by Grant Allen
Taunton, though so closely connected with Wells in origin, owes its continued existence to very different causes. The splendid vale in which it stands, thickly dotted with rich apple orchards, known as Taunton Dean, must always have been one of the most fruitful triassic reaches in all Britain. Indeed, the coins found on the spot seem to indicate that long before Ini’s time a station stood here on the Roman road from Bath to Exeter; while the great British camp at Norton, close by, justifies the local rhyme,
Norton was a wallèd town When Taunton was a fuzzy down.
It was to Ini, however, that the modern town owed its foundation; and his border fortress, a stockaded burg, placed at the point where Taunton Dean narrows to a neck of land along the river, occupied the site of the later castle. It was thus a military post in its beginnings; but it was meant to guard the rich farms of the newly-conquered region whose centre it occupied. A little farther on, the name of Wellington, the town of the Wealings or Welshmen, sufficiently marks the old limits of the Dumnonian kingdom. At a later period, when the capture of Exeter rendered the fortress unnecessary, Queen Fritheswyth granted Taunton to the see of Winchester, in whose possession it long after remained. The bishops built the castle on the site of Ini’s earthwork, the building being erected under Henry I. But its site made the town into the natural agricultural centre of Taunton Dean — the mart for all its cider, grain, and cheese; for, like all triassic districts, the Tone valley is largely given over to orchards and grazing. Of history in the ordinary acceptation Taunton has little; its growth has been slow and imperceptible. During the Middle Ages it rose to be the real capital of West Somerset; and its importance is attested by its magnificent churches, one of which, St. Mary Magdalene, has probably the finest and richest perpendicular tower in all England. When the woollen trade was naturalised in this country, the manufacture of serges found a home for a while in Taunton; and silk is still made there in a humble way. The sieges during the civil wars of the Commonwealth, and the events connected with Monmouth’s rebellion, belong to the political history of England, not to the local history of Taunton. The draining and cultivation of the moors — in Somerset the word is applied rather to a fen than to a down — of course increased the importance of the town; and when at last the railway from Exeter to Bristol swept through the centre of the picturesque valley, Taunton became an important junction, with branch lines diverging from it through the neighbouring dales in all directions. It has now some few manufactures, notably that of gloves; but as a whole it represents the purely natural agricultural town, as Wells represents the purely artificial cathedral city. From beginning to end it has been the centre of a fertile valley and nothing more. Communications have widened its district and increased its importance; but it contrasts at once with those towns which, like Salisbury and Colchester, have obtained an administrative impulse from ecclesiastical or military reasons, and those which, like Manchester or Sheffield, have been revolutionised by their position near the great coal-beds. Taking them as a whole, indeed, the central towns of the rich triassic vales remain the most thriving purely agricultural centres of England; and Taunton may perhaps be regarded as the best example of the class.
TAVISTOCK AND PLYMOUTH
On the farther side of Dartmoor, among the richly wooded dales that converge to form the valley and estuary of the Tamar at Plymouth, the long silver thread of the Tavy meanders in ceaseless windings through a deep glen, till at length it opens on the main stream of the united rivers near Tamerton. As in most other parts of Devonshire, the stream has given its own name to all the villages and parishes along its banks. Its upper portion is known as Tavy Cleave; next come two villages with churches dedicated severally to St. Mary and St. Peter, and known accordingly as Marytavy and Petertavy; then, a little lower down the bank stands Mount Tavy; while in the very midst of the fertile little valley, at the point naturally best adapted for an agricultural centre, rises the picturesque market-town of Tavistock. Its very name marks it out as the oldest and most important place in the whole glen of Tavy; for the termination “stock” or “stoke” is old English for a [stockaded place or a staked ford], and it [sometimes] denotes the primitive local centre of the districts in which it occurs. In the Saxon Chronicle, however, this obvious derivation of the name from the river at its foot is curiously distorted by the writer, who gives it the form of Tæfingstoc, as though the town were really an early clan-settlement of Teutonic Tavings. So Torridgeton on the Torridge close by has been corrupted into Torrington, and Oakhampton on the Okement, which should be called Okement-ton, has assumed on provincial lips the current form of Ockington. In like manner, on the Erme and the Dart we get delusive Ermingtons and Dartingtons, which oddly simulate the true clan-settlements, the Paddingtons, Kensingtons, and Basingstokes of the more thoroughly Teutonic east. In the west country, in fact, where (as in Ireland to-day) the Celtic inhabitants were rather Anglicised than exterminated or even absorbed, such false analogies are very common. As the people of the Llans and the Abers began to use the English language, they twisted their own local names into very curious translated or corrupted forms; just as the modern Cornish have twisted their old Cymric Bryn Huel into Brown Willy, have altered Maen-eglos into the Manacles, and have distorted Braddoc into a seemingly English Broadoak. It is thus that the twelfth century [east country scribe] changed the unfamiliar Tæfistoc into Tæfingstoc; and it is only the survival of the river name Tavy, like its Welsh sisters the Teify and the Taff, that has preserved for us the true old Anglicised form of Tavistock.
