In 974 AD Tavistock officially came into being. The date is recorded in a founding charter of Tavistock Abbey. Although little of the abbey is left, bits and bobs of buildings still stand, giving a good idea of the extent of the medieval abbey precinct. An assumption has always been made that the fragments of the medieval abbey seen today, stand on the same site as the original abbey, founded in the late Saxon era – a presumption of continuous occupation. This may well be the case, and it is not an unreasonable position to take, even though no archaeological evidence dating to before the 12th Century has been found in the monastic precinct (HERa).
“The study of river channel planforms in the context of economic development on floodplains is an intriguing area of study for landscape historians.”
Cook (2018)
In this blog I want to explore the notion of the incipient stages of monastic settlement from a hydrological perspective, and apply what I have been finding out to how Tavistock might have developed in its early centuries. Any previous readers of my blog will be familiar with my interest in water and rivers – how I am trying to peel away how rivers look today; to work back through layers of natural and human-induced modifications; and to imagine the riverine environments of the past, and how people interacted with them. In doing do I hope to better understand and appreciate the landscapes and urban-scapes of the places I inhabit and visit.
So what is it that is bothering me about the site of the founding of Tavistock Abbey?
The abbey precinct as we know it today, lies on a flat site, adjacent to the river Tavy (see LiDAR image below). It is a floodplain which today never seems to flood, but which in the past must have done so, because it is through flooding that flat valley floors develop. In many ways such land must be brilliant to build on – a blank and horizontal canvas – but clearly, the risk of flooding is a massive downside. Flood risk is just one of the reasons why floodplains have been largely avoided as a place for development until recent centuries, until our industrial-level abilities to engineer rivers and control drainage was sufficient to open them up to build upon.
To the risk of flooding as a problem of floodplain development we also need to add:
- Issues around managing unstable and migratory river channels – rivers of the past were less likely to have a single channel, and were often branched, with all channels being less ‘bank-bound’, and more prone to mobility than they are today.
- A poor foundation on which to build – floodplains are topped with clays, silts, loose gravels and cobbles.
- Difficulties in fresh water supply – floodplains, whilst soggy, are not good places to get fresh water for drinking, as there are no springs on floodplains and wells are prone to pollution.
I therefore found myself asking the question, if I was setting up a new monastic foundation in 974 AD, with high status buildings and precious contents, is this where I would put them? The answer was, I wasn’t sure but probably not. I needed to do some research!
Were floodplains typical sites for Anglo Saxon churches and monasteries?
By the 12th Century, with the new wave of Cistercian foundations sweeping Europe, floodplain locations were proving popular for monastic sites (e.g. Waverley, Fountains, and Rivelueux abbeys). When we imagine a medieval monastery, we often bring to mind the elegant ruins of these Cistercian houses, rising from a spacious floodplain. The Cistercians were, however, building their ecclesiastic sites in different times to when Tavistock Abbey was founded – enabled by cutting edge water management engineering technologies (Cook et al, 2003); and facilitated by a highly organised, rich and stable religio-political economy. However, despite their engineering hubris in the re-routing of rivers, and the construction of embankments, moats, and drainage schemes, many Cistercian abbeys had a bad history of flooding.
But what of pre-conquest religious foundations such as Tavistock? What types of location were typical for the requirements of Saxon religious building? Unfortunately there isn’t a nice database to consult containing the topographic details of their locations, so it was necessary to do a bit of internet digging to try and find examples of floodplains as a choice for Saxon monasteries. The majority of the sites I found were not on floodplains. A few were low lying and near to rivers, but when I delved deeper, it turned out they were located a few metres above rivers, perched on the bottom of hillslope bluffs , or on raised gravel islands (e.g. Chertsey). The most systematic analysis relevant to location that I found was that of Turner (2003) who discusses the locations of major churches founded in the south-west before the 10th C. Turner finds that in Devon, nearly half (45%) of these old churches are found in valley bottoms. However, after checking out those identifiable churches mentioned in the text, I was able to establish that, whilst low lying, they were not on floodplains but sitting a little above them. Therefore, despite the affinity of religious sites to water, building on a floodplain does not appear to have been a usual practice at this time.
