Bristol through the ages

There was a Roman port here before there was a town: Abona, at what is now Sea Mills, listed in the 3rd-century Antonine Itinerary. The town itself was founded on a low hill between the Frome and the Avon at some point before the early 11th century; the main evidence is a coin of Aethelred struck here around 1010, which shows a market town with a mint already working. The name Brycg stowe means "place by the bridge", and the local habit of adding an L to the end of words is thought to have turned it into Bristol. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has Harold Godwinson taking ship to Brycgstow in 1052 and drawing ships from the town in 1062 to move against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn.

Brycgstow was also a major centre of the Anglo-Saxon slave trade. Men, women and children taken in Wales or in northern England were traded through Bristol to Dublin, and from there the Viking rulers of Dublin sold them on across the known world. Wulfstan, the Saxon bishop of Worcester, whose diocese included Bristol, preached against the trade regularly, and it was eventually forbidden by the crown, though it carried on in secret for many years.

After the Norman conquest a motte-and-bailey was raised on the site of the present Castle Park, and Bristol was held by Geoffrey de Montbray, Bishop of Coutances, who used the town as his headquarters in the rebellion against William Rufus. The castle passed with the Honour of Gloucester to Robert Fitzhamon and then to Robert of Caen, first Earl of Gloucester, who backed his half-sister Matilda after Henry I died in 1135. Stephen of Blois abandoned an attempt to besiege Bristol in 1138 because the castle appeared impregnable, and was imprisoned there after his capture in 1141.

Robert Fitzharding, a wealthy Bristolian who had backed Matilda through the war and was later made Lord of Berkeley, founded St Augustine's Abbey in 1140. Bristol's dealings with Ireland ran deep from the start: Diarmait Mac Murchada, the deposed king of Leinster, was exiled here, Bristol merchants helped fund Richard de Clare and the Norman invasion that followed, and in 1172 Henry II gave Bristolians the right to live in and trade from Dublin.

The medieval Jewish community here was one of the smaller ones in England. Its members were accused in a blood libel in 1183, of which little detail survives. An archa was established late in the 12th century, without which Jews could not legally conduct business. In 1210 every Jewish householder in England was imprisoned in Bristol and a levy imposed on them, recorded as 60,000 or 66,000 marks. During the Second Barons' War the city's archa was burned and the community violently attacked; a further attack in 1275 caused no fatalities. The community was expelled in 1290 with the rest of England's Jews. A surviving ritual bath, now called Jacob's Well, was first read as a mikveh and later reinterpreted as a Bet Tohorah serving the Jewish cemetery at Jews Acre.

By the 13th century Bristol was a busy port, with a stone bridge across the Avon built around 1247. Woollen cloth became the main export through the 14th and 15th centuries and wine from Gascony and Bordeaux the principal import, alongside a heavy trade with the Anglo-Irish ports of Waterford and Cork and with Portugal; from about 1420 to 1480 the port also took stockfish, a freeze-dried cod, from Iceland. In 1373 Redcliffe and Bedminster were taken into the town and Edward III proclaimed it separate from Gloucestershire and Somerset, "a county by itself, to be called the county of Bristol in perpetuity" - the first town in England given that status.

By the mid-14th century Bristol is reckoned to have been England's third-largest town after London and York, with perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 people on the eve of the Black Death of 1348-49. Between a third and a half of them died, and the population stayed between 10,000 and 12,000 for most of the 15th and 16th centuries. William Canynge, born around 1399, was five times mayor and twice the town's MP, and spent much of his fortune rebuilding St Mary Redcliffe after lightning damaged it in 1446.

Henry VII sponsored the Venetian John Cabot's voyage from Bristol in 1497, which made landfall in North America, and Cabot came back speaking of the quantities of cod off the new land. He sailed again with five ships in 1498 and is generally believed not to have returned. William Weston led an expedition to the 'New found land' in 1499, the first commanded by an Englishman, but the city's merchants seem to have lost interest after 1509, having spent heavily for little profit.

The Dissolution took Bristol's friaries, monastic hospitals and priories, and in 1541 the civic leaders bought up former church lands for a thousand pounds; there is no record of Bristolians objecting to the royal seizures. In 1542 the former Abbey of St Augustine became Bristol Cathedral, a new diocese was founded and Bristol was made a city. Trade grew on wine, olive oil, iron and dyes inward and cloth, lead and hides outward, and many of the leading merchants smuggled; that illicit trade grew enormously after 1558 and became integral to the city's economy.

The corporation bought the castle in 1630. When the First Civil War broke out in 1642 the city took the Parliamentary side and partly restored its fortifications, but Royalist troops under Prince Rupert captured Bristol on 26 July 1643, doing extensive damage to town and castle and taking eight armed merchant vessels that became the nucleus of the Royalist fleet; the city's workshops were turned over to making muskets. After the New Model Army beat the Royalists at Langport in the summer of 1645, Sir Thomas Fairfax marched on Bristol, besieged it for three weeks and then attacked, and Rupert surrendered on 10 September. In 1656 Cromwell ordered the castle destroyed.

