'The surviving notebooks of eighteenth century magistrates can be used by historians to investigate the extent to which customary culture was constrained and regulated by law. Wood-gathering may have been essential to the economy of the rural poor, but it remained theft in the eyes of the law. Carl Griffin opens the notebook of William Hunt of West Lavington in Wiltshire and finds that it was a crime that kept the magistrate peculiarly busy'.
Year: 2005
Sir Richard Berkeley: An Elizabethan Career
'Sir Richard Berkeley, a harasser of smugglers at home and a schemer at court, was arguably one of the most politically astute landowners of the Elizabethan age. Here, Tony Nott profiles the complex political and diplomatic career of the first builder of Stoke House.
The man who’d have blood for his supper: the killing of Henry Murray
'If the maintenance of order on the streets of early nineteenth century Bristol was never a simple matter, the constantly shifting presence of large visiting communities of seafaring Europeans cannot have made it any easier. With inns, lodging houses, streets and quays frequently awash with colourfully vibrant but uncustomary sights and sounds, social tensions and conflicts between host and 'outlandish' communities were rarely far beneath the surface. Often the detail of these cultural tensions went unrecorded but, as Steve Poole shows here, papers from a coroners inquest kept at the Bristol Record Office, bring them vividly back to life'.
The Museum of Bristol and its public
'The Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery is a much-loved Bristol institution containing collections of national status alongside local treasures. But though its visitors often linger at Ernest Board's grand 1930 painting of Some Who Have Made Bristol Famous, the museum as a whole does not focus on the city's own history. Certainly, the lives of ordinary Bristolians have yet to be represented and as a buoyant market rewrites the city's topography, there is a real need to historicise Bristol's urban spaces'. In this article, Dresser looks at the plans to open a museum which fills the gaps left my Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
Little Wales beyond the Severn? The Welsh in Early Tudor Bristol
'There is a considerable Welsh presence in contemporary Bristol. Welsh accents are often to be heard in the city's streets, and that presence has doubtless grown since the building of the two Severn bridges. This is by no means a modern phenomenon, however, and in this article, Peter Fleming explores the experiences of the Welsh in Bristol during the reign of the Welsh king of England, Henry VII'.