Can continuity of occupation be assumed?
Clouding any interpretation of the location of buildings, Turner (2003) mentions that, for the vast majority of ecclesiastic sites, the earliest buildings are assumed to be in the same spot as the current location (or site of known ruins). This is at the heart of my own discomfort over the original location of Tavistock Abbey – it is an assumption that the earliest phases of the institution lie in exactly the same place as any current building or ruins.
An example of this is St Frideswide’s in Oxford (Blair, 1988). When this Anglo-Saxon foundation was extended, rather than pulling down and rebuilding on the same spot, probably in the 12th C, extension took place adjacent to the Saxon site. This occurred by building up the ground between the original structures, which stood on a sharp bluff above the floodplain, and levelling it out by building up the ground, to create a suitable place for development, in a location adjacent to the river. As Blair says …
No Anglo-Saxon church other than the very grandest would have been large enough to take the cloister and chancel as additions to its nave and crossing without substantial further remodelling, … The new style represented an ideology basically opposed to the retention of old buildings: they were rarely worth bringing up to date and, as many recent excavations have shown, architects preferred a ‘tabula rasa’. Once the decision to rebuild had been taken it was often convenient to do so on a slightly different site, leaving the old church in use until part of the new one was ready.
Blair, 1988
Whilst some medieval churches did replace older and smaller churches by being built directly on top of them, Blair says that these are in the minority. More often, he says, “the pre-Romanesque church or churches had been differently sited (e.g. Winchester Old Minster, Exeter, Rochester, Wells, Peterborough, Lyminge, Durham, and Haughmond)”.
So, if floodplains weren’t typical locations for Saxon monasteries, and if continuity of occupation cannot be assumed, what evidence is there in relation to hydrology and geomorphology that might explain the conditions under which a medieval floodplain could become colonised?
Conditions for Colonising the Floodplain
If we turn the clock back to 974 AD when Tavistock Abbey was founded, the riverscape would have looked different to how it does today [see – The Fluvial History of the Tavy – a Medieval Overview]. The depth of sediments on the Saxon floodplain would have been thinner, meaning that the floodplain would be lower than at present (O’Shea and Lewin, 2020). The river banks would have been much shallower and the Tavy, whilst it may have had a dominant main channel, possibly also had other secondary branches. The less entrenched river would be more prone to gradually migrating (or suddenly moving under storm conditions) (Lewin, 2010) and may not even have flowed along exactly the same course that we see today. Without considerable preparatory engineering, it seems fair to suggest, the floodplain at this time would not have made a good location for building upon.
If the Saxon abbey was not located on the floodplain, I expect you are wondering where would be a likely candidate? A good hypothetical location would be the area at the bottom of Kilworthy Hill (circled yellow on the image above), possibly in the vicinity of the area of the Coop and the old Temperance Hotel/Ordulph Arms, where ‘The Great House’ once stood (HERb) . This zone is elevated above the floodplain and is bordered to the west by the waters running down the Fishlake; a fast flowing stream useful for purging the waste from any buildings located here. The area is now urbanised and so it is not possible to work out if there were any springs. However, springs are common near to the base of hill-slopes, and so it feasible that a potable water source lay in this zone.
Providing credence to this suggestion is the work of Mary Freeman (2012). Freeman’s detective work set out the sequence of land ownership between the Fishlake and Kilworthy Lane, from the 16th Century. Her work makes a robust case for this area having once been in the possession of the abbey, and possibly so for a very long time. She links the unusual integrity of ownership of these parcels of land post-dissolution, back to the founding abbey Charter of the 10th century, which stated that gifted lands must stay in the monastery’s possession, and that these lands cannot be sold or exchanged by anyone, even the abbot, after the death of the founder [Ordulf]. Freeman’s hypothesis is that this land was an abbey possession going right back to the days of the Saxon lord himself. She even speculates that this is where he may have had his manorial hall.
