Sixteenth-century Bristol

Sixteenth-century Bristol was not the genteel Georgian city it would become. It was a port thick with the smell of salt and sewage, where plague swept through cramped timber houses and pirates brought their plunder to quayside taverns. John Latimer digs into the archives to reconstruct a city in turbulent transition: a town that hosted both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, that wrestled with its own ambition to be called 'City' rather than mere 'town.' Here are the sanitary horrors, the bear-baiting rings, the traveling players who brought London gossip to provincial crowds, the MPs who required bribing, and the endless, lumbering postal system that took weeks to deliver a letter. Originally published as newspaper columns in 1902, this is local history at its finest: meticulous, affectionate, and utterly unsanitized. For anyone who wonders what Tudor England actually smelled like, and how ordinary people filled their days between plagues.