Bristol fishermen had worked the Grand Banks of Newfoundland since the 16th century and began settling there permanently in larger numbers in the 17th, founding colonies at Bristol's Hope and Cuper's Cove. The rise of England's American colonies made the city's western position an advantage, and by the middle of the 18th century Bristol was one of the two leading outports in England. Much of that growth rested on the trade in enslaved Africans. In 1755 the city held 237 slave traders against London's 147, and it had been a major supplier of enslaved people to South Carolina before 1750. Between the late 17th century and abolition in 1807 more than 2,000 slaving voyages were made by Bristol ships, carrying an estimated half a million people from Africa to the Americas in brutal conditions; average profits ran at seventy per cent a voyage, and more than fifteen per cent of those transported died or were murdered on the Middle Passage. Some enslaved people were brought to the city itself from the Caribbean, among them Scipio Africanus, buried at Henbury, and Pero Jones, brought here by the slave trader and plantation owner John Pinney.

The trade reshaped the Avon valley: demand for cheap brassware to exchange in Africa produced a boom in copper and brass manufacture between Conham and Keynsham, with glass, soap, sugar, paper and chemical industries growing alongside. Opposition grew too. John Wesley founded the first Methodist chapel, the New Room in Broadmead, in 1739 and published Thoughts Upon Slavery in 1774; the Society of Friends began lobbying in Bristol in 1783. Thomas Clarkson came to study the trade and, through sailors he met at the Seven Stars, learned how slaver captains and mates "plied and stupefied seamen with drink" to sign them up, and Hannah More published "Slavery, A Poem" in 1788. Edmund Burke, elected Whig MP for Bristol in 1774, lost the seat in 1780 after his detestation of the slave trade angered his merchant sponsors. The city's leading families remained strongly anti-abolitionist.

Bristol Bridge, the only crossing that avoided a ferry, was rebuilt between 1764 and 1768, with a toll charged to pay for it. When the toll was extended in 1793 the Bristol Bridge Riot followed: eleven people were killed and forty-five injured, among the deadliest riots of the century. In 1831 the Lords' rejection of the second Reform Bill brought worse, when Sir Charles Wetherell, a magistrate who strongly opposed the Bill, came to open the new Assize Courts and was chased by a crowd to the Mansion House in Queen Square. The Act passed in 1832, and the city's boundaries were widened for the first time since 1373.

The port was losing ground. Competition from Liverpool from about 1760, war with France from 1793 and abolition in 1807 left Bristol behind the newer manufacturing centres of the north and the Midlands; cotton never took hold, and sugar, brass and glass declined. The long tidal passage up the Avon Gorge, which had made the port secure in the Middle Ages, was now a liability, and the Floating Harbour built to William Jessop's design between 1804 and 1809 did not overcome it; by 1867 the meanders of the Avon kept out any vessel over 300 feet, and the port facilities migrated downstream to Avonmouth. Even so the population quintupled across the century, reaching 140,158 by 1841, and tobacco importing and cigarette manufacture flourished under W. D. & H. O. Wills.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the Great Western Railway from Bristol to London, the Bristol-built steamships SS Great Western and SS Great Britain, and the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Mary Carpenter founded ragged schools and reformatories, and University College, forerunner of the University of Bristol, was founded in 1876.

In 1910 Sir George White, the owner of Bristol Tramways, founded the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company, later the Bristol Aeroplane Company, which built the Bristol Scout and the F.2 Fighter in the First World War and whose engine department passed to Rolls-Royce in 1966. Shipbuilding in the city docks, chiefly by Charles Hill & Sons, mattered until the 1970s. The council built more than 15,000 houses between 1919 and 1939, clearing some of the worst central slums onto new estates at Southmead, Knowle, Sea Mills and Horfield.

As a centre of aircraft manufacture and a major port, Bristol was a target for the Luftwaffe. The city centre was severely damaged, above all in November and December 1940 when the Broadmead area was flattened. About 1,300 people living or working in the city were killed and nearly 100,000 buildings were damaged, at least 3,000 beyond repair. The original central shopping area near the bridge and castle is now a park with two bombed-out churches and fragments of the castle in it.

The British Concorde prototype made its maiden flight from Filton on 9 April 1969. Postwar immigration from Commonwealth countries brought racist tension with it. In 1963 the Bristol Omnibus Company operated a colour bar, refusing to employ Black or Asian bus crews; the Bristol Bus Boycott successfully challenged it and is considered to have been instrumental in the passing of race relations legislation. In 1980 a police raid on a cafe in St Paul's set off the St Pauls riot, a protest against racism and police harassment that showed the alienation of the city's Afro-Caribbean residents. The docks moved seven miles downstream to Avonmouth and the deep-water Royal Portbury Dock, and in the late 20th century the emptied harbourside was redeveloped rather than left derelict. On 7 June 2020 protestors pulled the statue of Edward Colston from its plinth and pushed it into the harbour; it was recovered on 11 June and became a museum exhibit, after more than a decade of argument over its plaque, which commemorated Colston's philanthropy in the city and said nothing of his part in the Royal African Company and the Bristol slave trade.