Venerable Neot of Cornwall

Saint Neot of Cornwall

The thirty-first of July, along with being the feast of Saint Germain of Auxerre, is also the feast of another Celtic holy man: Saint Neot the monk of Cornwall. A man of diminutive stature but towering in terms of his holiness, he was the confessor and spiritual father to Ælfrǽd King of Wessex.

Neot was of high birth and of Cornish stock. He began his adult life as a soldier. But soon he had a conversion experience. He put off his armour and weapons, and retired from the world to live in service to Christ. He lived for awhile as a monk at the famous Glastonbury Abbey, in which he was trained not only in the precepts of the Christian faith but also in the broader subjects of a rounded sæcular education. He lived as a monk there for some years, but for the Brythonic temperament the pull of the hermitage has always been stronger than that of the monastery. Saint Neot left Glastonbury and went to live an eremitical life in a remote cell in Cornwall.

He settled in the windswept granite uplands of Bodmin Moor, at the place near where the present-day village of St Neot is settled. The village of St Neot is in a wooded valley through which the River Fowey flows. There had been one anchorite who had lived there before – one Saint Gwerir, about whose life little else is known but to whom many wonders were attributed in days after. Here our Saint Neot spent the next few years in solitude and constant prayer. However, the folk of the surrounding country were drawn to him for spiritual counsel and comfort. Soon he had a number of disciples living near him. He built an abbey for these disciples to live in, and headed it himself as abbot. This monastery was still standing by the time the Normans invaded.

Saint Neot was a very short fellow, standing no more than four feet tall. His Life recounts that he had to stand on a stool in order to serve the Gifts during each Liturgy. Saint Neot was much renowned for his care for the infirm and the needy, as well as for his holy life and wisdom. He also had a peculiar form of asceticism: he would submerge himself up to his neck in a well full of cold water and recite the Psalter from memory.

Saint Neot had a special relationship with wild animals, which loved him and served him as though they were tame. There was a stream nearby his cell that always had three fish in it. An angel appeared to the hermit, saying that if he would catch and eat no more than one fish from that stream each day, those same three fish would always return there. This he did for a long time, until one day he fell gravely ill. One of his disciples, hoping to restore him to health, caught two fish from the stream and cooked them, giving them to the saint to eat. Saint Neot, seeing that the divine command he had been given was broken, was greatly grieved. He said a prayer to the Trinity over the fish, who at once were restored to life – and then he took them back to the stream and released them.

On another occasion, a doe was in flight from a hunter’s hounds, and sought shelter with Saint Neot. The exhausted doe took shelter with Saint Neot while he prayed. The hounds were not far behind; however, at one glance from the saint, the hounds did not dare to fall upon the doe. They ran back to their masters and let the doe live.

There are a number of other tales of wonders attributed to Saint Neot. On one occasion, after the monastery had been founded, thieves broke into the monastery and stole the oxen, leaving the holy man and his disciples without the means of sustenance. A generous forester living nearby, pitying the monks, gave Saint Neot his deer, which from then on obeyed Saint Neot like tame beasts, helping him to plough the fields. Later, the same thieves who had stolen the oxen brought them back and knelt at Saint Neot’s feet, begging his forgiveness. Saint Neot forgave and blessed them, and thereafter the thieves became monks in the same monastery.

The hermit was the confessor to Ælfrǽd King, and also provided shelter, aid and spiritual advice to him while he was fighting his asymmetric guerrilla war of resistance against the invading heathen Danes. Saint Neot gave Ælfrǽd his blessing to fight prior to the Battle of Edington, and predicted his victory over the Danish foe. A recently-reposed Saint Neot even appeared alongside Saint Cuðberht in a vision to Ælfrǽd on the eve of the battle, and gave him courage for the unequal fight he had to face.

Saint Neot reposed in the Lord on the thirty-first of July, probably in the year 877. He was buried in the monastery church he had founded on Bodmin Moor. A hundred years later, however, a monastery was founded in at Eynesbury in Cambridge with the assistance of Saint Ósweald of Worcester. A part of Saint Neot’s relics were translated there, while a part were still left in Cornwall. A portion of Saint Neot’s relics were translated to Bec in France after the Norman Conquest.

The monastery in St Neots, Cornwall, did not survive the Reformation; the site of the monastery passed into the personal hands of Elizabeth I and thereafter to the Stuarts. Likewise, the monastery at Eynesbury was completely torn down. St Neots in Cornwall was thereafter a town fully and ardently loyal to the Royalist cause in the Civil War. They even celebrate Oak Apple Day there to this day.

Venerable Neot, caretaker of animals and friend to the poor, intercede for us with Christ our God!