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 counties. 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.