The Bodmin manumissions or Bodmin Gospels is a manuscript supposed to be of the 9th century. The document is of interest to language scholars as it contains writing in Latin, Saxon and Cornish texts.
Recorded in the Old Cornish language are the names and details of slaves freed in Bodmin (the then principal town of Cornwall, an important religious centre) between the mid tenth and mid eleventh centuries. There is also an Old Cornish Vocabulary, an English – Latin vocabulary of ca. AD 1000 to which was added about a century later a Cornish translation. Some 961 Cornish words are recorded, ranging from celestial bodies, through church and craft occupation, to plants and animals.[1]
This, it is believed, is the only original record relating to Cornwall, or its Bishopric, anterior to the Norman Conquest. The volume is in quarto, of rather an oblong form, and is very neatly written, though evidently by a scribe not well informed, or of great learning, even for those times. The entries seem to be contemporaneous with the manumissions which they record. The practice of manumitting slaves in the church, as recorded in the entries, appears to have existed from the early part of the fourth century.[2]