What may have been the original West Welsh or Cornish name of the town on the Tavy it would now probably be impossible to discover. Everywhere in Britain the English conquest makes a complete blank of the previous history after the Roman occupation; and the later that conquest was anywhere delayed, the longer is the intervening blank in the local annals. Now, western Devon was only really subdued in the reign of Athelstan, and it was not thoroughly Anglicised until a far later period. As there is no reason to suspect the former existence of any Roman station on the site, we may take it for granted that the vale of Tavy remained in the possession of a mere scattered Celtic population down to the period of the English conquest, and that its chief hamlet always occupied the place where Tavistock now stands. But as the English language slowly spread over the newly annexed districts, the native Welsh names were rudely translated — Lanpetroc, or the church of St. Petroc, becoming Petrocstow, afterwards corrupted into Padstow; while a line of similar saintly names marks the debatable borderland of the two tongues at Morwenstow, Davidstow, Jacobstow, Virginstow, and Bridestow. All these parishes, though mostly on the Devonian side of the boundary, retain their Celtic dedications, and clearly represent primitive Cornish-Welsh Llans. By much the same process some old Cymric Caer or Dinas became roughly Anglicised as Tavistock. Up to the days of Edgar the West Saxon, the Celtic Defnas of Devonshire still apparently retained a great deal of local feeling under their own ealdorman Ordgar, whose daughter was considered a fitting bride for the great overlord at Winchester himself. It was Ordgar who began the foundation of the famous minster at Tavistock, on the extreme western limit of his earldom; and the joint dedication of his abbey to Our Lady and the Cornish St. Rumon sufficiently attests the surviving strength of Celtic sentiment in the west country down to that comparatively late period. The relics of St. Rumon formed the great treasure of the place. The monastery was finally completed and endowed by Ordgar’s son Ordwulf. Around the new shrine all the later history of Tavistock naturally clusters. Athelred granted it numerous privileges; but during his disastrous reign, a body of Danes sailed up the Tavy — there was as yet no Plymouth to sack at the mouth of the estuary — and “burned up Ordwulf’s minster at Tæfingstoc, and bore unnumbered booty with them to their ships.” Nevertheless the abbey was soon rebuilt and ranked as of such importance that it gave an archbishop to the province of York before the conquest. As the shrine of a local Cornu-British saint it enjoyed the greatest popularity in the two c
ounties. The Cornish language, indeed, did not become wholly extinct in this part of Devonshire until the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Tavistock remained ecclesiastically and commercially the centre of the whole Tamar basin. The site of Plymouth was then occupied only by three little fishing hamlets known as the three Suttons; and in his own secluded valley, cut off from all the rest of England by the intervening block of Dartmoor, the Benedictine abbot of Tavistock reigned practically supreme over his little territories for five hundred years. Within the borough and hundred he possessed sole jurisdiction; and his house was considered the wealthiest in the West Welsh counties, save only the Augustinian monastery at Plymton. The neighbouring borough of Lidford was also the stannary capital of the Dartmoor mines, and doubtless contributed by its proximity to the local importance of Tavistock. The great minster church almost equalled in size and importance the two western cathedrals of Wells and Exeter. Under Henry VIII., just before the suppression of the monasteries, the head of this house was raised to the dignity of a mitred abbot, and at the same time made independent of episcopal control by a special bull of Leo X. Shortly after, the storm broke; and the [dismantled] abbey, with most of its manors, was bestowed by Henry on the founder of the house of Russell, still so intimately connected with the borough of Tavistock. Thomas Cromwell had already pulled down a large part of the