Bristol in the eleventh century.
The chief churches not yet built.
Peninsular site of the borough.
The two rivers. put on a new character, one which, in the disturbances half a century later, won for it the name of the stepmother of all England.[1] A fortress, the forerunner of the great work of Robert Earl of Gloucester,[2] had now arisen, and its presence made Bristol one of the chief military centres of England down to the warfare of the seventeenth century. The Bristol of those days had not yet occupied the ground which is now covered by its two chief ecclesiastical ornaments. The abbey of Saint Augustine, the creation of Robert Fitz-Harding, had not yet arisen on the lowest slope of the hills to the west, nor the priory of Saint James, the creation of Earl Robert, on the ground to the north of the borough. These foundations arose in the next age on the Mercian ground without the walls. And any forerunner which may then have been of the church of Saint Mary on the Red cliff, for ages past the stateliest among the parish churches of England, stood beyond the walls, beyond the river, on undisputed West-Saxon ground. The older Bristol lay wholly on the Mercian side of the Avon, at the point where the Frome of Gloucestershire still poured its waters into the greater stream in the sight of the sun.[3] But nowhere, unless at Palermo, have the relations of land and water been more strangely turned about than they have been at Bristol. The course of the greater river, though not actually turned aside, is disguised by cuts and artificial harbours which puzzle the
- ↑ Gesta Stephani, 41. "Totius Angliæ noverca Bristoa."
- ↑ Simeon of Durham (1088) speaks of the "castellum fortissimum" at this time.
- ↑ Gesta Steph. 36. "Est Bristoa civitas . . . ipso situ loci omnium civitatum Angliæ munitissima. Sicut enim de Brundusio legimus, quædam provinciæ Glaornensis pars ad formam linguæ restricta, et in longum protensa, duobus fluviis gemina ejus latera proluentibus, inque inferiori parte, ubi ipsa terra defectum patitur, in unam aquarum abundantiam coeuntibus, efficit civitatem."
