoners of war, and involved the driving of a tunnel nearly 2 m. long through the heart of Morwell Down. The canal was opened in 1817, carried a great traffic for many years, but went out of use by the 1890s. Mining had largely ceased by then, and such traffic as there was went by rail. The canal lies silent but not useless, for in 1933-4 it was cleaned out to provide power for supplying electricity to the neighbourhood. It now makes a delightful summer evening's walk as far as the mouth of the tunnel. The deserted Morwellham quay, once the scene of so much activity, is also a picturesque spot for a visit, and a picnic among the ruins.
Tavistock itself, apart from the fragmentary remains of the abbey, and the medieval parish church, is almost entirely a 19th century town, and largely the result-in one way or another-of the mining prosperity of the years down to 1870. Between 1801 and 1861 the population nearly trebled (3,420 to 8,965). In the following twenty years it fell by over 2,000, owing to the closing of many of the copper mines. Miners and their families left for the north of England coalfields, or emigrated to the mines of America and Australia. By 1931 the population of the town was smaller than it had been a hundred years earlier, but it is by no means decayed. It is a cheerful little market town, far enough from Plymouth to have a life and character of its own, and serving its original purpose as a market for a wide countryside around. It is curious to reflect that it is substantially a 19th century mining town: such words conjure up visions of Barnsley or Wigan. But copper and tin did not blacken the landscape as coal would have done, and the dukes of Bedford, with their almost complete ownership of the town and district, ensured the neat and orderly expansion of housing. At the S. end of the town, along the Yelverton road, the Duke of Bedford laid out in the late 1840s and early 1850s a hundred miners' houses, an object lesson to speculative builders and central planners alike.
The Duke also remodelled the centre of the town during the 1840s, largely over the abbey site. He erected the guildhall (1848) in the Gothic style, and laid out the new Plymouth road from the Guildhall Square to Fitzford. He also Gothicised the Bedford Hotel which had been built as a private dwelling house c. 1725 by Jacob Saunders, a rich Presbyterian merchant, on the site of the abbey frater or refectory. Saunders' house was turned into an inn early in the 19th century, but a good deal remains of his "pompous dwelling house" (as his enemies described it), notably the fine dining room of the present hotel.
The fate of the abbey buildings after 1539 has been described by Mr. Finberg in his Tavistock Abbey. Very little remains of this once splendid Benedictine house, but the accurate reconstruction shown in Plate 15 reveals what it was once like and where the buildings lay. The abbey-site lay between the parish church on the NW. and the Tavy on the SE. The visible remains may be suromarised as follows: ( I) a late 13th century wall in the parish churchyard, representing the NW. corner of the cloister, the longer wall being that of the abbey church; (2) Betsy Grimbal's tower (so called) in the vicarage garden, which represents the W. gatehouse of the abbey and part of the abbot's lodging (15th century) ; (3) the still-house and abbey precinct wall along the Tavy; (4) Court Gate in Guildhall Square, the main gateway of the abbey, late 12th century, remodelled in the 15th century and altered and restored by John Foulston in 1824. Since 1829 it has housed the Tavistock Library; (5) the misericord, a dining hall reserved originally forthe use of the sick, survives intact as the Unitarian chapel to-day, though the E. entrance dates only from 1845. From 1691 it has been used continuously as a place of worship, at first by the Presbyterians and later by the Unitarians. The coved plaster ceiling dates from 1755, the original timber roof surviving underneath; (6) the porch to the misericord survives at the back of the Bedford Hotel, and is now used as a dairy. It was the original N. entrance to the misericord and has a vaulted roof with bosses (early 16th century); (7) the police station and sergeant's house, in Guildhall Square, incorporate some remains of the abbey. All these remains should be studied with the aid of the reconstruction of the site already referred to.
The parish church has the rare dedication to St. Eustace, found in only two other English parishes. It was first founded, in all probability, in the early 13th century, and rebuilt and enlarged shortly before 1318 when Bishop Stapeldon dedicated it. Very little remains of the 14th century building, for between 1425 and 1450 the church was further enlarged and rebuilt. The second S. aisle, known as the Cloth worker's Aisle, was built in 1445 by the gift of Constance, widow of John Wyse. Notice its fine wagon roof with carved bosses. The arcade leading into this aisle is of granite but the other arcades and interior stonework are of Roborough elvan. The external walls are of the green Hurdwick stone. Among the noteworthy contents of the church are the organ, the original specification for which was drawn up by Samuel Wesley, organist here for a time; the early 15th century Italian picture in the chapel; the remarkably fine tomb of Sir John Glanville (1600), who was born at Tavistock and was the first attorney to reach the judicial bench; the William Morris window near the warshrine, and the Kempe window in the N. choir aisle. The churchwardens' accounts are among the earliest in England, beginning in 1385-6, though the series is very imperfect down to 1535-6.
In the vicarage garden are preserved three inscribed stones, probably funerary monuments of the 6th century. Two were found at Buckland Monachorum and one in Tavistock. All have Latin inscriptions. One of the Buckland stones is also carved with Ogham characters, a script invented in S. Ireland and brought by Irish invaders to the W. of England. The vicarage itself is a pleasant early 19th century building in Hurdwick stone.
There is much other decent early 19th century building in the town, including the Corn Market (1835), now a cinema, and the workhouse on the N. side of the town, erected in 1837, and attributed to Sir Gilbert Scott. Fitzford church, large and gaunt, was built in the Italian Gothic style in 1866-7. After being disused for many years, it was taken over by the Roman Catholics in 1951 as a place of worship.
The Abbey Bridge was built in 1764: and widened in 1859-60. Vigo Bridge, also over the Tavy, dates from 1773. Near here the beautiful Quaker Cemetery should be noticed, with its clipped cypresses, rhododendrons, weeping willows, and great copper beeches. At the S. entrance to the town stands a fine statue to Sir Francis Drake (c. 154:0-96), by Boehm. The better known statue on Plymouth Hoe is a replica of this original. Drake was almost certainly born at Crowndale Farm, about 1 m. S. of the town, but nothing remains of the farmhouse of his date.
Tavistock was described by Fuller as "that fruitful seed-plot of eminent and famous men." Besides Drake, there were Sir John Glanville, William Browne, the poet and author of Britannia's Pastorals (much of his poetry is about the beautiful Tavistock country), and Sir John Maynard (1602-90), who sat in the Short and Long Parliaments and framed Strafford's impeachment. In the parish are a number of interesting houses. Morwell was a country seat of the abbots of Tavistock, and is a perfect little 15th century house on a quadrangular plan. Kilworthy lies secluded at the end of a long lane. It was the home of the Glanvilles in the 16th century but the present house was rebuilt c. 1800. The Elizabethan walled garden and terraces, however, remain unchanged. Of the ancient house of the Fitz family at Fitzford (now at the S. end of the town) nothing is left but the rebuilt gatehouse.
