ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2026 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2026 ************************************ From: "Brian M. Scott" 15 Apr 2000 Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel! You asked whether the name would have been possible for a Saxon living at some time between 850 and 1100 CE, noting that you would greatly appreciate any additional information that we might have. The Old English name is a fine choice. It was the name of several churchmen in the 10th century, most notably Dunstan son of Heorstan, archbishop of Canterbury from 960 to 988, who within ten years of his death was already being venerated as a saint. [1, 2] His fame probably contributed to the popularity of the name, which remained in use throughout the Middle Ages. In particular, it appears in Domesday Book (as and and in the Latinized forms and ) as the name of several men who held land just before the Conquest. [3, 4] Padstow is called 'Saint Petroc's church' in the entry for the year 981 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; its name subsequently appears as c.995, 1297, 1351, and 1361. [5, 6] From this you can see that is a late, worn-down form of the Old English name, one that seems not to have appeared until the 14th century. Two other names are associated with Padstow in your period; they seem always to have been secondary to and its later forms, but we have included them for the sake of completeness. The older one is Cornish. S. Petroc founded his monastery at Padstow in succession to an earlier S. Gwethenek, and as late as 1086 the place appears in record as , from the Cornish for 'Gwethenek's church'. The other, , is only attested from 1201, but it seems to go back to an Old English 'old church, old holy place'. This name indirectly commemorates the translation of S. Petroc's shrine and relics from Padstow to Bodmin. This occurred around the year 1000, and at some point thereafter people must have begun to refer to Padstow as the 'old church' to distinguish it from the 'new church' at Bodmin. [6, 7] Both Old English and Latin are used in documents from your period, so we are suggesting both Old English and Latin forms of your name. A typical Old English form would be , where <{ae}> represents the a-e-ligature (i.e., an and an squashed together to share a common upright). This is pronounced approximately \DOON-stahn at PET-roh-kes STOW-@\. (Here \OO\ represents the sound of in , \OW\ stands for the sound of in , and \@\ represents the sound of the in ). If you wish, you could substitute either of the prepositions or for <{ae}t>; all three were used in this way, though it appears that <{ae}t> was most common and least common. [8] They are pronounced approximately \ohn\ and \ohf\, respectively. [9] In a Latin document the name would most likely have appeared as or some very close variant. Finally, since your period extends a bit past the Conquest, we thought that you might like to know how the name would have been written by the Norman scribes of Domesday Book and the late 11th century. Padstow itself doesn't seem to have been recorded in Domesday Book, but Petrockstow in neighboring Devon bore the identical name and appears as . [10] (Here the is merely an orthographic variant of ; the two letters were used interchangeably.) Any combination of a Domesday Book form of (i.e., , , , or ) with or would be plausible in a late 11th century Anglo-Norman documentary context. Maridonna Benvenuti, Arval Benicoeur, and Raquel Buenaventura also contributed to this letter. We hope that it has been useful; if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to write again. For the Academy, Talan Gwynek 15 April 2000 ===== References and Notes: [1] Searle, William George. Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1897); p. 173. [2] Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); s.n. Dunstan. [3] Withycombe, E.G. The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); s.n. Dunstan. [4] von Feilitzen, O. The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book (Uppsala: 1937); s.n. Dunstan. [5] Ekwall, Eilert. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); s.n. Padstow. [6] Padel, Oliver James. A Popular Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names (Penzance, England: A. Hodge, 1988); s.n. Padstow. [7] Farmer, op. cit., s.n. Petroc. [8] Tengvik, Goesta. Old English Bynames (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri-A.-B., 1938); Chapter 1. [9] Note that Old English ends with the sound \f\ and not with the \v\ sound of the modern preposition. [10] Ekwall, op. cit., s.n. Petrockstow.