“I contend that a ghostly outline of Ordulf’s manor house demesne can be discerned in the present landscape of Tavistock”
Freeman, M (2012)
Whether site of eorlderman’s hall, Saxon abbey, or both -an association which Blair (2018, p376) says is the common pattern – contributes to a case for the pedigree of this area of Tavistock, at the foot of the hill above the floodplain, as a potential location for the original Saxon abbey.
In the period between the 10th and the 14th centuries, Britain’s rivers saw a massive increase in sedimentation rates, due mainly to population pressure and changes in agricultural practice (Lewin, 2010). For a Dartmoor river such as the Tavy, sediments eroded through tin mining would have also been contributory. By the 12th century, when Tavistock Abbey was undergoing its expansion and re-development, the floodplain here was rapidly filling with sediment. This would have helped entrench the river between steeper banks, and would have pushed it towards a more stable single channel form. To this catchment-derived sedimentation we can also add localised sediment build-up, caused by the dumping of building rubble and general urban detritus. Post monastic dissolution, this process of ground level accumulation continued, as can be observed by looking at the base level of buildings like the Bedford Hotel, the porch of Abbey Chapel, and the medieval cloister remnants in the churchyard.
One thousand years ago, the area around the base of Kilworthy Hill, where I am suggesting the early abbey may have been founded, would have had a very different morphology to today. Stripped of this millennium of material, the bottom of the hill would have had a much more abrupt transition between slope and floodplain, whereas today it is more gentle. This has, in more recent years, been even further ‘graded out’ by the addition of rock and rubble when the Bedford estate remodelled this part of the town (Andrew Thompson, pers. com.). A good view of the ground changes can be seen by looking into the courtyard at the back of the Town Council offices (see image below). In thinking about the physical environment of Tavistock at the time of the founding of the abbey then, it is useful to bear in mind just how changed the geomorphology of this zone of the town has been. In imagining a late Saxon landscape, into which an abbey is located, then a more realistic picture of this part of town would be of Kilworthy Hill with a sharp lower hill-slope bluff, sitting on the corner of the Tavy, and smaller the Fishlake floodplains.
If it was the case that the Saxon monastery had lain on the more restricted sloping ground just north of the current abbey as I am hypothesising then, as the centuries progressed, the re-development prospects of the flat and virgin floodplain of the river valley would have no doubt begun to look very appealing. With Cistercian monasteries setting up on floodplains in the 12th C, and with the sharing of knowledge about water management between the monasteries of Europe, then development on this land would now be feasible. However, in order to make this happen, the monks of Tavistock Abbey may have needed to spend considerable time and effort further preparing the landscape for this move, by purposefully building up the ground, embanking the river, and organising the controlled flow of water, such as that of the leat that ran from the Tavy, down through Brook Street.
In locating the abbey on the floodplain, the monks would have had to have made sure they had a secure drinking water supply, as it is a myth that medieval people drank nothing but wine and small beer (Medievalists.net). So how could they do this in the 12th C when they couldn’t in the 10th? The Tavy and other open water sources would not have been suitable for drinking as these would be polluted. Wells dug into floodplains were also easily contaminated. Rainwater capture could be used to supplement water supplies but this was not an appropriate method for drinking water, as stored water does not remain potable. Since floodplains do not have springs, this means the only drinking water supply options for a monastery on a floodplain would be carrying the water onto the site. It is known that monasteries did employ people to carry water at times of emergency (Bond, 2001) but the volumes and frequency that water was needed make this impractical as a daily option. All these factors being the case, the notion that a Saxon monastery would locate on a floodplain seems to be an odd one. It was only in the 12th century that floodplain occupation became a viable option, when advances in water technology enabled monasteries to set up piped conduit systems to feed clean flowing water directly to their premises from pure spring heads, often over distances of several miles (Bond, 2001). I intend to come back to the subject of monastic water management in further blogs, but for now I hope that this summary indicates that a question mark should exist over the incipient development sequence of Tavistock Abbey in hydrological context.
Having discussed these assumptions behind the orthodoxy that Tavistock Abbey’s location has been continuous since its late Saxon founding, and some of the hydrologically reasons why this might be problematic, I want to finish by using a few examples to provide parallels of medieval developments migrating onto floodplains.
