The earliest record of the ground that No. 51 stands on comes from 1295. In that year the part on the street frontage belonged to Master Thomas de Montsorel, and the land set back behind it to a man recorded simply as John son of William. Montsorel appears in the city’s landgable rents for the same year, the ground rents that every plot inside the old town owed.
Medieval Bristol was a tight grid of long, narrow plots. A house or a row of shops faced the street, and behind it a yard, a garden or a second building ran back towards the lane at the rear. Behind No. 51 that lane was Tower Lane; along one side ran the passage later called Bear Lane, and later still Cider House Passage.
A bowyer’s shops
By 1385 the front of the plot held three shops, leased to John Lupyate, a bowyer, and his son, also John. A bowyer made longbows: a skilled and respected trade in the fourteenth century. The shops passed through the Bierden family, and in 1435 Edmund Bierden left them to his daughter Alice and her husband John Fitelton of Somerset. Bierden’s will added that if the couple died without children, the property should go to religious uses.
The land behind belonged in 1390 to John Richard, a draper. In 1411 his holding was described as his dwelling house with four shops and a cellar underneath, two gardens behind, and a “clothhous” beneath the house: a room for storing or working cloth, the trade that made medieval Bristol rich.
Between the Saracen’s Head and a tavern
In the 1490s and early 1500s the front tenement passed from John More to John Mauncell and then to John Colas. A small rent was still owed from it to St Augustine’s Abbey, though it had not been paid since about 1475.
A deed of 1522 gives the clearest picture of the plot’s neighbours. When John Colas, merchant, gave up his rights to the executors of Robert Thorne, the property was described as lying between a tenement of the chapel of St John the Evangelist on the south and Walter Strange’s tenement called the “Sarsyns hed”, the Saracen’s Head, on the north. It ran back to Hugh Yong’s tenement called “Brownes Taverne”.
So by Henry VIII’s reign there was already a tavern on the back part of the plot, the first of many drinking places on this spot. Later that year the whole property, from Broad Street right back to Tower Lane, was granted by Thorne’s executors to Hugh Young, gentleman.