Works of Earl Robert.
Growth of the town. not to be despised. To the west of that isthmus, within the peninsula, stood the original town, girded to the north by the original course of the Frome, to the southwest by the marshy ground at the junction of the rivers.[1] To the west of the isthmus, outside the peninsula, stood the castle. Standing on the exposed side, open to an attack from the east, it was fenced in on three sides by a moat joining the two rivers at either end. A writer of the next age gives us a picture of Bristol Castle as it then stood, strengthened by all the more advanced art of that time.[2] But the great keep of Earl Robert, slighted in the days of the Commonwealth, was not yet. We can only guess at the state of borough and fortress, as they had stood when the sons of Harold were driven back from the walls of Bristol, or as they stood now at the opening of the civil war which we have now reached. But there are few towns whose general look must have been more thoroughly unlike what it is now. The central and busy streets which occupy the area of the older Bristol must, allowing for the difference between the eleventh century and the nineteenth, still keep the general character of the old merchant-borough. But few changes can be greater than those which have affected Bristol both in earlier and in later times. One period of change first surrounded the elder town
- ↑ The course of the stream and the line of the walls have been altered more than once; but the description in the Gesta Stephani of the peninsula, as long and tongue-shaped, shows that the Frome cannot, when that was written, have taken the line of the present Baldwin Street. The town was on the peninsula, but it covered only the north-east part of it.
- ↑ Gesta Steph. "Ex una tamen ejus regione ubi ad obsidendum opportunior magisque pervia habetur, castellum plurimo aggere exaltatum, muro et propugnaculis, turribus, et diversis machinis firmatum, impugnantium coercet accessus." This is doubtless equally true in its measure of the state of things in 1088; but there is not now much sign of the "plurimus agger." The old prints of Bristol show Earl Robert's keep, a square tower of the best class.