Examples of Settlements Migrating onto Floodplains
Moissac, France
Like Tavistock, and similar in size, the town of Moissac in southern France, appears to have had its development seeded by the founding of its abbey. The abbey came into being in the 8th C and was sited on elevated land at the base of an alluvial fan, set back from the river. Over the centuries the town has radiated out from the abbey and spread across the floodplain. In a radiocarbon dated stratigraphic study of boreholes across the floodplain, Leigh et al (2019) were able to establish that this area was a back swamp of the river until about 1000 AD when rapid accumulation of floodplain deposits started to occur. This is attributed to the accelerated soil erosion that occurred in the 11th to 14th due to agricultural practices and population pressure. By 1200 AD up to 3m of sediment had already been laid down, which was then supplemented by building rubble. Migration of the main river channel may also have favoured this location shifting to one dominated by sedimentation. The authors say “the rapid bottomland sedimentation was a positive ecosystem service … resulting in more arable and habitable land facilitating the expansion of Moissac during the High Middle Ages“. The authors say that the 11th and 12th centuries are regarded as the golden age of the abbey and attribute this flourishing period of population growth, culture and agriculture in part to the floodplain sedimentation, underscoring the “mutual association between human activities and geomorphic systems“.
Buckfast Abbey
In an example from close to home, the abbey at Buckfast provides an analogy of a Saxon Abbey moving to a floodplain location. The burning down of Holy Trinity church in Buckfastleigh in 1992 opened the site up to major archaeological investigations which were not previously possible when the church was still in use. Holy Trinity Church is situated about 500m south of the Buckfast Abbey site on land elevated above the river Dart. It is thought to have been founded in 1018 AD, but this may have been the date of re-foundation of an earlier monastery. According to Reynolds and Turner (2012) …
“it had been presumed that the late Anglo-Saxon monastery stood on the site of the present Buckfast Abbey and that the monastic complex had been frequently modified, taking its present form in the late twentieth century. However, we suspected that the site of Holy Trinity church had formed the focus for the early medieval monastic community, before a move to the valley-floor site of the present abbey in the twelfth century.”
Reynolds and Turner, 2012
The extant buildings of Buckfast Abbey, just like Tavistock, date to the 12th Century, with a planned precinct laid out on the floodplain, but with the original late Saxon monastery located in a different position, elevated from the river.
Okehampton
Drawing on another local example, the north Dartmoor town of Okehampton also has a history suggestive of a town whose loci of development has shifted to the floodplain. In a historical landscape assessment of the town, Parkes (2016) explains that the late Saxon town on Ocmundtune is thought to have been on the hill around High Street, to the west of the current town centre. In the early Norman there is evidence of another separate commercial centre developing, to the east of the current town centre, in a triangle of land near the Crediton road. Then, in c 1220 AD, Robert de Courtenay was granted a charter confirming the privileges of his ‘free borough of Okehampton’. The location of this new market centre is considered to be the flat area of land between the east and west Okement rivers. Is it possible that the environmental changes taking place on floodplains across the country (Lewin, 2010) were also making settlement of the Okehampton floodplain an appealing and feasible option? Whilst the archaeological literature on Okehampton’s development does not consider hydro-geomorphic changes as a factor in the story of the development of the town, what is clear is that between the late Saxon and the Middle Ages, Okehampton’s town centre shifted from hillslopes down onto the floodplain.
Conclusions
Problematically for interpreting the archaeological and historical record, the majority of material written about monastic development focuses on the period from the 12th century onwards because this is the period for which the vast majority of building and written evidence is available (e.g. Bond, 2004). Little remains of Saxon monastic and church buildings, and records from these phases are scant. It is therefore the case that understandings of the initial development of Saxon monastic sites is poorly understood and individual site histories become dominated by the better evidenced later phases.
