Page:The histories of Launceston and Dunheved, in the county of Cornwall.djvu/16

 yet no written record of this people exists prior to that very landing of Cæsar.

So with reference to Launceston. The compilers of Domesday Book, in the year 1085, tell us that "The Canons of St. Stephen hold Lanscauetone." Here was an educated class of men, owning a manor to which a market had been attached, but of which important place no written account can be discovered. Fortunately we can gather from general history some knowledge of the immediate surroundings of Launceston in the century or two which preceded the Conquest. Thus, the battle be- tween Egbert and the Danes, on Hingston Down, about nine miles south of us, had occurred in the year 825. A Cornish bishopric had been established at Bodmin in 905. In 926 iEthelstan is said to have conquered the Cornish Britons, and subsequently to have endowed their religious houses with many privileges and much land. After his death in 941, his successor Eadmund released several slaves at the altar of St. Petrock in Bodmin. Each of his immediate successors, Eadryd (946-955), Eadwig (955-959), Eadgar (959-975), and Æthelred (978-981), did the same. In the last-named year Bodmin and its monastery were burnt by the Danes, and the seat of the See was moved to St. Germans, where it remained until 1049, when the diocese was united with Exeter.

With reference to the manumission of the slaves at Bodmin, Dr. Oliver (Monasticon) infers from the names of the liberating and liberated persons, that during the whole of the forty years embraced by this record of them, the Saxons were, throughout Cornwall, in complete ascendancy, both in lay and ecclesiastical matters. We, however, know that shortly afterwards the Danes again became masters of considerable portions of England, and that they so continued until the accession of Edward the Confessor, 1041.