Saint Petroc's monastery was important enough to attract attention. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Petroces stow - almost certainly Padstow - was raided by the Vikings in 981. Whether as a direct response or some time afterward, the monks moved inland to Bodmin, carrying the relics of St Petroc with them. The cult of the saint became central to both towns. The current church of St Petroc in Padstow is one of four traditionally founded by him - the others are Little Petherick, Parracombe and Bodmin. Most of the present building dates from the 13th and 14th centuries, with a fifteenth-century font of Catacleuse stone and a pulpit of around 1530. Two fine monuments commemorate members of the Prideaux family, who took over the manor before the Dissolution of the Monasteries during Henry VIII's reign. A monumental brass of 1421 also survives. In medieval Cornish, the town was sometimes called Aldestowe, 'old place' - in contrast to Bodmin, the new place where the monks had gone.

Padstow grew rich on the awkwardness of its geography. The north coast of Cornwall has very few safe harbours, and ships coming in off the Atlantic needed somewhere to land. Padstow was one of the few options. Trade ran heavily with Ireland and with the English and Welsh ports of the Bristol Channel. Tin, copper, lead, slate, cured fish and dairy produce went out; timber from Norway and Sweden, salt and wine from France, hemp, iron and jute from Russia came in. During the early eighteenth century, Padstow paid more in duties on coal imports than any other Cornish port except Falmouth. The catch was getting in. The cliffs at the river mouth killed the wind exactly when ships needed it most, and the Doom Bar - a shifting sandbank across the estuary - waited for the ones whose sails went slack. A manual capstan on the west bank winched stricken vessels to safety, and rockets fired lines to ships that could not make their own way in. In the first half of the nineteenth century Padstow became a significant port of embarkation for emigrants, especially Canada-bound. Local shipbuilders also benefited from the imported timber - five shipyards operated here in the late nineteenth century, though by 1900 the industry had effectively died.

Each May Day, Padstow holds one of the oldest continuously celebrated folk customs in England. A 'hobby horse' - the 'Obby 'Oss - and its costumed teaser dance through the streets to drum and accordion, accompanied by the day's song. There are in fact two horses, the Old 'Oss and the Blue Ribbon 'Oss, with separate processions that converge at the maypole. The Wikipedia article notes simply that the day was renamed Mummers' Day in an attempt to identify it more clearly with established Cornish tradition, and that the question of whether participants should darken their faces - long disputed by some outsiders - has been reviewed repeatedly by the town since the 1970s. Charlie Bate, a noted Padstow folk advocate, recounted that the conduct of the day had been carefully reviewed long before the controversy reached national press. Whatever its precise origins, the day is a Padstow thing. It belongs to the place, and the place belongs to it.

In 1975 a young chef named Rick Stein opened a seafood restaurant in Padstow. Five decades later he has so reshaped the town's economy that British food writers have dubbed it Padstein. Stein owns several restaurants and businesses along the harbour, and tourists travel from across the United Kingdom for a table. Some fishing fleet remains - the harbour still works as a yachting haven and a small commercial port - but the dominant trade now is hospitality. The 1899 train station, once the western terminus of the London & South Western Railway's Atlantic Coast Express direct from London Waterloo, closed in 1967 under the Beeching cuts. Its tracks are now the Camel Trail, an 18-mile walking and cycling path along the river to Wadebridge and Bodmin, used by some 400,000 people a year. The station building serves as the offices of Padstow Town Council. The old line is gone; the visitors still come.

Padstow has more famous sons than a town of 2,669 has any right to. Matthew Quintal (1766-1799), an able seaman from Padstow, was among the mutineers of HMS Bounty and the last of them to be murdered on Pitcairn Island. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney (1793-1875) was a surgeon, chemist, architect and lecturer who experimented with steam locomotion and limelight. Enys Tregarthen (1850-1923) collected Cornish folklore and wrote it into books for children. Donald Rawe (1930-2018), poet and dramatist, took the bardic name Scryfer Lanwednoc - Writer of Padstow - on his admission to Gorseth Kernow in 1970. During the Second World War, in 1940, a single German bomber dropped a small load on the town. One bomb hit a terrace of houses in New Street, killing three. The damage is repaired. The names are not all forgotten. Padstow keeps its memory close, as it has since Petroc came across the river.