Trans. & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 130 (2012), 225–240

The Redland Estates of John Cossins, and what happened to them

by PETER MALPASS

Today Redland is a residential suburb of Bristol, but historically (and until 1835) it lay just outside the city boundary. It was a rural corner of the parish of Westbury-on-Trym, tucked between the parishes of Clifton to the south west and Horfield to the north east. The 1841 tithe map shows a cluster of houses on the Redland side of Blackboy Hill, but house building was about begin, and by 1914 the patchwork of fields and nurseries had been replaced by the solidly middle class villas that continue to characterise the area.1 The grandest of the mansions that formerly dotted the Redland landscape have been demolished or converted to non-residential uses. The grandest of them all, Redland Court mansion, has been the home of Redland High School since 1885. Its 2.5 acre site is the remnant of an estate that was once much more extensive than previous accounts have acknowledged. Histories of Redland in the 18th century by Revd. H.J. Wilkins and Charlton and Milton have tended to focus on the acquisition of Redland Court and surrounding land by John Cossins in 1732, his subsequent investment in improvement in the 1730s and 1740s, and the dissipation of the assets by Jeremy Baker (nephew of Cossins’ wife Martha), who inherited the estate in 1778 and ran up such heavy debts that on his death in 1798 the house and land had to be sold.2 These accounts hardly even hint at two important facts, namely that after buying the Redland Court estate Cossins made further significant land purchases and that much of this land was not disposed of in the 1799 auction. Some of it was safe in a trust that Cossins had set up to provide an income for the Chapel that he built adjacent to , and much of the rest remained in the family for another two generations. The first part of this article aims to clarify the location and extent of Cossins’ two distinct Redland estates, while the second part examines what subsequently happened to the estates under a succession of owners. Unsurprisingly there is much more documentary evidence for more recent developments and the methodology employed in relation to determining the land owned by John Cossins himself requires some explanation. A basic assumption is that those who inherited land once owned by Cossins were not in a position to add to it (for reasons that will become clear below), and so we can infer that when any land was disposed of by these people it was derived from the Cossins bequests. By comparing the available lists of properties owned by Cossins with later plans and deeds, and drawing inferences from the 1841 tithe map and apportionment we can work out where most of the land was. The task is made more difficult by the rather approximate measurement of land area in the 18th century and the way that some field names appear to change over time, while others are reconfigured. Some fields had no name, or were simply identified as, say, a close of five acres. Often location was indicated in property deeds by naming the owners

1. P. Malpass, Redland: the making of a Victorian suburb (Avon Local History and Archaeology, 2012). 2. H.J. Wilkins, and Redland (Arrowsmith, 1924); J. Charlton and D. Milton, Redland, 791–1800 (Arrowsmith, 1951).

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of adjacent properties, a practice that worked better for contemporary readers than for modern researchers. John Cossins owned land and property in London and elsewhere, but this study focuses solely on the Redland estates, and draws most of its evidence from files held by the Bristol Record Office.

Cossins and the Redland Court Estate Redland Manor (later Redland Court) had been acquired by a Bristol physician, Jeremy Martin in 1653. Charlton and Milton (p. 32) report that he purchased the house plus 42 acres, and although they provide the field names it is not possible to identify exactly where they all were (because some of the names differ from those on later plans).3 Martin also purchased two fields known as Kendall Meads (6 acres), which remained in the portfolio until the 1830s, as will be mentioned later. The Kendall Meads were located in Cotham (where St Matthews Road is today – see Fig. 4), but otherwise we can be confident that the estate consisted of land closer to and surrounding the house. As Charlton and Milton observe, the income from 48 acres was insufficient to maintain the lifestyle of a landed gentleman, and Jeremy Martin must have relied on his professional earnings. His heirs, particularly Gregory Martin who occupied the estate from 1711 until 1732, were more dependent on income from the land with the result was that mortgages were taken out as debts mounted. According to Charlton and Milton (pp. 36–7) Gregory Martin had effectively lost control of the estate before he conveyed it to John Cossins in 1732. They say that there is no record of any payment from Cossins to Martin and that Cossins took over the existing mortgages. John Cossins was a successful grocer, born in London in 1682 and he seems to have been wealthy enough by the age of 50 to retire to Bristol and to set himself up as a country gentleman, while simultaneously doing a favour for his wife’s family by taking on her uncle’s indebted estate. Given the significance of the slave trade and the exploitation of enslaved Africans for the Bristol economy in the 18th century, and the known propensity of successful West India merchants to convert their riches into real estate, it is necessary to ask how Cossins had acquired his wealth.4 It seems unlikely that he made his money simply by retailing packets of sugar and other comestibles, and he should probably be thought of as a merchant rather than a shopkeeper, but whether and how far he was engaged in the more reprehensible aspects of the West India trade is not known. Wilkins confidently asserted that unlike Edward Colston ‘There are no dark and hideous shadows on the reputation of John Cossins’.5 However, Dresser explicitly links Redland Court to the proceeds of slavery, and says that Cossins married ‘a wealthy West Indian heiress’ Martha Innys, daughter of Andrew Innys, a Bristol merchant.6 John Cossins certainly mixed with and made deals with people who were directly involved in either the trading of enslaved people to the West Indies or their exploitation on the plantations, but in the small social and economic elite of 18th-century Bristol such contacts were inevitable. Among his associates were Slade Baker and Paul Fisher, both known to have been directly involved in the slave trade.7 Baker, usually described as a linen draper, was

