Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. Maps present. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The main precinct of the University of Bristol is situated on and around the summit of St Michael’s Hill to the north-west of the centre of medieval Bristol. The town of Bristol founded c.1000 A.D. was first confined within a fortified enclosure between the Avon and the Frome centred on the crossroads of Broad Street Corn Street High Street and Wine Street. The expansion of this town was rapid. Less than 150 years after its founding it was described by King Stephen’s chronicler as ‘almost the richest city’. By the mid thirteenth century the walled area had been greatly extended. The suburbs on the west were now closer to St Michael’s Hill and the church of St Michael’s was certainly by then in existence. The suburban expansion that took in St Michael’s Hill and eventually all of what is now the University Precinct had begun by the sixteenth century. This early expansion and the landscape disturbed by the building of the Royal Fort in the English Civil War are not recorded on any surviving maps. The continued surban expansion is most easily followed through the maps of 1673 and later. Millerd’s map of 1673 (Fig.2) shows a scatter of gardens and houses the Little Park houses on St Michael’s Hill and the houses contained within the Royal Fort ‘now demolished’ and ‘converted into houses and pleasant gardens’. The legend amplifies this theme: ‘the riseing of the hill St Michael being converted into comely buildings & pleasant gardens makes a very beautifull addition to the suburbs thereof. (LL)