In 1532 the merchant Robert Thorne and Thomas de la Warr, the Master of the Hospital of St Bartholomew, agreed to turn the old hospital and almshouse into a free grammar school. The lands that had supported the hospital, known as the Bartholomew Lands, became the school’s endowment. That school is today’s Bristol Grammar School.
By the early seventeenth century the tenement stretching from Broad Street back to Tower Lane was part of those lands. Its rents went to the school, and the feoffees (the trustees who managed the lands) leased out its parts separately. Whether it came to the school through Thorne himself is not certain: his own list of title deeds survives, but does not settle the question.
Four tenements on the street
In 1617 the feoffees leased four tenements in Broad Street to Thomas Hobson. They can only have been a subdivision of No. 51 and the property immediately behind it. By the late seventeenth century they were leased to a widow, Mrs Arthur, and lived in by Sarah Crockford (who had two of them), John Bickwell and James Hallard.
In 1700 the property was leased to Samuel Packer, a cooper, on condition that he spent £100 on building. That is the last time the Broad Street frontage appears in the school’s rentals, which suggests the front was rebuilt and let on a long lease.
The back part of the plot had a separate and livelier history, told in the next chapter.