Template:Wp-St Neots-History

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Early history

Remains of Iron Age settlement have been found in the town centre; a Roman encampment was located in the town. It became known as Eynesbury, after Ernulf, a local leader.

Neot was a holy man who founded a monastery near the present-day Cornish village of St Neot. When he died, his remains were kept there as holy relics, and many pilgrims visited, making donations. In the later tenth century a Priory was established in what is now St Neots, Cambridgeshire (then simply part of Eynesbury) and the landowners Leofric and his wife Leoflaed obtained Neot's remains (leaving an arm in Cornwall), realising that they would attract pilgrims, and their money, to their Priory. This was successful, and the Priory became rich and famous, and the area became known as St Neots.

About this time, the settlement to the west of the River Ouse was known as Ea-tun, meaning "waterside village". In Norman times, a sub-division of a Baron's area of control was called a "soke" and in French the area was called the Soka de Eton, and later Eaton Socon. Before the river was bridged, people waded across it, and this was called a "ford", from which the immediate area became called Eaton Ford.

The Priory was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, and the relics of St Neot were lost.

The River Great Ouse was made navigable from St Ives to Bedford, via St Neots, in 1629, increasing river-borne trade in the town.

The Second English Civil War began in April 1648. The Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell were in control, but King Charles I planned to overthrow them by force of arms. An attempt to seize London by his supporters, the Royalists, failed. A group of them retreated to St Neots and planned to spend the night of 9 July resting in the town. In the small hours of 10 July Parliamentary troops attacked, taking them by surprise, and the battle centred on the market square area. Many Royalists were killed or taken prisoner.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the town enjoyed prosperity through corn milling and brewing, and from stagecoach traffic and from 1850 its railway connection. Eaton Socon was on the Great North Road and had inns used as a staging post and overnight stop for stagecoaches travelling between London and York; some of the routes ran via St Neots instead of Eaton Socon, and intersected with traffic on the east-west route from the Eastern Counties and the Midlands.

Between 1851 and 1885 George Bower’s Vulcan Iron Foundry was a major employer, supplying equipment for gasworks throughout the British Isles and worldwide.

The separate village of Eynesbury became re-incorporated into St Neots in 1876.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Eaton Ford and Eaton Socon, lying on the west side of the River Great Ouse, were formerly within Bedfordshire, but in 1965 the situation was regularised, and they were incorporated into St Neots, and Cambridgeshire.

Technology-based industries operate in some of the town's light industrial estates and a gas turbine power station functions at Little Barford on the edge of the town.

Recent development has added new areas Eynesbury Manor and Love's Farm bringing the population to over 35,000, which will be exceeded on completion and sale of 2,800 homes at Wintringham Park in the early 2020s. It is projected that the population of the town will be 65,000 by the end of the Huntingdonshire Local Plan period (2036).