In this article, Chris Montague looks the impact of the 1834 Poor Law amendment, and its impact on society's ability to help the poor. Furthermore, the essay covers how the "ideology of such a law was to be seen well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Bristol".
Tag: Bristol
Over Court: the life and death of an Elizabethan Manor House
"Wealthy Bristolians have always escaped the pressures of city life for the peace of rural South Gloucestershire. Country estates frequently changed hands as fortunes were made and lost and fashionable mansions were built with the profits of trade, including the Slave Trade. Sarah Hands has traced the story of Over Court from its medieval origins".
Continuity and Change in Agricultural Practices on Severnside
"Mary Jane Steer concentrates on farming life where Bristol expanded into the Severn Vale in the later 19th and 20th centuries. George Watkins and his family are the focus of her research. Like most of the rural population before 1900 they worked mainly as agricultural labourers, although George came to the area as a labourer on the Severn Tunnel in the early 1880s".
Elmington Manor Farm: 1584-1911
"Elmington Manor Farm is the best-documented farm in the Lower Severn Vale Levels, which is why James Powell chose as his topic 'The Estate Management of Elmington Manor Farm and environs 1066-1950'". From sources in "public archives, planning departments, libraries and museums" Powell looks at the earliest records of the farm, and how it survived to be surveyed by the "Second World War Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries".
Medieval Redwick, South Gloucestershire
"The Severn Vale salt marshes attracted our Prehistoric ancestors because of the wealth of food - especially fish and wildfowl. Regular flooding prevented permanent settlement but left silt behind which enriched the soil... Sue explores a wide range of records kept by church and state to piece together the lives of Redwick's medieval inhabitants".
Tales of the Vale: The ‘A Forgotten Landscape’ History Research Project – Introduction
"A Forgotten Landscape is an exciting project designed to reconnect local people with their heritage in the Lower Severn Vale Levels. One strand of this Heritage Lottery Fund Landscape Partnership Project is a community history project called Tales of the Vale". Bainbridge introduces the project, and how it interprets the landscape of the South West.
Pill Boxes in the South West: a Neglected Heritage?
"While popular memory associates the summer of 1940 with debonair young men in Spitfires duelling the Luftwaffe in the sky, there was frantic building activity going on below in preparation for the expected German invasion. Eugene Byrne looks at some of the defence works made in anticipation of the ground war in the west of England".
A Church as it should be? Victorian Restoration in South West England
'In this paper Weller demonstrates that, chiefly with "examples from the parishes in and around Bristol and Somerset, that the older church buildings we see today, whilst for the most part still possessing a Medieval structural core, have undergone varying degrees of transformation, sometimes including partial or occasionally total demolition, during the Victorian Age"'.
Prosecuting Bristol’s Fascists, 1934-1944
"During the Second World War a handful of local fascists or former fascists were detained in the Bristol area as potential security threats. Others were prosecuted for apparently expressing pro-German sympathies and even trying to sabotage the war effort. Eugene Byrne looks at some of these cases".
Grounds for grave concern: cemeteries and their management in Bristol, past and present
"Not only does death connect human beings across place and time; few other areas of human experience than disposal of the dead are so replete with existential meaning,yet simultaneously quite so prosaic". Helen Frisby and Stuart Prior look at the management of cemeteries in Bristol, as well as reflecting on the Graves Commission, which they were both a part of.