What is clear is that the architectural vision for what constituted a monastery changed considerably between the pre and post conquest worlds. Although the stone basilica-type churches of the late Saxon era would have been grand for the time (that is, if they were made of stone at all; many were likely made of wood), this was nothing compared to the huge vaulted buildings of the high medieval period, with their adjoining cloisters, chapter house, abbots lodgings, refectory and dormitories. Lilley (1999) suggests we might want to view the post-conquest monastic precinct in the context of the urban renaissance of the 11th and 12th centuries, in which these new urban spaces were created due to the cultural politics of territorial control in Anglo‐Norman England. Tavistock would have been part of this renaissance and would have experienced a great desire and pressure to modernise the monastic infrastructure. In order to be part of this change, Tavistock Abbey, would have wanted, and needed, to re-model itself, and in order to do so, the virgin space of the floodplain may have provided a splendid development opportunity.
We recommend a cross-period synthesis of the history of land reclamation and related socionatural floodplain sites. We recommend multidisciplinary research approaches that focus on the recovery of the history, involved agents, socionatural dynamics and the short- to long-term consequences of land reclamation in floodplains.
Werther et al (2021) on the current limitations of understanding of the ‘Fluvial anthropocene’.
With: 1) a changed floodplain, thickened by alluvium and the detritus of of the town, and perhaps purposefully engineered to build up the ground level of the site; 2) a state of the art 12th C water management system of water supply and sewerage; and 3) possible flood risk attenuation measures; all these factors may have enabled the development of a modern 12th C monastery. These present a very different set of environmental, economic, cultural, political and technological circumstances to those the Saxon abbey founders would have been working with in 974 AD.
So then, if we could dig deep into the mud of Tavistock’s soils and sediments to find traces of the Saxon monastery, where do you think we might find them?
Many thanks to Andrew Thompson of Andrew Thompson Heritage who has: allowed me to bounce my ideas off him; challenged my logic; informed me of historical landscape changes; and pointed me to relevant literature. Most of all I want to thank him for all his encouragement in giving me confidence to explore my fluid ideas.
[Blog updated 11/1/22]
References
Blair, J., 1988. St Frideswide’s Monastery: Problems and Possibilities. Oxoniensia, 53(1), pp.221-258.
Blair, J., 2018. Building Anglo-Saxon England. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.
Bond, J., 2017. Monastic Water Management in Great Britain: A Review.”. Monastic Archaeology: Papers on the Study of Medieval Monasteries, edited by Graham Keevill, Mick Aston, and Teresa Hall, pp.88-136.
Bond, J., 2004. Monastic landscapes. Tempus Pub Limited.
Cook, H., 2018. River channel planforms and floodplains: a study in the Wessex landscape. Landscape History, 39(1), pp.5-24.
Cook, H., Stearne, K. and Williamson, T., 2003. The origins of water meadows in England. The Agricultural History Review, pp.155-162.
Freeman, M., 2012. Ordulf’s Shadow in Tavistock. In Bliss, J., Jago, C., and Maycock, E. (Eds.) ‘Aspects of Devon History : People, Places and Landscapes‘. The Devon History Society Fortieth Anniversary Book. The Devon History Society: Exeter.
HERa, Undated. Tavistock Abbey. MDV3919
HERb, Undated. The Great House, Tavistock. MDV80122
Leigh, D.S., Gragson, T.L. and Lefebvre, B., 2019. Rapid alluvial sedimentation aided expansion of Moissac during the High Middle Ages along the Tarn River in southern France. Geomorphology, 331, pp.49-58.
Lewin, J., 2010. Medieval environmental impacts and feedbacks: the lowland floodplains of England and Wales. Geoarchaeology, 25(3), pp.267-311.
Lilley, K.D., 1999. Urban landscapes and the cultural politics of territorial control in Anglo‐Norman England. Landscape Research, 24(1), pp.5-23.
Medievalists.net, Undated. Did people drink water in the Middle Ages?
O’Shea, T.E. and Lewin, J., 2020. Urban flooding in Britain: an approach to comparing ancient and contemporary flood exposure. Natural Hazards, 104(1), pp.581-591.
Parkes, C. 2016. Devon Historic Coastal and Market Towns Survey: Okehampton. Historic Environment Projects, Devon County Council.
