[Footnote 4: Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1873.]
The buildings at the time of the Dissolution were very large, and there was a fine church, but of these only a Perpendicular tower adjoining the cloisters, and a large tithe-barn, are in a state of good preservation at the present day. A modern house was built on the western side of the vanished cloisters, but in 1882 the Abbey was bought for a colony of Benedictine monks from Pierrequivire in Burgundy, who have partly rebuilt the monastery on its ancient lines, and are restoring the Abbey church.
A few miles away to the south-west is Dean Prior, and the living that Herrick held when he poured out his grumbles and complaints about 'dull Devonshire.' Herrick was a true Cockney, and the earliest part of his life was spent in a house in Cheapside. When he grew up, he had the good luck to come into the brilliant and witty company that gathered round Ben Jonson, so it must be allowed that he had an excuse for sometimes thinking that life in an obscure hamlet, two hundred miles from London, was a dreary exile. But, as Mr R. J. King remarks, in spite of all his grievances, he had in him a sense that responded very readily to the pretty customs and observances of the village, that marked, here with a handful of flowers, there with a sheaf of wheat or a branch of holly, the different festivals of the year.
Herrick's poem 'Christmas Eve' refers to a local custom that appealed to him:
'Come, guard this night the Christmas-pie, That the thief, though ne'er so sly, With his flesh-hooks, don't come nigh, To catch it
From him, who all alone sits there, Having his eyes still in his ear, And a deal of mighty fear, To watch it.'
Mr King makes this interesting note on it: 'This custom, so far as I know, is unnoticed by anyone but Herrick.
'"Having his eyes still in his ear, And a deal of mighty fear,"
guarded the pie through the night before Christmas.
'The pie represented the manger of Bethlehem, and its contents the wise men's offerings. The Devonshire "Christmas play" has had a curious fate. Except, perhaps, in some of the moorland parishes, it has disappeared at home. But the Newfoundland fisheries were long carried on for the most part by sailors from the neighbourhood of Dartmouth and Tor Bay, and Mr Jukes tells us that the streets of St John's at Christmas-time continue to exhibit St George, the Turkish Knight, and all their companions, in full vigour.'