A short distance up the Tamar it receives its little tributary the Tavy,
running through a deep ravine, and on its banks are the ruins of
Tavistock Abbey, founded in the tenth century and dedicated to St. Mary.
Orgarius, the Earl of Devonshire, was admonished in a dream to build it,
but his son Ordulph finished it. He was of great strength and gigantic
stature, could break down gates and stride across a stream ten feet
wide. They still preserve, we are told, some of Ordulph's huge bones in
Tavistock Church. The Danes plundered and burned the abbey, but it was
rebuilt in greater splendor, and its abbot sat in the House of Peers.
When it was disestablished, like Woburn it fell to Lord Russell, and it
is now owned by the Duke of Bedford. The remains of the grand
establishment, however, are but scanty, and its best memory is that of
the printing-press set up by the monks, which was the second press
established in England. The Duke of Bedford's attractive villa of
Endsleigh is near Tavistock, and a short distance south of the town is
Buckland Abbey, built on the river-bank by the Countess of Devon in the
thirteenth century. This was the home of Sir Francis Drake, and is still
held by his descendants. Drake was born in a modest cottage on the banks
of the Tavy about the year 1539. North of Tavistock, on the little river
Lyd, are the ruins of Lydford Castle, surrounded by a village of rude
cottages. Here originated the "law of Lydford," a proverb expressive of
hasty judgment:
"First hang and draw,
Then hear the cause by Lydford law."
One chronicler accounts for this proverb by the wretched state of the
castle jail, in which imprisonment was worse than death. At Lydford is a
remarkable chasm where a rude arch is thrown across an abyss, at the
bottom of which, eighty feet below, the Lyd rattles along in its
contracted bed. This is a favorite place for suicides, and the tale is
still told of a benighted horseman, caught in a heavy storm, who spurred
his horse along the road at headlong speed to seek shelter in the
village. Next day it was found that the storm had swept the bridge away,
and the rider shuddered to think how his horse on that headlong ride
through the tempest had leaped over the abyss without his knowing it.