3. Culvermead (11 acres) Gastons (4 acres) Old Orchard (3 acres) Upper Hill (5 acres) Well Hay (3 acres) Little Brockridge (5 acres) Grove (2 acres) Lower Hill (5 acres) Linke (2 acres) and Linke Wood (2 acres). 4. M. Dresser, Slavery Obscured (Redcliffe Press, 2007). 5. Wilkins, Redland Chapel, p. 18. 6. Dresser, Slavery Obscured, p. 113. 7. A. Burnside and S. Brennan, ‘Paul Fisher: linen draper and merchant of Clifton Hill House’, in M. Crossley-Evans (ed.), ‘A Grand City’ – ‘Life Movement and Work’ Bristol in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 2010), p. 49.

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married to Cossins’ wife’s niece Elizabeth, whose son Jeremy Baker eventually inherited Redland Court. Fisher, rich enough to have built Clifton Hill House, was also close to the Baker family and was appointed by Cossins to be a trustee of the Redland Chapel Trust. In addition, Cossins purchased a substantial tract of land in Redland from people known to have had connections in the West Indies, but none of this is sufficient to prove that he was himself involved with slavery. Soon after taking over at Redland Court Cossins demolished the Tudor manor house and built a new mansion, completed in 1735, in the fashionable Palladian style.8 It seems likely that it was Cossins who was responsible for the fine avenue of trees that still runs away from the house and which would have provided a fitting approach to the new mansion from the Bristol direction (see Fig. 6). The Cotham end of the avenue is hinted at on Rocque’s map of Bristol dated 1750, supporting the belief that Cossins was responsible for it. Maps published in the 1820s and 1830s indicate that the far end of the avenue was marked by a crenellated stone arch, in the field then known as the Arch Ground (now Archfield Road). This suggests that Cossins owned land all the way from the house to the Arch Ground, and this is supported by the fact that this field was owned by Catherine Baker in 1835 as part of a portfolio of property passed down from Cossins (see below).

Fig. 1. Redland Court, painted in about 1824 by Edward Cashin. Reproduced with permission from Bristol Museums and Galleries, M3432. However, the Arch Ground was not part of the estate purchased in 1732. At that stage Cossins acquired only the mansion house and grounds, together with its surrounding 42 acres and Kendall Meads, all of which had belonged to Jeremy Martin. We can also say that he added to the estate, because 78 acres (including the house and grounds) were put up for auction in 1799.9 Moreover,

8. W. Ison, The Georgian Buildings of Bristol (Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 164. 9. Charlton and Milton, Redland, p. 55.

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we know that the neither Kendall Meads nor the Arch Ground were included in the 1799 sale, nor were the two adjacent fields (317 and 318 on the 1841 tithe map) that were also inherited by Catherine Baker as an infant in 1817. These three fields amounted to 19 acres, and they may be the purchase referred to by Charlton and Milton (p. 43) who say Cossins bought ‘Green Ground’ in 1740. Whenever the additional land was purchased, we can conclude that overall John Cossins added at least 38 acres to the Redland Court estate. Indeed, he must have purchased a lot more land because in 1749 he was able to put 40 acres into a trust to provide an income for the chapel that he had recently built on land adjacent to Redland Green.

