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This is Windmill Hill, and so is this, and so is most if not all of this, serving triple purpose as it does as the name of a street, an actual hill, and a south Bristol suburb sprawled on and around the hill. Having previously done a video about the minster that gave its name to Bedminster, I thought I should do one about the windmill which gave its name to Windmill Hill.
Just one teeny tiny problem. My first search for it turned up a 24/7 Bristol listicle entitled "13 things you didn't know about Windmill Hill", of which number 1 was:
"No windmills here Despite its name, there's no evidence of a windmill ever existing on Windmill Hill. Archive maps show no sign of the landmark, although experts say this doesn't completely rule out the existence of one."
With the best will in the world, it didn't seem possible to stretch even a five minute youtube video out of the answer "there wasn't one", so I pretty much gave up on the spot. Except…
I couldn't help thinking, who the hell names a hill Windmill Hill if there's no windmill on it? Admittedly, there are… caveats with that sort of logic, but even so…My brain stubbornly insisted there couldn't be etymological smoke without fire, and it had to be worth at least another 5 minutes of googling.
I then turned up a street art blog, about this piece on the side of the Rising Sun pub at the top of the hill. The collaboration between My Dog Sighs and Curtis Hylton has windmills reflected in two giant eyes. There was formerly another windmill mural on the other side of the pub. The blogger tells us:
"Evidence of the actual windmill ever existing is a little hard to find now. Prior to the area's development however one is supposed to have existed in the 15th century."
The area's urban development came mostly in the Victorian era, as you can tell fairly easily what with all the quintessentially Victorian housing stock, Victorian churches, and my personal favourite, a Victorian school. Bristol does seem to have a lot of architecturally charming Victorian schools; I'd do a video on them but I'm not sure how much I have to say. Or that it's a good idea to hang around filming outside schools, to be honest.
This one is St Mary Redcliffe Primary School and is a nice rubble construction with limestone trimmings, that material combination I covered previously on the channel.
It overlooks Victoria Park, which is unsurprisingly also Victorian - the clue being in the name, I suppose - being established in the 1880s when the council bought the land, although it had been an informal open space prior to that.
But back to the windmill, and the suggestion that it existed in the 15th century - with all due respect, a street art blog isn't exactly the most typically rigorous academic source for the existence of climate-powered mechanised wheat-processing infrastructure in the medieval era, and they were only tentative about it even then, but still, this was more encouraging than Bristol 24/7's take, so I kept looking.
And eventually I found the most intriguing and confidently affirmative claim of all.
In Bristol City Council's 2014 Character Assessment document for Bedminster, we are told:
"St Catherine's Hospital was founded in the 11th century, by Robert de Berkeley, at Brightbow to provide accommodation for the sick and pilgrims en route to Glastonbury. The Hospital's Mill carried Mill Lane over and up the hill to the Hospital's windmill, which gives Windmill Hill its name. Mill Lane, which links East Street to Windmill Hill is therefore an early route - only the northern extremity of Mill Lane is extant."
There's a lot to unpack here. On the face of it, we have an unambiguous statement that there definitely was an eponymous windmill on this hill and it's from a source which…. um… well I generally hesitate to call Bristol City Council 'credible', in most circumstances, but you'd imagine whoever wrote this must have based it on something.
And we can confirm most of this paragraph easily enough. I've mentioned Robert of Berkeley, major 11th century landowner of these parts, in these videos several times before. No dispute either over the existence of St Catherine's Hospital, which today is indirectly remembered by the name of Catherine Mead Street. And we can visit the truncated remains of Mill Street, and confirm on old maps it did indeed used to run all the way to the bottom of Windmill Hill, the street.. But there's a pretty gaping flaw here: on its way there it crossed the River Malago, where a watermill was situated, in my mind making it pretty doubtful that its name had anything to do with a windmill.
And as for the really key claim for our purposes here - that the hospital had a windmill up here - sadly we're not told what sources this is based on, and, to cut a long story short, I couldn't find any myself to verify the claim. Since I don't have academic or professional researcher type of access to stuff, that's not to say they don't exist. But unfortunately, that's about where my quest for the windmill ran out.
At this point I considered shifting focus to the story of St Catherine's Hospital. Unfortunately for me there is essentially nothing to use as accompanying visuals, because by the 19th century the hospital buildings had been variously converted or demolished and buried under a tannery, which in turn was demolished in 1886 and buried under a giant tobacco factory, which in turn was mostly demolished in 1986 and buried under a giant ASDA.
What remained of the tobacco factory has recently been -slash- is currently being turned into blobs of 'luxury' flats - and this latest wave of construction and reconstruction prompted the usual legally obligatory archaeology work, undertaken by Wessex Archaeology, who graciously allowed me to use these photos of their dig.
2 metres below current ground level, in gaps between the Victorian tobacco factory buildings, they found the walls and floors of part of the medieval hospital, and their environmental archaeology department was able to determine the diet of the residents was dominated by fish.
Like St Bartholomew's hospital shown here, previously mentioned in my Christmas Steps video, St Katherine's was a hospital in the medieval sense of the word; more closely related to the concept of 'hospitality' than today's notion of professional medical care. As the council document indicated, such facilities often acted like hostels for pilgrims and travellers, and although they were supposedly charitable institutions with a mission to also aid the sick and needy, the extent to which they actually did so was variable.
Well, given the limited state of medical knowledge at the time, not to mention the fact much of their treatment seemed to consist of chanting psalms and prayers rather than applying even that limited medical knowledge, that statement could be taken in several ways, so perhaps I should clarify. The extent to which they even attempted to care for the sick was highly variable. By the 14th century tales were widespread of ill people dying outside these hospitals while corrupt wardens allocated the institution's resources according to nepotism rather than need.
St Catherine's was most active from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It escaped the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century, which was the final nail in the coffin for so many medieval religious hospitals, but this survival was pretty meaningless as it soon passed into private hands in 1577 and ceased operating as a hospital forever. (Well, unless you count the pharmacy counter in ASDA as some sort of spiritual continuation, but I think that might be stretching it).
Over the following centuries, its Bedminster buildings were very variously reused as private residence, tenements, a glasshouse and a tannery. But whether or not its outlying buildings ever included a windmill on Windmill Hill remains a mystery, at least to me. If anyone out there watching happens to have an archive of St Katherine's 15th century property records lying around and can fill us all in in the comments, that'd be absolutely grand.
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