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| A Norman arch of Bristol |
Les idyllic than Bath, Bristol is a
treasure trove of stories. It had been the dynamic hub of southwest
England for centuries of international commerce. But with a long, dark shadow; it was a hub of the triangular slave
trade. Merchants of Bristol sent ships to patrol the coasts of Africa
beginning in the 17th c., and took their human cargo to America,
which sent slavery's products back to Bristol: cotton, tobacco,
sugar. Bristol sent out 2,018 ships that kidnapped 500,000 human beings.
"We fitted out again for... Africa
and thence to Charlestown, during the gale we lost 20 or so of the
slaves, and the remainder much impaired, so that we came to a very
bad market." (Unpublished journal, 1780s)
Those profits--and later compensation
paid to slave-owners when their slaves were emancipated--built
Bristol. Investing in philanthropy and culture, the slave traders
became pillars of society. There were also the voices of conscience here,
including the founder of Methodism John Wesley (who sent missionaries to Africa), the Quakers, and among others an Evangelical writer, Hannah More:
Then for love of filthy Gold,
Strait they bore me to the sea;
Cramm'd me down a Slave Ship's hold
Where were Hundreds stow'd like me
Shrieking, sickening, fainting, dying,
Deed of shame for Britons brave...
-----Hannah More, The Sorrows of Yamba, or
the Negro Woman's Lamentation, 1795
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| Bristol Cathedral |
But the most authoritative witnesses of
Bristol's long history are the churches.
The Bristol Cathedral
(1140 AD), soaring and massive with a Perpendicular gothic ceiling, has a Chapter House dating back to the 12th c., with narrow regular columns
of twisted and braided stone.
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| Chapter House, 1165 |
The Elder Lady Chapel was completed in
1220, and is decorated with monkeys! In one carving a monkey plays
bagpipes while a ram plays the fiddle. In the Berkeley Chapel little
snails were carved on the ivy and acanthus leaves of the stone floral
capitals. The lavish realm of Shakespeare.
Italianate marble tiles the "quire"
(built 1300-1330). A schoolteacher loudly shepherded her
flock--"look, someone dirtied it" scowled a little girl.
"People are disgusting, aren't they?" the school marm
pronounced loudly. She explained to her charges the misericords,
hard, embroidered cushions that clacked loudly if the poor
sleep-deprived monk actually sat down, i.e., fell asleep.
But on to Bristol's many other stories!
Daniel Defoe met his model for Robinson Crusoe, Andrew Selkirk, in
the old tavern the Llandroger Trow. It is across the street from the
old Royal Theatre, said to be haunted by the ghost of the legendary
actress, Sarah Siddons. Robert Louis Stevenson used another tavern "Hole in the
Wall" as his "Spyglass Tavern" in Treasure Island, where press gangs
looked for soused patrons to kidnap and force into the service of the British
Navy.
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| The New Chapel |
The New Chapel (Wesley Chapel, 1739)
is the world's oldest Methodist building, built for the great field
preacher John Wesley, who traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to speak to crowds of mainly Welsh miners, three and four thousand at a time, men who were barred from the
snobbish Anglican church. He sent his apostles to America where they planted the seeds of Methodism, Pentecostalism and the modern Charismatic movement, preaching the personal experience of god and redemption by faith. Wesley was only 5'3" but his voice carried
powerfully. His brother Charles left behind 9,000 hymns.
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| Elizabethan oak bed, The Red Lodge |
Nearby is the Quakers Friars, used by
Dominican friars in the 13th c., and then Quakers in the 16th c.
William Penn and George Fox, founder of the Quakers, were both
married there.
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| North Porch, St. Mary Redcliffe |
And here I insert a word on my ancestors,
religious Nonconformists, by the circuitous route of Flushing, Queens. There the Flushing
Remonstrance was signed, an extraordinary document that is considered the source
of the US Constitution's clauses on religious freedom. The signing of
the Remonstrance led to its ban by Peter Stuyvesant, Director General
of New Netherland. A cousin of my ancestors, John Bowne (of the
Bowne House in Flushing) then allowed the Quakers to meet in his
home, and for that Stuyvesant imprisoned him. Unable to make Bowne
recant, Stuyvesant thought to solve the problem by sending Bowne to
Amsterdam (he was English, not Dutch, nor did he speak the language).
There Bowne petitioned to testify to the West Indies Company officials,
after which they deliberated for a month and finally decided it was more
politic to proclaim religious freedom in the colonies than to enforce
Stuyvesant's bigotry.
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| Thomas Chatterton |
And then there is the "Fairest,
Goodliest, and most famous parish church in England," according
to Elizabeth I, St. Mary Redcliffe. Filled with stories, it is most
importantly where John Cabot, the anglicized Genoan, set out for
Newfoundland and "discovered America," say the
parishioners, after his sponsor's name, Amerike.
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| Northern Porch, St. Mary Redcliffe |
The oldest northern corner dates from
about 1200, an ornate, fanciful gothic. Here was where pilgrims, setting sail on the River Avon, prayed for protection from Mary, Star of the Sea. Above is the tower where the
young poet Thomas Chatterton, (b. 1752) whose father was sexton,
claimed to have discovered medieval manuscripts from a (fictitious)
monk, tracts that he himself penned. When his forgeries were discovered he
committed suicide at the age of 17, but his work was praised by poets
Wordsworth and Keats, among others. Samuel Johnson tried to get up
into the tower where the manuscripts were "found", but got his
great girth stuck in the narrow stairway.
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| William Canynges |
The church has a window commemorating
Handel who composed here, and the arms of William Penn, founder of
Pennsylvania, USA. There are magnificent life sized funeral
effigies, two separate ones of William Canynges (d. 1396), merchant,
five times mayor and Abbot. His son was also five times mayor and
completed building the church.
On leaving we saw a brochure
commemorating the church cat, Tom (1912-1927) who attended more
services than the clergy, either sitting with the organist, or on the
lap of a worshipper. He was honored with a grand funeral and his
small coffin is buried in the church yard.
