History of Bristol
Bristol is a city with a population of nearly half a million people in south west England, situated between Somerset and Gloucestershire on the tidal River Avon.
A mint was established in the Saxon burgh of Brycgstow by the 10th century and the town rose to prominence in the Norman era, gaining a charter and county status in 1373.
Maritime connections to Wales, Ireland, Iceland, western France, Spain and Portugal brought a steady increase in trade in wool, fish, wine and grain during the Middle Ages.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the construction of a floating harbour, advances in shipbuilding and further industrialisation with the growth of the glass, paper, soap and chemical industries aided by the establishment of Bristol as the terminus of the Great Western Railway by I. K. Brunel.
[1] Stone tools made from flint, chert, sandstone and quartzite have been found in terraces of the River Avon, most notably in the neighbourhoods of Shirehampton and Pill.
The Saxon bishop of Worcester, Wulfstan, whose diocese included Bristol, preached against the trade regularly and eventually it was forbidden by the crown, though it carried on in secret for many years.
[14] Rufus created the Honour of Gloucester, which included Bristol, from his mother Queen Matilda's estates and granted it to Robert Fitzhamon.
[20] In 1140 St Augustine's Abbey was founded by Robert Fitzharding, a wealthy Bristolian who had loyally supported the Earl and Matilda in the war.
[30] A stone bridge was built across the Avon, c. 1247 and between the years of 1240 and 1247 a Great Ditch was constructed in St Augustine's Marsh to straighten out the course of the River Frome and provide more space for berthing ships.
The major surviving part of the walls is visible adjacent to the only remaining gateway under the tower of the Church of St John the Baptist.
[36] In later life he became a priest and spent a considerable part of his fortune in rebuilding St Mary Redcliffe church, which had been severely damaged by lightning in 1446.
[48] Moreover, recent research has shown that England's fisheries off Iceland actually grew significantly from the 1490s, albeit the centre for this activity shifted from Bristol to East Anglia.
There was no mention of the island being discovered but Croft was prosecuted for illegal exports of salt, on the grounds that, as a customs officer, he should not have engaged in trade.
[49] Professor David Beers Quinn, whose theories form the basis for a variety of popular histories, suggested that the explorers may have discovered the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, waters rich in cod.
[62] Many of the city's leading merchants were involved in smuggling at this time, illicitly exporting goods like foodstuffs and leather, while under-declaring imports of wine.
"[65] Bristol sent three ships to the Royal Navy fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and also supplied two levies of men to the defending land forces.
[66] The castle had fallen into disuse in the late Tudor era, but the City authorities had no control over royal property and the precincts became a refuge for lawbreakers.
The visit featured a pageant on the river, with an English ship attacked by Turkish galleys, which the queen watched from the Canon's Marsh meadow near the Cathedral.
However Royalist troops under the command of Prince Rupert captured Bristol on 26 July 1643, in the process causing extensive damage to both town and castle.
Renewed growth came with the 17th-century rise of England's American colonies and the rapid 18th-century expansion of Bristol's part in the "Triangular trade" in Africans taken for slavery in the Americas.
Over 2000 slaving voyages were made by Bristol ships between the late 17th century and abolition in 1807, carrying an estimated half a million people from Africa to the Americas in brutal conditions.
Prominent manufacturers such as Abraham Darby and William Champion developed extensive works between Conham and Keynsham which used ores from the Mendips and coal from the North Somerset coalfield.
Prominent local opponents of both the trade and the institution of slavery itself included Anne Yearsley, Hannah More,[81] Harry Gandey, Mary Carpenter, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.
[89] Competition from Liverpool from 1760, the disruption of maritime commerce through war with France (1793) and the abolition of the slave trade (1807) contributed to the city's failure to keep pace with the newer manufacturing centres of the North and Midlands.
Buchanan and Cossons cite "a certain complacency and inertia [from the prominent mercantile families] which was a serious handicap in the adjustment to new conditions in the Industrial Revolution period.
"[90] The long passage up the heavily tidal Avon Gorge, which had made the port highly secure during the Middle Ages, had become a liability which the construction of a new "Floating Harbour" (designed by William Jessop) in 1804–1809[91] failed to overcome.
Local magistrate Sir Charles Wetherall, a strong opponent of the Bill, visited Bristol to open the new Assize Courts and an angry mob chased him to the Mansion House in Queen Square.
The Bristol Brabazon was a large trans-Atlantic airliner built in the late 1940s, based on developments in heavy bombers during the World War, but it received no sales orders and never went into production.
[118] High technology companies such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, and Orange, along with creative and media enterprises become significant local employers as traditional manufacturing industries declined.
[119] Like much of British post-war planning, regeneration of Bristol city centre was characterised by large, cheap tower blocks, brutalist architecture and expansion of roads.
