Description

A new unused book.

About the book >.>.> The topography of Bristol has been a subject of enduring interest over many centuries. William Worcestre provided a contemporary description replete with measurements and a wealth of detail in the later 15th century. The maps of James Millerd and John Rocque of 1673 and 1740 presented a similar body of information cartographically each concerned both with the contemporary city and its past. In the 17th and early 18th centuries Samuel Pepys Celia Fiennes and Daniel Defoe recorded their fleeting observations more briefly but with undiminished fascination. In the 1730s James Stewart’s historical writings now in the Bodleian Library sprang directly from his encounter in June 1733 with two gentleman on Brandon Hill busily engaged in drawing the NW prospect of the city later identified by him as Samuel and Nathaniel Buck. From the early 19th century Bristol’s historians were increasingly aware of the archival information that could be called on to reconstruct medieval Bristol in a greater level of detail. Samuel Seyer’s Memoirs have a strong topographical bias and areas of special interest to him included the town walls the castle the bridge and the early course of the Frome. In particular his transcription of the cartulary of St Augustine’s Abbey (now in the City Library) must have given him a greater awareness than that possessed by his predecessors of the detailed information available in the archival sources for understanding the layout of the medieval town. Bush’s work on Bristol Town Duties and Manchee’s on Bristol Charities called on such material more indirectly. Manchee in particular looked at a significant proportion of the source material for this volume and we may ask whether the large scale abstraction of medieval and post medieval documentation was required by the Charity Commissioners on the scale provided. (SP)