buildings, and the few fragments that now remain are but of slight interest. Even the abbey church was destroyed; the existing parish church [St Eustace] is a minor building of the perpendicular period. Meanwhile the trade of Tavistock had been gradually developing, especially its woollen manufacture, and the local kerseys were favourably known in the sixteenth century throughout the whole of England. At the same time its copper and tin mines were more fully explored; and during the seventeenth century it still remained the undoubted capital of the extreme west. Pym sat for the borough in the Long Parliament; and, like most other industrial centres, it declared against the king in the Civil War. But with the eighteenth century the supremacy of Tavistock in the Tamar basin began to be rudely shaken by the rise of Plymouth. The village of King’s Sutton, or Sutton-juxta-Plym-mouth, had been slowly growing up to the reign of Henry VI., when it was first incorporated by Act of Parliament: and from that time onward it rose rapidly to the rank of a great commercial port. The westward twist given to trade and adventure in the reign of Elizabeth immensely increased its importance; and from the days of the Stuarts it manifestly superseded Tavistock entirely as the local metropolis of the west. At present, the little borough has dropped quietly into the position of a small country mining town and agricultural centre; now being gradually revivified by its position on a through line of railway between Plymouth and Exeter. It only deserves attention from the historical inquirer in our own time as the real original native centre of the debatable Tamar district, a place now occupied by Plymouth, which may fairly be regarded at the present day as the true capital of the Cornu-British race in both counties.
EXETER
A defensible hill overlooking the head of navigation on an estuarine river — such is the common situation of all old British or early English commercial towns; and Exeter forms no exception to the rule. Its primitive nucleus consists of the isolated red igneous rock which forms the mound now capped by the scanty relics of Rougemont Castle; and the original Celtic earthworks may still be traced in the vallum on two sides of the castle yard; for here, as elsewhere, the site of the stronghold has no doubt been successively occupied by Euskarian, Dumnonian, Roman, Saxon, and Norman masters. The river which it commands bore originally the common Celtic name of Isca, [a form] which reappears in the Axe, the Esk, and the Usk, besides affording the first syllable to Uxbridge and Axminster. That British Exeter early formed the chief emporium for the Cornish tin trade is sufficiently vouched by the numerous discoveries of Greek coins belonging to the Syrian and Egyptian dynasties; while, indeed, its connection with the stannaries has throughout its history been very close. When the Romans penetrated into the western peninsula they made the stockaded fort on the River Isca into their principal Dumnonian station; and with them its name took the form of Isca Dumnoniorum, to distinguish it from that other Isca in the Silurian territory which has been so differently modernised as Caerlon upon Usk. Villas, tessellated pavements, and other remains still attest the commercial and administrative greatness of Exeter under its Roman lords. After the withdrawal of the legions cast the semi-Romanised provincials upon their own resources, Isca appears to have remained for some centuries the capital of the revived Dumnonian principality, which long held out against the aggressive clansmen of Wessex. Here a Christian Dumnonian prince undoubtedly held his court, while heathen Saxons ruled in Winchester, during those shadowy days which Lord Tennyson has chosen for the scene of his Arthurian Idylls; and hither a little later, when Wessex had made its peace with the Roman Church, Abbot Aldhelm of Malmesbury dispatched his epistle on the Celtic heresies “to the most glorious lord of the western kingdom, Geraint.” In truth, nowhere in all Britain is the continuity between Roman and modern times so marked as at Exeter; and that fact forms the master-key to all the subsequent history of the city — from the political point of view at least.
