Bridgwater: Personality, Place And The Built Environment (Bar British)

Bridgwater: Personality, Place and the Built Environment traces the history and development of the town of Bridgwater as a physical entity from its origins to 1700. This includes not only the physical layout of the town as a whole, but also the plan and structure of its individual plots and buildings. These have been reconstructed through the hundreds of leases from the medieval period and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preserved in the town's archives. Although the area around Bridgwater was settled in prehistory and Roman times, Bridgwater itself first appeared in the early eleventh century. In contrast to previous histories of the town, the book shows that rather than being the village depicted in the Domesday survey, Bridgwater was founded as a bridgehead burh by its Anglo-Saxon lord, Maerleswein. It was later promoted to Anglo-Norman borough c. 1200 by the Devon magnate, William de Brewer, who added the castle and parks as part of a planned aristocratic landscape. The book pl