The relics of St. Neot remained at his monastery in Cornwall till about the year 974, when Earl Alric, and his wife Ethelfleda, having founded a religious house at Eynesbury, in Huntingdonshire, and being at a loss for some patron saint, adopted the expedient of stealing the body of St. Neot; which was accordingly done, and the town retains his name, thus feloniously obtained, up to the present time. The monastery in Cornwall continued feebly to exist after this disaster through the Saxon times; but having lost its palladium, it felt the roiner’s hand; and almost immediately after the Norman Conquest, it was finally suppressed; yet the memory of the local saint is still cherished by the inhabitants of the parish and of the neighbourhood, endeared perhaps by the tradition of his diminutive stature, reduced in their imaginations to fifteen inches of height; and to these feelings we in all probability owe the preservation of the painted glass, the great decoration of this church, and one of the principal works of art to be seen in Cornwall. The church itself is of the best description, having a nave and two aisles of equal length, with a square tower at the western end, and with the rare addition of an embattled parapet towards the south, but probably not older than the fifteenth century, with the exception of some parts of the walls near the chancel, which seem to have been a part of the former church. Soon after the new building had been completed, individuals in some cases, and associations in others, as the unmarried men of the parish, the unmarried women, and the wives, contributed a window, either in honour of the local saint, or of their particular patrons; and the peculiar attachment felt for the little saint seems to have preserved these fragile materials at the two important periods of our modern history, the time when the great change of religion took place, and at that of the Civil Wars. It may however be recollected that no violent change occurred here, the monastic institution having been dissolved by the Earl of Morton, half brother of the Conqueror; and no place could be more retired from the observation of strangers, or from the passage of fanatical armies.