History of the BRS

The Society was founded on 13 March 1929 at a public meeting held at the Council House (now Bristol Register Office) in Corn Street, Bristol, presided over by the Lord Mayor.1 The creation of the Society followed the appointment of Miss N. Dermott Harding as the first City Archivist in 1924 and the establishment of the Archives Department of Bristol Corporation (now Bristol Archives), which sought to make the city’s historic manuscripts available to scholars on a formal basis.  The Inaugural meeting of the Society was held on 25 June 1929 in the Council Chamber, a constitution was adopted and officers elected.  The Lord Mayor was to be the President with the Bishop of Bristol, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol and Master of the Society of Merchant Venturers as Vice Presidents.  The management of the Society was entrusted to a Council consisting of a Chairman, a General Editor, a Secretary and a Treasurer, together with the Town Clerk, and the City Archivist. 

The first General Editor was R. B. Mowat, Professor of History at the University of Bristol whose duties were specified in the constitution as “full discretion concerning the preparation and issue of all publications authorized by the Council, and he may, if he thinks fit, appoint one or more Assistant Editors”.2 The University’s Vice-Chancellor, Thomas Tudor Loveday was the first Chairman of Council, while the Secretary, W. L. Cooper, was the University’s librarian, and the Assistant Editor, J. W. Gough, was a lecturer in History.3  Only the Treasurer Cyril Meade-King was not associated with the University and this close relationship between the Society and the University has continued throughout its existence.

A publication strategy was laid before the second annual meeting in January 1930 and the first volume, Bristol Charters 1155-1373, prepared by the City Archivist, was published in December 1930.  A further nine volumes were published over the next ten years.  Miss H. E. Nott, who replaced Miss Harding in 1933, was soon editing the Deposition books for 1643-7 published as vol. VI in 1935 and in 1937 it was followed by Eleanora Carus-Wilson’s very well-received The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Later Middle Ages.  E. W. W. Veale, Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol, published two of what would be five volumes of the Great Red Book of Bristol and had taken over as Treasurer in 1934, thus completing the University’s tenure of all the offices within the society. At the 1936 Annual Meeting the General Editor, Professor Mowat, outlined a publication schedule through to 1944 but mobilisation for the war effort took its toll and no volumes were published from 1941 to 1945.

When the Society resumed its work at the end of the Second World War it faced many challenges.  The General Editor Professor Mowat had been killed in 1941 and the recently appointed Professor of Medieval History at the University, Professor D. C. Douglas, was elected as General Editor at the annual meeting in 1945 before his arrival in the city.4 He would work in partnership with the City Archivist, Elizabeth Ralph, as his Assistant Editor for the best part of the next 25 years and she would remain in office until her death in 2000.   A new volume was soon produced, since H. A. Cronne’s work on the Bristol Charters 1378-1499 was already available to form volume XI.  He had been evacuated to Bristol from King’s College London from 1939 to 1943 and, taking the opportunity to work on the charters, his introduction provided a fine overview of the city’s history. There were continuing financial concerns for the Society’s officers however.  Costs had risen and membership had fallen but appeals for new members had some success by 1949, when the membership had risen from 157 to 195.

In 1949 Professor Douglas had declared the intention of catching up with the wartime arrears of publication by 1950 and with the appearance of two volumes in 1950 this seems to have been achieved.  Volumes then appear regularly, though not annually until 1960 and include works which would become classics in their field.  As the society moved into the 1960s publication became more sporadic.  Only four volumes in total appeared between 1960 and 1968, and in what must have been his last Annual meeting as General Editor, Professor Douglas commented on the Society’s inability to publish more volumes.  By 1971 Patrick McGrath had succeeded Professor Douglas as General Editor.5  Under his general editorship the Society seems to have become more adept at tapping sources of research funding and seven volumes appeared in the 1970s including three on Bristol’s non-conformist history.

