with a fringe of ecclesiastical buildings, and then took them within a more extended line of wall. Another in later days has swept away well nigh every trace of the fortress which was so famous both in the twelfth century and in the seventeenth, and has covered the whole range of the neighbouring hills with a new and airy city of modern days.
Bristol occupied by Bishop Geoffrey.
His relation to the town.
The castle of Bristol then, though not perched, like so
many of its fellows, on any lofty height, was placed on
a strong and important site. That site, commanding
the lower course of the Avon and the great borough
upon it, and guarding the meeting-place, still of two
shires, as once of two kingdoms, supplied an admirable
centre for the work of those whose object was, not to
guard those shires, but to lay them waste.[1] To that
end Bristol was occupied and garrisoned by the warrior
Bishop of Coutances, Geoffrey of Mowbray. It is not
unlikely that he was already in command of the castle.
He was not only a land-owner in the two neighbouring
shires, a very great land-owner in that of Somerset;[2]
but the meagre notice of Bristol in the Great Survey
also shows that he stood in some special relation to the
borough as the receiver of the King's dues within it.[3]
He doubtless added anything that the castle needed in
- ↑ The description of the later occupation of Bristol (Gesta Steph. p. 37) will serve equally for this earlier one. "E diversis siquidem provinciis et regionibus emersi, tanto illic abundantius et gratulantius affuerunt, quanto sub divite domino ex munitissimo castello, quicquid libentium animo occurreret, in uberrima committere Anglia fuit eis permissum."
- ↑ His estates in Somerset are very large. See Domesday, 87 a et seqq. In Gloucestershire (165) he appears as "Episcopus de Sancto Laudo"—the older seat of the bishopric of Coutances.
- ↑ Domesday, 163. Under "Bertune apud Bristou," now Barton Regis, we read, "Hoc manerium et Bristou reddit regi c. et x. markas argenti. Burgenses dicunt quod episcopus G. habet xxxiii. markas argenti et unam markam auri propter firmam regis." This looks like the Earl's third penny; but Geoffrey certainly had no formal earldom in Gloucestershire.
