s works, potteries,
soaperies, shoe factories, leather works and tanneries, chemical works, saw
mills, breweries, copper, lead and shot works, iron works, machine works,
stained-paper works, anchors, chain cables, sail-cloth, buttons. A
coalfield extending 16 m. south-east to Radstock avails much for Bristol
manufactures.

The parliamentary borough is divided into four divisions, each returning
one member. The government of the city is in the hands of a lord mayor, 22
aldermen and 66 councillors. The area in 1901 was 11,705 acres; but in 1904
it was increased to 17,004 acres.

_History._--Bristol (Brigstow, Bristou, Bristow, Bristole) is one of the
best examples of a town that has owed its greatness entirely to trade. It
was never a shire town or the site of a great religious house, and it owed
little to its position as the head of a feudal lordship, or as a military
post. Though it is near both British and Roman camps, there is no evidence
of a British or Roman settlement. It was the western limit of the Saxon
invasion of Britain, and about the year 1000 a Saxon settlement began to
grow up at the junction of the rivers Frome and Avon, the natural
advantages of the situation favouring the growth of the township. Bristol
owed much to Danish rule, and during the reign of Canute, when the wool
trade with Ireland began, it became the market for English slaves. In the
reign of Edward the Confessor the town was included in the earldom of Sweyn
Godwinsson, and at the date of the Domesday survey it was already a royal
borough governed by a reeve appointed by the king as overlord, the king's
geld being assessed at 110 marks. There was a mint at the time of the
Conquest, which proves that Bristol must have been already a place of some
size, though the fact that the town was a member of the royal manor of
Baston shows that its importance was still of recent growth. One-third of
the geld was paid to Geoffrey de Coutances, bishop of Exeter, who threw up
the earthworks of the castle. He joined in a rebellion against William II.,
and after his death the king granted the town and castle, as part of the
honour of Gloucester, to Robert FitzHamon, whose daughter Mabel, marrying
Earl Robert of Gloucester in 1119, brought him Bristol as her dowry. Earl
Robert still further strengthened the castle, probably with masonry, and
involved Bristol in the rebellion against Stephen. From the castle he
harried the whole neighbourhood, threatened Bath