Hello, I'm Wilson Pruitt, and you are listening to the History of Methodism Podcast. You can support us online at patreon.com/historyofmethodism. Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Today’s Episode: Bristol.
Christian revival is not an abstract concept. It always has taken place in a particular location among particular people. If the events of a revival had taken place a few miles over, something may not have happened at all. The Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles that sparked the spread of Pentecostalism is a good example of this. If William Seymour had ended up in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, the confluence of events would not have taken place. Or even if he had stayed in Houston, it would not have turned out the same. None of this takes any agency away from God or means that we ignore divine presence within revival. Instead, the historical contingencies of revival help us to see the power of God amidst the contradictory and complementary realities of humanity throughout the centuries.
Bristol, in the southeast of England. It was the particular place where the Methodist revival will begin in the spring of 1739. The soil of that revival contains the geography of Bristol as well as its history and the fluctuating population of the port city.
The area of what is now Bristol has had settlement for thousands and thousands of years. Two Paleolithic settlements have been found on the banks of the Avon, that famous river of Shakespeare which enters the sea at Bristol. The word, Bristol, comes from the Old English, Brycgstow, meaning bridge place. Bristol sits south of the Severn River, and Severn estuary, which borders the southern part of Wales. The Severn Estuary goes into Bristol Channel and the Celtic Sea which has Ireland on its Western Side. The Romans settled there in a community named Abona, that was connected by road to the famous Bath settlement.
It was during the Saxon and Viking era that Bristol first became connected to the Slave Trade. When Williams the Conqueror landed in 1066, about 10% of the British population was enslaved. Most of these took place as the result of the near constant warfare that had been taking place on the islands for centuries. Bristol was where the vikings would ship slaves out of England for Dublin, Ireland, where their rule was unchallenged. From Ireland, slaves were shipped all over Europe.
The first revival in Bristol history took place during this time when the bishop, St. Wulfstan, consistently preached against slavery. This is how he described the situation:
They used to buy men from all over England and carry them to Ireland in the hope of gain; nay they even set forth for sale women whom they had themselves gotten with child. You might well groan to see the long rows of young men and maidens whose beauty and youth might move the pity of a savage, bound together with cords, and brought to market to be sold.1
Slavery was eventually banned in England in 1102, but with the Vikings still in control of Ireland, many were taken into slavery for decades after. It wasn’t until Henry II first conquered Ireland that the slave threat was ended, though this did not end Bristol’s history of slavery by any means.
With Henry’s conquest of Ireland, he also gave Bristol rights of colonization and commerce in Dublin, so there is a long history of Bristol trading, working, and making a living in Ireland .
As the Middle Ages progressed, trade expanded in Bristol. Wool was the largest export and wine from Bordeaux the largest import. In the days before the plague hit England, Bristol was the third largest town, after London and York, with a population of 15-20,000 people. 2
The Society of Merchant Venturers was founded during this time. It funded John Cabot’s 1497 journey to Canada and held a monopoly of trade in the port.
With the Tudors came a rise of respectability in Bristol. It was officially named a city in 1542, with the former Abbey of Saint Augustine becoming the Bristol Cathedral. At this point in history, the meaning of the word city was the place where a bishop sat, so it needed a Cathedral.
In the English Civil War, Bristol originally sided with the Parliamentarians, but it was captured by Prince Rupert in 1643. Sir Thomas Fairfax eventually retook Bristol in 1645, one of the precursors to the end of the first civil war.
After the end of the Civil War, the Royal African Company was chartered in 1672 and given a monopoly of the African Slave Trade. Edward Colston, a prominent Bristol Merchant, was a member of the Royal African Company and became wealthy off of the monopoly. He then joined the Society of Merchant Venturers, and helped lobby for the charter to be revoked. In 1698 it was, opening the slave trade to others. There were smugglers out of Bristol before this, but in 1698, the trade became legal and the merchants of Bristol flourished. Colston founded a number of poorhouses, hospitals, and other charity groups, but the wealth was from slaves.
In 1713, Great Britain became the exclusive transporter of slaves for the Spanish colonies, so the trade expanded dramatically.