Reynolds, A.J. and Turner, S., 2012. Discovery of a late Anglo-Saxon monastic site in Devon: Holy Trinity church, Buckfastleigh. Archaeology International.
Turner, S., 2006. Making a Christian Landscape-how Christianity Shaped the Countryside in E. University of Exeter Press.
Werther, L., Mehler, N., Schenk, G.J. and Zielhofer, C., 2021. On the Way to the Fluvial Anthroposphere—Current Limitations and Perspectives of Multidisciplinary Research. Water, 13(16), p.2188.
An absolutely fascinating article about a landscape which I really thought I knew well !! Perhaps I do not know it as well as I thought. Your narrative is fascinating and thought provoking. I shall look at the valley floor landscape of the town with refreshed eyes and broader consideration. This provokes a completely refreshed view of the early Abbey landscape.
And of course, the Tavistock Abbey was sacked by the Vikings in 997, which might have provided an incentive to move its location.
And what about the island that used to be at the approximate location of Dolvin Road Cemetery/Pannier Market. Might the Saxon Abbey have been built on an island?
The extensive remodelling of the town centre makes historical analysis very difficult!
Hi Wyn. Yes, as you say, the abbey was raised to the ground by Vikings, and this would have given the opportunity for re-modelling the abbey. However, what I am suggesting is that the floodplain in the 10th C was was only at the start of the phase of major medieval human-induced sedimentation that is known to have swelled English floodplains, and that significant groundwork and preparation is needed if you are going to build on them. Water supply technologies were also prohibitive in the 10th C compared to the 12th C, when they became ubiquitous for reasonably affluent monasteries.
River islands have been used historically to build on, but from what I can see, these tend to be on more substantial rivers where islands are big, provide a stable feature, and offer defence. The Island in the Tavy seems to have had some trees on it, so it was reasonably stable, but it would have been mostly made of river cobbles and boulders. Personally I think it would have been a relatively unstable and risky place to build but it is an interesting suggestion. I hope I have shown in the several blogs I have done on rivers, how the Tavy would have appeared in the 10th C may have been quite different to what we see now. Perhaps back then, there was an even bigger island in the Tavy?!
Yes, the remodelling of the town makes it all very opaque doesn’t it? I doubt there will be an answer, as it is too buried and buggered about with, but being aware of current assumptions made about the development history of the town may help inform future interpretations. So, for example, if it is assumed that the Saxon site lay below the precinct of the Medieval abbey, then people might not have their eyes open to potential of evidence elsewhere when a watching brief is given on construction/development work going on in the town centre.
I am really looking forward to doing a lot more reading about these topics as I try and learn more about how our Tavistock landscape might have changed.
Thank you for a very interesting review of the Tavy and Tavistock. One question that arises for me – might beavers have played a role in the medieval period in influencing the form, variation and flooding of our rivers, including the Tavy? They only became extinct quite late in the 16thC. I have a particular interest in the remaining water meadows to the southwest of Tavistock. These start off as playing fields and grazing, then on through a sewage works, recycling centre and a closed, unlined, municipal landfill, until they reach a series of six water meadows. Beyond this the river takes a sharp left turn into a steep-sided narrow valley until it emerges at Doublewaters and is joined by the River Walkham. These six ancient water meadows along the River Tavy southwest and downstream of Tavistock were recently put up for sale, and a group seven, mostly local people including myself and my partner, joined together to buy them with the intention to protect the rare ecology along this quiet valley from becoming a pheasant rearing unit. In the last year, a number of questions about the history of this land have arisen and it has been a great pleasure to discover your blogs.