From the 1980s onwards the Society produced a volume annually.  David Large was by now Secretary and he gave the Society’s first public lecture in 1981 on Radicalism in Bristol in the nineteenth century, when the Society made a concerted effort to raise its profile in the city, with a second public lecture, Church and Community in Bristol during the sixteenth century by Dr J. H. Bettey taking place in December 1982. By then Mary Williams, who had succeeded Elizabeth Ralph as City Archivist in 1971, was the Society’s Treasurer, preserving the strong links between the society and the city’s Record Office.

One of the characteristics of the Bristol Record Society has been its commitment to long term projects, from its earliest publications of the Bristol charters (vols I, XI and XII) and the Great Red Book of Bristol, edited by E. W. W. Veale (vols II, IV, VIII, XVI, XVIII) to David Richardson’s four-volume history of Bristol and the trade in enslaved Africans (vols XXXVIII, XXXIX, XLII, XLVII) and the ongoing series edited by Roger Leech on the topography of medieval and early modern Bristol (vols XLVIII, 52).  Equally noteworthy are Clive Burgess’s work on the records of All Saints (vols XLVI, 53, 56) and Mr and Mrs George’s work on the Bristol probate inventories of (52, 57, 60). Some volumes are themselves the outcome of many years work, including Margaret Sharp’s study of the accounts of the constables of Bristol Castle that had taken thirty years (vol. XXXIV).

By 1990 J. H. Bettey, Reader in Local History at the University of Bristol and authority on the history of the West Country, particularly its ecclesiastical history, had succeeded Patrick McGrath as General Editor.  He remained in office for ten years, but the year 2000 was something of a turning point for the Society.  Not only did Dr Bettey stand down as General Editor and David Large as Secretary, but Miss Ralph, Assistant Editor for over fifty years, died in January of that year.  Her influence on the history of Bristol is incalculable.  She edited five volumes for the society, as well as acting as Assistant Editor.  She had also been General Secretary and President of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, and in 2001 that society published a volume of essays in her honour, edited by Dr Bettey.6  Bristol Record Society volume 51 is dedicated to her.

Members of the Regional History Centre at the University of the West of England were fortunately on hand to take on the work of the society.  Madge Dresser and Peter Fleming acted as joint secretaries and Roger Leech joined them to undertake the role of General Editors.  Jonathan Barry became a General Editor in 2011 and Evan Jones in 2021 on the resignations of Peter Fleming and Madge Dresser, respectively.  Evan Jones assumed special responsibility for digital publications and took forward the Society’s extensive digitisation programme.  It has now e-published over 350 works relating to the history of Bristol, including all the Society’s own volumes, the pamphlets produced by Bristol Historical Association, and many one-off records volumes, academic monographs and topographical prints. All have been made freely available online in the Bristol Record Society Collection of the Internet Archive.  From 2021 the Society changed its publication policy, issuing its volume annually to members as a PDF and printing a limited number for distribution to libraries.   

  1. N[orah] Dermott Harding (ed.), Bristol Charters, 1155-1373 (Bristol Record Society publications, vol. 1, Bristol: 1930), vii. ↩︎
  2. Robert Balmain Mowat (1883-1941), a political historian, was lost in an air accident, The Spectator, 5 Sep. 1941, 4. ↩︎
  3. T. T. Loveday (1875-1966) was a philosopher by discipline, Vice- Chancellor of Bristol (1922-44) and Chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (1935-8).  W. L. Cooper, University Librarian (1923-46), was a historian by training and had joined the University in 1913 as a lecturer in history. ↩︎
  4. David C. Douglas, FBA (1893-1982), distinguished Anglo-Norman historian and biographer of William the Conqueror. ↩︎
  5. Professor Patrick McGrath (1917-91), Senior Lecturer in History, University of Bristol, editor of three BRS volumes (XVII, XIX, XXXVII), Honorary General Editor of the Historical Association, Bristol Branch, Local History Pamphlets 1960-91 and historian of recusancy. ↩︎
  6. Historic Churches and Church Life in Bristol: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Ralph 1911-2000, ed. J. H. Bettey (Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 2001). ↩︎

Page last updated 11 September 2024