Even before Egbert’s time, however, the West Saxon kings had reduced the district of Dyfnaint or Devon to tributary submission; and already we hear of fights between the Defnas and the men of Cornwall, where the Defnas clearly appear to be acting in the interest of the West Saxon overlords. Mr. Davidson has shown that the Saxons had certainly settled in the eastern part of the shire as early as the middle of the eighth century; and on the lips of these Teutonic colonists the Isca became Exe, and the town of Isca became Exan-ceaster — a name gradually softened, after the usual border fashion, into Execestre and Exeter. Till the reign of Athelstan, English and Welsh dwelt together independently in the city; but when that vigorous West Saxon king began his wars against Howell of Cornwall, he reduced the Welsh burghers of Exeter to subjection before passing on to subdue their independent brethren in the west. To this day, as Mr. Green points out, the dedications of churches in the northern and southern halves of the city bear witness to the original division of races within the burgh; for those in the northern part commemorate such local Celtic devotees as St. Petroc, while those in the southern quarter are hallowed in the familiar names of orthodox Roman saints. Athelstan restored the old city walls, and fortified the angles with stone-built towers. Down to the date of the Norman conquest, Exeter lay of course wholly within the ancient walls, whose boundaries can still be easily traced along the edge of the escarpment. It occupied the summit of a low hill, defended on one side by the Exe, and on two others by the long ravines of Northernhay and Southernhay; while it lay exposed to the east alone, where a sort of high isthmus, now traversed by St. Sidwell Street (the old Icknild Way), connected this outlying spur with the main uplands in the rear. The extreme limits extended from the castle to the old Snail Tower near All Hallows Church, and from Bedford Circus to the corner of Coombe Street. The four main roads (in reality two) intersecting one another nearly at right angles — North Street, South Street, Fore Street, and High Street — still represent the original ground-plan of the square Roman Isca. East Gate, West Gate, North Gate, and South Gate, where they passed through the wall, have long ago ceased to be practically recognisable. Quay Gate, at the corner of Coombe Street, led down obliquely to the wharves at the river-side which gave the city its commercial importance. Here alone the wall stretched down to the banks of the Exe; elsewhere it faithfully followed the commanding crest of the triangular hill-slope.
Like other trading towns, Exeter suffered during the Danish invasions, though the burghers more than once compelled the discomfited pirates to fly to their ships. The royal rights in the city were made over to Emma, wife successively of Athelred and Cnut, as part of her morning gift; and in Cnut’s reign the strength of the Danish seafaring element in Exeter is sufficiently shown by the foundation of St. Olave�
�s Church, dedicated to the canonised Scandinavian king Olave. It was under Emma’s son the Confessor, however, that the ecclesiastical history of Exeter began in earnest. The joint West Welsh bishop-stool of Devon and Cornwall was then removed from Crediton to its present seat, in order that it might enjoy the needful protection of a walled burgh. Thus, before the conquest, Exeter had already become the acknowledged capital of the semi-Celtic west, standing to the Dumnonian Welsh-kin as London stood to the dominant West Saxons, and as York stood to the colonising Danes of the North. After the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings, the little local metropolis ventured to stand out on its own account against the Normans, and offered to admit the new king only on the terms of a free civic republic receiving its emperor. But William would brook no Florence or Venice in his conquered realm, and he besieged and took Exeter by means of a mine. He then erected a new castle, which he called Rougemont, on the site of the Dumnonian dun and the Roman fortress. The old cathedral of Leofric, the first bishop, stood on the site of the existing Lady Chapel probably; but Warelwast, the Conqueror’s nephew, began the Norman minster, which was much injured by fire during the troubles of Stephen’s reign. To this building belong the unique, and it must be confessed uncouth transeptal towers, which form the most striking feature of the cathedral in a distant view. The larger part of the existing minster, however, consists of decorated work, and was erected by successive bishops between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
