It is not my intention to enter on any discussion relative to the remote and obscure antiquity of Bodmin. Tanner, in his Notitia Monasticon, says Bodmin, or Bodmanna.
There was a church built here to the memory of St. Petroc, a religious man born in Wales, but who, coming from Ireland, is said to have built a monastery on the north coast of Cornwall, about A.D. 520, and to have been there buried; but his body being afterwards removed to Bodmin, a church was built to his memory, and the episcopal see for Cornwall was believed to have been therein placed by King Edward the Elder and Archbishop Plegmund, A.D. 705. Here King Æthelstan is reported to have met with old Saxon, or rather British, monks following the Rule of St. Benedict, to whom he granted so great privileges and endowments that he is accounted founder of the monastery here, about A.D. 926. That settlement was destroyed by the Danish pirates, A.D. 981; yet the religious continued here under several shapes, and much alienation of their lands, both before and after the Conquest, till about the year 1120, when Earl Algar, with the King’s license, and the consent of William Warlewach, Bishop of Exeter, re-established this religious-house, and placed therein regular canons of the Order of St. Austin, who continued till the general suppression, when it was styled the Priory of St. Mary and St. Petroc, and was valued at 270_l._ per annum according to Dugdale, and 289_l._ 12_s._ according to Speed. The site, with the demesnes, were granted, 36th of Henry VIII. to Thomas Sternhold, one of the first translators of the Psalms into English metre.
Any one desirous of learning all that can be known or conjectured respecting the Western Bishopric, is referred to “The Ancient Cathedral of Cornwall historically surveyed,” by the Rev. John Whitaker; where that subject and various others are discussed, with the eloquence, ability, erudition, and confidence, usually displayed by that eminent writer; who appears always to assume throughout the whole of his work the very questionable fact, that monastic historians, distant both in time and in space from the events which they relate, are possessed of perfect information, and that their narratives flow with unerring accuracy, at a period when none of the inventions for rapidly carrying intelligence, and for stamping it with the authentic impression of public notoriety, had yet occurred to the human mind.