1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/St Neots

ST NEOTS (pronounced St Neets), a market town in the southern parliamentary division of Huntingdonshiie, England, on the right (east) bank of the Ouse, 51½ m. N. of London by the Great Northern railway. Pop. of urban district, (1901) 3880. A stone bridge crosses the river, built in 1589 from the ruins of a former priory. The parish church of St Mary is a fine Perpendicular building of the later 15th century. The original oak roof is noteworthy. Among other buildings may be mentioned the Victoria museum (1887), the library and literary institute, and the endowed school (1760). Paper-mills, breweries, flour-mills, and engineering works furnish the chief industries of the town.

The name of St Neots is derived from the monastery founded in the adjoining parish of Eynesbury in the reign of King Edgar (967–975). St Neot, a priest of Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset, became a recluse at a place which he named Neotstoke, near Bodmin in Cornwall, where he died about the end of the 9th century. His shrine at Eynesbury being threatened by the incursion of the Danes early in the 11th century, the relics were conveyed to Crowland Abbey, in Lincolnshire, of which he became one of the patron saints. But in 1112 the monastery was re founded from that of Bec in Normandy. An Anglo-Saxon enamelled mosaic in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford is supposed to contain a portrait of St Neot. In 1648 a troop of Royalists under the command of Villiers, duke of Buckingham, was routed in St Neots by the Parliamentarians.