HISTORY OF CHRIST CHURCH

 

Christ Church (properly the Holy Trinity) may well stand on the oldest religious site in the City of Bristol - the hill-top in the centre of the original walled town, where the four chief streets (Broad, Wine, High, Corn) meet.

 

No documentary evidence survives to give a secure Anglo-Saxon date to any of the City churches, although the lower tower of the old church at Christ Church was said to have borne a date from the middle of the reign of Ethelred II, the Unready.

 

A fragment found at Saint Mary le-Port is only doubtfully pre-Conquest, Saint Peter was traditionally a manorial church of similar date, All Saints (first recorded in 1153) has a good Anglo-Saxon dedication, and the Guild of Kalendars at Christ Church claimed to have been founded in the 600s.

 

These must be the four oldest, and three of them, lacking Saint Peter but joined by Saint Ewen (a Bishop of Rouen whose dedication is surely post-Conquest), were bunched tightly around the cross-roads and were by 1295 related to the four quarters of the villa of Bristol. The Bristol Cross (now at Stourhead House, Wiltshire) stood at these cross roads