The principal industries are shipbuilding, ropewalks, chocolate factories, sugar refineries, tobacco mills and pipe-making, glass works, potteries, soaperies, shoe factories, leather works and tanneries, chemical works, saw mills, breweries, copper, lead and shot works, iron works, machine works, stained-paper works, anchors, chain cables, sail-cloth, buttons. A coalfield extending 16 m. south-east to Radstock avails much for Bristol manufactures.
The parliamentary borough is divided into four divisions, each returning one member. The government of the city is in the hands of a lord mayor, 22 aldermen and 66 councillors. The area in 1901 was 11,705 acres; but in 1904 it was increased to 17,004 acres.
_History._--Bristol (Brigstow, Bristou, Bristow, Bristole) is one of the best examples of a town that has owed its greatness entirely to trade. It was never a shire town or the site of a great religious house, and it owed little to its position as the head of a feudal lordship, or as a military post. Though it is near both British and Roman camps, there is no evidence of a British or Roman settlement. It was the western limit of the Saxon invasion of Britain, and about the year 1000 a Saxon settlement began to grow up at the junction of the rivers Frome and Avon, the natural advantages of the situation favouring the growth of the township. Bristol owed much to Danish rule, and during the reign of Canute, when the wool trade with Ireland began, it became the market for English slaves. In the reign of Edward the Confessor the town was included in the earldom of Sweyn Godwinsson, and at the date of the Domesday survey it was already a royal borough governed by a reeve appointed by the king as overlord, the king's geld being assessed at 110 marks. There was a mint at the time of the Conquest, which proves that Bristol must have been already a place of some size, though the fact that the town was a member of the royal manor of Baston shows that its importance was still of recent growth. One-third of the geld was paid to Geoffrey de Coutances, bishop of Exeter, who threw up the earthworks of the castle. He joined in a rebellion against William II., and after his death the king granted the town and castle, as part of the honour of Gloucester, to Robert FitzHamon, whose daughter Mabel, marrying Earl Robert of Gloucester in 1119, brought him Bristol as her dowry. Earl Robert still further strengthened the castle, probably with masonry, and involved Bristol in the rebellion against Stephen. From the castle he harried the whole neighbourhood, threatened Bath, and sold his prisoners as slaves to Ireland. A contemporary chronicler describes Bristol castle as "seated on a mighty mound, and garrisoned with knights and foot soldiers or rather robbers and raiders," and he calls Bristol the stepmother of England.