It seems likely that during the period when the Abbey in Tavistock flourished, that these water meadows would have been part of the Abbey lands and managed by the monks, although I have so far not been able to confirm this with reference to the literature in the way that your blogs do. By the time the River Tavy reaches these water meadows the valley is quite concealed and it would be interesting to know whether are any records that might indicate their use. Certainly, there were times when the Tavistock abbey and community were vulnerable to attack by marauding invaders. These water meadows might be easily overlooked and any food there by safer from pillage than areas closer to the town. Could they have taken advantage of this? There is some evidence that grain was grown on these fields because the remains of an agricultural barn on site has a blocked exit directly opposite the main entrance which looks like it might have been for winnowing grain. If grain was grown on these secluded fields, protected from the wind with the high sides of the valley, then it also raises the question whether deliberate control of the river, flooding the meadows during the winter to allow for the deposition of alluvial erosion from upstream could have occurred. Any dam would have been released in the Spring, perhaps with an added benefit of netting any trapped fish. Immediately downstream from the six water meadows the river turns sharply to the left and there is a pinch point here that could easily have managed seasonal flooding. Unfortunately, I do not have hard evidence to back these conjectures but I feel it is still worthwhile to draw the possibilities to both yourself and Simon Dell as local historians. We would be happy to host a visit to these water meadows.
Hi Colin
Thanks for your very relevant reflections and questions, and for taking the time to read my blog. I think we know each other. I used to work with Wendy at GEES. Anyway, enough of that, back to water!
Your questions relate to beavers, water meadow management and monastic ownership. It is my intention to write many more posts about various hydrological matters in and around Tavistock and these are all aspects that I will be addressing. I say this by way of saying I don’t have fully formed answers to these questions at the moment. However, I do know that water was typically managed, in the long centuries of the medieval, over meadowland, to keep them moist and fertilised, in order to produce valuable hay. This was done by simply creating a blockage in the water course so that it spilled over onto the floodplain. More sophisticated methods were used in more recent centuries but there is no indication in the LiDAR of any bed-works criss crossing these meadows so, if they were managed (which I presume they were, since they have the designation meadow) then perhaps this continued, by using the age old techniques, until relatively recently. I think these more elaborate water meadow flooding techniques were more common further east and may not have been so needed here in West Devon, given how damp it already is.
This reflection has caused me to get off my shelf William Marshall’s ‘Rural Economy of the West of England’ (1796) and his observations seem to bare this out. He says “The origin of the practice of watering meadows artificially , in this district, cannot be reached by memory, nor does tradition, I believe, attempt to ascertain it” He goes on “the quantity of watered lands, in this district [WestDevon], is, in some townships, considerable; while, in others, where the valleys are narrow, and their sides wooded, little watered ground is seen”. ‘The management of those lands which are subjected to the practice, whatever it may have been heretofore, is, at present, far from being accurate. The soil is imperfectly drained, and the water imperfectly spread over it … Yet, the effect of the water, notwithstanding the low ebb at which the watering of the lands is found, at this day, is such as I have no where observed; except in the neighbourhood of chalk hills. It gives a greeness and grossness of herbage, nearly equal to that of the meadows of Wiltshire and Hampshire”. Interestingly, Marshall mentions that ‘Foxtail’ seems very reluctant to grow in the water meadows of Buckland Abbey where it is, in his opinion, usual for watermeadows.
I am keeping an eye out for any hydrologically related mentions in the literature so that I can build my understanding of how our landscape has been influenced by water. My difficulty is, I am a physical geographer by background and so maps and fieldwork is my comfort zone, not latin texts! Lots of the historical work written about Tavistock’s history has not been done with a landscape focus. There may be all sorts of mentions to water management buried in the ancient records of the abbey, but I can only see, second hand, what historians have written about.
I will certainly ask about and look out for reference to those six meadows being abbey lands. My understanding is that yes, the land on that side of the river was part of the Tavistock abbey estate. I am building up quite a collection of material on all aspects of water management and fluvial matters. I am more than happy to share this with you. With regards an invite to visit these meadows, I would very much like to take you up on the offer. I will drop you an email.
Another fascinating blog. Really enjoyed reading about a possible alternative history of the Abbey beginnings which most people take as read.
Thanks Elaine. My background as a geographer was in palaeoenvironmental science, so this blog, more than any other, draws on that experience. It struck me that most of Tavistock’s history had been interpreted before this palaeoenvironmental evidence was available and that such information was not widely known beyond some academic circles. I would so love to properly see what is going on below the tarmac of the town!