Bristol, England

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 (Unpublished journal, 1780s)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

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.

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.

Ram and Monkey, Elder Lady Chapel

In the Elder Lady Chapel

Here lyeth the bodies of Sir John Younge, Knight, and Dame Ioane, his wyfe..

Elsewhere in the Abbey star shaped niches with ornate stone draperies shelter the recumbent statues of the deceased, more solemn, more Anglo-Saxon than their French counterparts. The walls and floors are tiled throughout with gravestones from the 15th, 16th, 17th, c.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.