Dr Oliver Padel

Honorary Research Fellow

Contact Information

Department of ASNC, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP
Email: ojp10@cam.ac.uk

Academic Interests

  • Cornish place-names; Cornish medieval history; medieval Cornish language and literature. Celtic place-names; Celtic saint’s cults; the Arthurian legend in Wales and elsewhere
  • Projects: the place-names of Cornwall (for the English Place-Name Society); edition of the Bodmin Manumissions; the 1327 Lay Subsidy for Cornwall; the geography of Cornish-speaking in the Middle Ages
  • Editor, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall
  • Council member, Devon and Cornwall Record Society

Selected Publications

  • Cornish Place-Name Elements, English Place-Name Society,  vol. 56/57 (1985)
  • A Popular Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names (1988)
  • Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (2000; 2013)
  • The Cornish Lands of the Arundells of Lanherne, Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (ed. with H. S. A. Fox), Devon and Cornwall Record Society, n.s. 41 (2000)
  • ‘Local saints and place-names in Cornwall’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe (2002), pp. 303–60
  • ‘The charter of Lanlawren (Cornwall)’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. K. O’Brien O’Keeffe and A. Orchard (2005), II, 74–85
  • ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the development of the Merlin legend’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 51 (2006), 37–65
  • ‘Evidence for oral tales in medieval Cornwall’, Studia Celtica, 40 (2006), 127–53
  • ‘Place-names and the Saxon conquest of Devon and Cornwall’, in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. Higham (2007), pp. 215–30
  • ‘Saint Ké: les voyages d’un saint, de son culte, et de ses reliques’, Britannia Monastica, 11 (2007), 49–59
  • ‘Cornu-Latin treuga “griefs”’, Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries, 40.iv (2008), 118–21
  • ‘Two Devonshire place-names’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 41 (2009), 119–26
  • Slavery in Saxon Cornwall: the Bodmin Manumissions, Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture, 7 (2009)
  • The Lanhydrock Atlas (ed. with P. Holden and P. Herring, 2010) [Seventeenth-century estate atlas]
  • ‘Christianity in medieval Cornwall: Celtic aspects’, in Victoria History of the County of Cornwall, II, Religious History to 1560 (2010), pp. 110–25
  • ‘Ancient and medieval administrative divisions of Cornwall’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 131 (2010), 211–14
  • ‘Asser’s parochia of Exeter’, in TOME: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-Edwards, ed. F. Edmonds and P. Russell (2011), pp. 65–72
  • ‘Place-names and calendaring practices’, in The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem: a Companion, ed. M. Hicks (2012), pp. 223–37
  • ‘Aneirin and Taliesin: sceptical speculations’, in Beyond the Gododdin: Dark-Age Scotland in Medieval Wales, edited by Alex Woolf (St Andrews, 2013), pp. 115–52
  • ‘Brittonic place-names in England’, in Perceptions of Place: Twenty-first-Century Interpretations of English Place-Name Studies, edited by Jayne Carroll and David Parsons (Nottingham, 2013), pp. 1–39
  • ‘Five Cornish toponyms revisited: Crim, Darite, Uthnoe, Port Isaac, Treverva’, Studia Celtica, 47 (2013), 69–111
  • ‘Historical background to the sculpture’, in Ann Preston-Jones, Elisabeth Okasha and others, Early Cornish Sculpture, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, vol. XI (Oxford, 2013), pp. 21–36; also ‘Further discussion of the name [DONIERT]’, ibid. pp. 135–7, ‘Old Cornish runhol’, ibid. pp. 153–4
  • ‘The nature and date of the Old Cornish Vocabulary’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 61 (2014), 173–99
  • ‘Change and development in English place-names: what counts as corruption?’ Quaestio Insularis, 15 (2014), 1–21
  • ‘The boundary of Tywarnhayle (Perranzabuloe) in A.D. 960’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 2014, 69–92
  • ‘Celtic, Pictish and Germanic onomastics in the work of H. M. Chadwick’, in M. Chadwick and the Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, edited by Michael Lapidge, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 69–70 (2015), 157–70
  • ‘Glasney College, Penryn, Cornwall’, in Europe: a Literary History, 1348–1418, edited by David Wallace, 2 vols (Oxford, 2016), I, 455–64
  • ‘Where was Middle Cornish spoken?’ Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 74 (2017), 1–31