We already have allowed the term “Saxon” to them, on the understanding that a pre-Conquest date is not implied thereby, but merely the fact that their style is different from that of buildings to which we give the term “Norman.” It may also be premised that, in considering their relative date, we have to deal cautiously and tentatively with a series of probabilities. We must also put legend aside. A hardy tradition, resting on no authentic basis, but engraved on a brass tablet within the church, points to certain traces of fire in the church of Stow as evidence of its burning by the Danes in 870. If this were true, and if the lower walls of the tower, as they exist to-day, were the tower walls of the Saxon cathedral of Sidnaceaster, we should be able to point to a church of the ninth century, if not earlier, which would probably have supplied an architectural standard to the diocese. However, we have nothing but the size of the church and an unfounded, if time-honoured, assumption to give it claim to cathedral rank. The very name of Sidnaceaster was probably invented in post-Conquest times, by some one who misread the signature of one of the bishops of Lindsey to the decrees of a Saxon council.[40] And, finally, the authentic history of the church of Stow does not begin till about the year 1040, when Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester, with the powerful assistance of Earl Leofric and his wife Godiva, set a band of religious men on the site hallowed by memories of the miraculous sojourn of St. Etheldreda on her flight from York to Ely. All that lies behind 1040 in connection with this church is pure romance. When Bishop Rémi later in the century restored St. Mary’s Minster at Stow, what he probably did was to complete Eadnoth’s ambitious beginnings, on a worthy scale, out of reverence for St. Etheldreda, and not out of sentimental feeling for an old cathedral church which he had superseded for all time by his new church at Lincoln. If a small archdeaconry in the Norman diocese of Lincoln, corresponding to the original district of Lindsey, took its name from Stow, we must not consider this as admitting the old cathedral dignity of Stow. The size of Eadnoth’s and Rémi’s church made it the most prominent building in the archdeaconry: no more convenient or suitable name could be supplied to the district.[41]