John Cossins’s Other Redland Estate The chapel trust land was part of a major land purchase in 1738, when Cossins paid £2,200 for at least 58 acres, plus eight small houses, all in the Redland area.10 The background was that in June 1735 John Maycock, a Barbadian estate owner, had mortgaged the property (including some property at Lawford’s Gate, Bristol) for £4,000 but had been unable to redeem the mortgage and in March 1738 it was agreed that his creditors, Samuel Perry and Coort Kneirt, should sell it for what they could get. Although we have a list of the fields and houses purchased by Cossins in 1738 and we can be reasonably confident of the location of his second Redland estate is difficult to be precise about each individual site. The easiest part concerns the land identified on the plan below, which shows the extent of the land placed in the Redland Chapel Trust by Cossins in 1749.11 Several of the fields named on the plan appear in the list of 1738 and it seems likely that all of the land given to support the chapel was derived from that purchase. Rather than trying to identify each of the 58 acres, an alternative approach is to locate the various parcels of land that can be definitely or inferentially attributed to John Cossins. This approach is both less frustrating and more interesting, in the sense that it reveals his ownership of yet more land. First, a conveyance of Dec. 1767 by John Innys to Philip West (mason) refers to 5 acres known as Mine Ground, fronting onto what is today Redland Hill (part of the site is now the Redland Steiner School).12 The deed clearly states that this land was part of Cossins’ 1738 purchase. Innys, who had inherited the Redland Court estate, did not sell this site for an up-front capital sum; rather, in a deal that prefigured what was to become the norm in the 19th-century development of residential suburbs in Bristol, he agreed to transfer the land in return for ‘a yearly fee farm rent’ of £20 forever. For his part Philip West agreed to expend at least £2,400 to build

10. This section is largely based in one file in the B[ristol] R[ecord] O[ffice] 39113/11, deeds of 91 Hampton Road. The file includes an abstract of Benjamin Stickland’s title to land in Redland, enabling us to trace its ownership back to the early 1730s. The list of the property bought by Cossins is: an orchard, where a mansion house had stood, plus a close of 3 acres, Long Meadow (5 acres), The Brow (3 acres), Twenty Acres (10 acres), Curtis Hall (5 acres) and Hill Leaze (5 acres), all of which was in the possession of James Farnam. Then 6 paddocks (10 acres), Great Grove (6 acres, 3 roods (a rood was a quarter of an acre)) Close of meadow (2 acres 2 roods), Close of meadow known as Long Ground (5 acres 1 rood) adjoining Greenway, close of meadow near Greenway (3 acres 2 roods), 1 tenement (2 roods), one other tenement and small garden, one tenement, backside and orchard, known as the Bull’s Head, one small tenement and little garden, one house and garden, one old decayed tenement, backside and garden and one tenement. All these properties were ‘formerly the inheritance of Sir Robert Yeamans’. 11. BRO P/RG/T/1. 12. BRO 8015/78; see also W. Evans, ‘Redland Hill House and Redland Chapel, Bristol’, Trans. BGAS, 118 (2000), pp. 206–12.

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Fig. 2. Redland Chapel Trust Land.

3 or more ‘good and substantial’ houses. However, like many optimistic builders and property developers West was under-capitalised and went bankrupt in 1770.13 Second, in 1768 John Innys disposed of another, larger, area of land, also part of the 1738 purchase and again the recipient was Philip West.14 This site included a house known as Cornish Mount, plus Cornish Mount Close (3 acres) and Great Grove (8 acres). Cornish Mount was an old

13. ibid.. 14. BRO 8015/79.

