The true name of the town is Dunheved. It grew up about the Norman castle, instead of about the church, and as it grew, and the colony at S. Stephen’s dwindled, it drew to itself the name of the church town. Launceston is, in fact, one of those very interesting instances of the _caer_ and the _llan_, separated the one from the other by a stream. According to the Celtic system, a church must stand in its own lawn, surrounded by its own tribesmen, and the chief in his _caer_ or _dun_ must also be without competing authority surrounded by his own vassals. Consequently, in Cornwall, churches are, as a rule, away from the towns, which latter have grown up about the chieftain’s residence, except in such instances as Padstow and Bodmin, where a religious, monastic settlement formed the nucleus. Camelford, an old borough town, is over two miles from its parish church, Lanteglos, without even a chapel-of-ease in it, an ecclesiastical scandal in the diocese. Callington, the old capital of the municipality of Galewig, is three miles from its church of Southill. The church of Launceston has grown up out of a small chapel erected for the convenience of those who lived about the castle walls, hangers-on upon the garrison. The Norman baron, and perhaps the Saxon eorlderman, liked to have his chaplain forming part of his household, and much at his disposal to say mass and sing matins in a chapel to which he could go without inconvenience, forming part of his residence. But such an arrangement was alien to Celtic ideas. Among the Celts the saint stood on an entirely independent footing over against the secular chief, and was in no way subordinate to him. The chaplain of the Norman might hesitate about reprimanding too sharply the noble who supplied him with his bread-and-butter. But the Celtic saint had no scruples of that sort. If a chief had carried off a widow’s cow, or had snatched a pretty wench from her parents, the saint seized his staff and went to the _dun_ and demanded admittance. A saint’s curse was esteemed a most formidable thing. If unjustly pronounced, it recoiled like a boomerang against him who had hurled it. Once pronounced, it must produce its effect, and the only means of averting its fall was to turn it aside against a tree or a rock, which it shivered to atoms. In this the Celtic saint merely stepped into the prerogatives of the Druid. In Cormac’s _Glossary of Old Irishisms_--and Cormac, king-bishop of Cashel, died in 903--is a curious instance of the force of a curse in pagan times. The wife of Caier fell in love with Neidhe the bard, her husband’s nephew. Now a bard had the privilege of hurling a curse if a request made by him should be refused, but not else. So the woman, desiring to be rid of her husband, bade the bard ask of the king a knife which had been given to him in Alba, on condition that he never parted with it. Neidhe demanded the knife. “Woe and alas!” said Caier, “it is prohibited to me to give it away.”