Both historians certainly drew from ballads, but these ballads were the vehicle through which history in early times was preserved. It has been supposed that the Harewood in question was Harewood near Leeds, in Yorkshire, but surely Elfrida would be on her inheritance in the West. Another difficulty is that there was no convent of nuns near the place. But this may have been thrown in as a sort of moral to the tale--if kings or other men do naughty things, they will have to pay for it.
Tavistock Abbey had some men of rare ability to rule over it. One was Aylmer, chosen in 981, who lived in difficult times, when the Vikings came and harried the coasts, ran up the rivers, and plundered and burned wherever they went. When the Danes were spoiling the land, driving off the cattle and burning the farms, he gave out of the revenues of the abbey a double danegeld or contribution for the relief of those in distress. But presently his own abbey was surrounded, pillaged, and burnt. This was in 997, by a horde that had first landed at Watchet, and then returned round the Land's End, and had run up the Tamar. They went as far as Lydford, and burnt and slew everything and every person they could lay hands on.
But a far abler man was Lyfing, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, and at the same time of Devon and Cornwall.
Another admirable man was Aldred, who succeeded Lyfing in the see of Worcester in 1046, after having been Abbot of Tavistock fourteen years; and he was made Archbishop of York in 1060, and died in 1069, broken-hearted at the misery that came in the wake of the Conquest. The lives of both these men, showing how to steer a difficult course in a troubled sea among many rocks, are worth a study, and for that I refer the reader to Mr. Alford's _Abbots of Tavistock_. (Plymouth, 1891.)
The Abbey Church of Tavistock was second only to Exeter for size and dignity in the West. It has completely disappeared, and the road in front of the Bedford Hotel now runs over what was the nave of the great church.
Where now stands the hotel was in ancient days the Saxon school; it was pulled down in 1736, when the inn, then the house of the Dukes of Bedford, was erected on its site and out of its materials.