Ships would leave Bristol with manufactured goods, bronze tea kettles and things of that nature, and then head to the Gold Coast of Africa, what is not Ghana and Benin. The manufactured goods would come off the boats and be replaced by enslaved African humans who were put into the same holds as the tea kettles. Madge Dresser, in her book on the slave trade in Bristol, Slavery Obscured, describes the ad hoc ways Bristol slavers filled their holds.
When Bristol slavers arrived on the West African coast, they might stop at one of the established forts or factories, or they might cast their anchor offshore and wait for canoemen to make contact with them. The routine varied, and sometimes, as in Old Calabar on the Niger Delta, it was customary for the slavers to give the 'cabouceers' or local headmen the goods on 'trust' and wait for them to return with slaves. Such 'trust' was reinforced by the practice of 'pawning', whereby relatives of the African traders were left on board English ships until the promised slaves were provided. The understanding was that if the traders did not return by the agreed time, the English were entitled to sell their relatives into bondage.3
From here, the slaves were shipped over to the Caribbean or the Carolinas, where they would be unloaded and sold. Finally, the ships would be filled with raw commodities, like sugar, tobacco, or cotton, to be shipped back to Bristol. So slaves didn’t directly enter Bristol or England (since slavery had been illegal there since 1102), but the blood of the slaves did in the ships that were used, again and again, for the same purpose.
14% of the slaves died in the voyage, though that number increased over the 18th century as the volume increased. Ships carrying 20 were soon carrying 200. Many of the ships used in the trade were financed by small investors. A few families would pitch in and put their money down. So this wasn’t just a simple set of rich, wicked men doing the devil’s work. This was a society profiting from this practice.
The 1730s and 40s were the high point of Bristol’s slave trade. In the middle of the 1740s, Liverpool surpassed it.
With all that said, the slave trade was never the most important trade going on in Bristol. It was always well diversified port. The slave trade helped to expand the class distinctions within Bristol. The rich became richer and the poor stayed poor.
Richard Heitzenrater describes the Bristol that George Whitefield would head to in early 1739.
“This small city was the growing commercial center of southwestern England; it was emerging as the leading provincial city in the kingdom and the chief port for trade with North America and the West Indies. Its merchants imported tobacco and sugar while exporting manufactured goods and African slaves. The city of nearly fifty thousand people, about one-tenth the size of London and the site of a magnificent cathedral, was surrounded by coal mines that helped to fuel the growing industrial revolution, with all its attendant problems and possibilities.”4
Before the Wesley’s and Whitefield arrived in 1739, Small revivals had taken place in Wales and Cornwall.
Henry Rake describes the situation in Wales in his biography of Wesley:
As early as 1714, for a few years a minister called Griffith Jones was preaching to crowds in the open air and intruding on other men’s parishes. Then in 1735 two crucial Church of England men were converted, a layman called Howel Harris and a clergyman called Daniel Rowland, the latter being influenced by Griffith Jones.5
Two figures in Cornwall are described in Kenneth Hylson-Smith’s, Evangelicals in the Church of England: 1734-1984.
The more notable of these was George Thomson, vicar of St Gennys, a small, secluded village on the Atlantic seaboard. With almost no outside assistance he became increasingly convinced of those doctrines of salvation through faith alone which were learned by the Wesleys only five or six years later. His fellow labourer was the aged John Bennet, who was described by George Whitefield in 1743 as 'about eighty years of age, but not above one year old in the school of Christ.’6
Bristol, though, was a gateway to the world. The timing of the Bristol Revival usually hinges on the February refusal of the rectors of Bristol and Bath to allow George Whitefield to preach, thus leading him to preach in the fields. But before we get to revival, we need to go back to January of 1739 after the great spiritual experience of New Year’s Day. What took place in the lives of the Wesleys and George Whitefield on the eve of Revival? Next time on the History of Methodism.
Sources
Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Richard Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called methodists (Nashville: Abingdon, 2013).
Kenneth Hylson-Smith, Evangelicals in the Church of England: 1734-1984. (London: T&T Clark, 1992).
Henry Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast (London: Epworth, 1988).
- https://www.buildinghistory.org/bristol/saxonslaves.shtml ↩︎
- https://www.discoverbristol.co.uk/bristol-history/ ↩︎
- Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured, 32. ↩︎
- Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called methodists. ↩︎
- Rake, 164. ↩︎
- Hylson-Smith, 20. ↩︎