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house, later rebuilt and renamed Grove House, on what is today Grove Road, off Black Boy Hill, but then it was identified as ‘being at or near a place called the Limekilns’. It is clear that Innys was seeking to increase the income from his land, for the rent charge was set at £42 p.a. and West was required to repair, alter or improve the existing house and to build one or more good and substantial new houses. It is highly probable that Cornish Mount Close was the field behind the house (396), and that Great Grove was the field on the south side of Lower Redland Road (264). The grounds for this inference are that the sizes of these fields according to the 1841 tithe map are congruent with the areas mentioned in the deeds and they both abut other plots associated with John Cossins. Third, the 1841 tithe apportionment indicates that a total of 22 acres belonged to ‘William Henry Warton and Catherine Innys (his wife)’.15 In fact Mrs Warton was born Catherine Jane Baker, and as a toddler in 1817 she had inherited what remained of John Cossins’s land, including Kendall Meads in Cotham and 16 acres of Redland. The largest part of this holding consisted of three fields known as Greenway, Middle Greenway and Further Greenway (267, 268 and 271) on the western side of Hampton Road/Elgin Park, plus a smaller piece of pasture (272). In addition there were 3 plots in the angle between Redland Road and Redland Hill (386–8) and a small site on the corner of Lower Redland Road and Binden Place (a short stretch of Blackboy Hill). The deeds for the sale of fields 268, 271 and 272 in 1842 confirmed that they had been part of Cossins’s 1738 acquisition, and it seems probable that the other sites were also included, given their contiguity with other sites known or very likely to have been part of that deal. Thus we can say that 58 acres understates the extent of the 1738 purchase, because we can tie at least 72 acres to it: Redland Chapel land 40 acres Mine Ground 5 acres Cornish Mount 11 acres Greenway etc 16 acres. Additionally we know that Catherine Baker inherited a total of 19 acres at Arch Ground that almost certainly derived from John Cossins. The total amount of land in Redland owned by Cossins therefore appears to have been 169 acres (72 in the 1738 deal +19 at Arch ground +78 in the Redland Court estate), not forgetting the 6 acres of Kendall Meads. This is a minimum estimate and does not include several houses for which we have no land area, nor a 1 acre field known as Tea Boat (of unknown location) and land on the Durdham Down (north) side of Redland Hill which is believed to have been owned by Cossins.16 If it is true that his initial purchase was the old mansion house plus just 42 acres then it is clear that Cossins more than tripled the size of his holding in the area, and that he was by far the largest land owner in Redland in the 18th century.

What Happened Next John and Martha Cossins had no children and when he died in 1759 he left all his Redland property to his wife. Martha specified in her will that the Redland Court estate should pass first to her brother Jeremy Innys for his lifetime, then to her other brother John, and next to Jeremy

15. BRO EP/A/32/41 Westbury-on-Trym and Stoke Bishop Tithe apportionment, 1842, to be read with the tithe map, drawn up by Y. and J.P. Sturge, 1841. 16. This is based on recollections of the deeds of the old Redland College site, which have gone missing since the site was sold for housing.

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Fig. 3. Redland Land Owned by John Cossins.

Baker, the son of Slade Baker.17 The estate was described as the land bought by John Cossins from Gregory Martin, excluding Kendall Meads, but including unspecified other land. Kendall Meads, plus some other unspecified property was to go to John Innys, and it is tempting to infer that the

17. BRO 8015/12 copy of the will of Martha Cossins, 24 Sept. 1761.

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family saw the Redland patrimony in terms of two distinct parts. Jeremy Innys died in 1764 and so the two parts were reunited under his brother John. As we have seen, in the late 1760s he disposed of 16 acres of land and property off Redland Hill and Grove Road but the estate as a whole was still largely intact at his death in 1778. The will of John Innys, made in August 1775, left all his Redland property to Jeremy Baker, the son of his deceased niece Elizabeth Baker.18 Like his father, Jeremy Baker was a linen draper and partner in the Miles Bank (1786–98); he was also a Tory member of the Common Council. However, he appears to have been unable to keep his expenditure in line with his income and his death, in 1798, revealed that he had borrowed heavily against the value of the property. The outstanding debts precipitated a crisis in the family’s fortunes. Baker’s will left all his property in trust for his son, Jeremy Innys Baker. The trustees were Revd. Reginald Pyndar Baker, Revd. Slade Baker and John Vaughan (a banker), and these three together with Baker’s widow, Katharina, and his heir were unable to resolve the imbalance between assets and liabilities. The case went to the Chancery Court of Rolls in 1799, where Master Wilmot ruled that the mansion and surrounding land must be sold.19 This broke a family connection that went back nearly 150 years, but at least a significant amount of land and property remained under the control of the three trustees. The house and about 75 acres were put up for auction in 4 lots at the Bath Tavern Bristol on 15 June 1799.20 Lot I was the mansion and grounds plus the land on both sides and in front, amounting to about 43 acres, whic