The area today that is known as Totterdown was once part of the Manor of Knowle; called Canole in the Doomsday book, the manor was quite small and its first Norman lord, Osberne Giffard.[1] Osberne held lands in Gloucestershire where he built a castle.[2] The Manor of Knowle was too small to support a household for someone as powerfull as Osberne Giffard and it would have been administered from Osberne’s Court at Brimpsfield near Gloucester. Before the Normans took over, Canole was in the hands of a Saxon called Alnoth and it seems likely that a small settlement had grown up in Saxon times; by the time of the Domesday survey of 1086 this amounted to perhaps just 11 families.
Aldebury
The name Aldebury of Knowle appears in a Bristol charter of 1188, in Charters of 1252 and 1373 other variations on the name appear. Its location is not given precisely in the Charters but it was certainly in the area of what is now the junction of the Wells and Bath Roads where a map of 1742 gives the name Aldeburyham. ‘Alde’ probably meant “old” although it could be a contraction of “alder”, referring to the alder trees that favour the banks of the Avon, ‘bury’ indicates a fortified place or simply a settlement, so Aldebury of Knowle was either the ‘old settlement’ or “Alder village” of the Manor of Knowle.
Pile Hill/Pylle Hill
A charter of 1373 refers to a place called Pylhillesbrugh; as with Aldebury it was not given a definite location but was in the region of the present junction of the Wells and Bath Roads. The element ‘brugh’ may be a confusion with ‘burgh’ which has the same meaning as ‘bury’ but more likely it means “bridge”. There are three possible locations where a bridge may once have been needed on the road out of Bristol to Bath. Firstly and closest to the City, a huge ditch dug in 1248 once ran adjacent to the City wall and this had to be bridged at the Temple Gate. Secondly, further south, and before the Avon was diverted into the New Cut in 1804, a small creek formed by a stream running into the Avon, ran near to where the Cut now joins the river at Temple Meads. Thirdly and most southerly of all, located at what is now the Three Lamps junction, the Road would have been cut by a natural gully. The gully was formed by a stream fed by springs rising at what is now the lower end of Cambridge Street, the stream flowing out into the Avon somewhere below May Lane. A similar spring cut gully can still be seen today as a notable landscape feature in Knowle, on the east side of a lane that runs from Imperial Walk into the Callington Road conservation area.
The name Pile, Pyle, Pylle or Pill has a number of possible meanings; in the name of the village of Pill further down the Avon it means a creek or inlet. However the Saxon Charters of Somerset used the word pyl as the name for a stream or brook and as Totterdown was part of Somerset in Saxon times it may be that it was the springs on the east slopes of Pylle Hill, or the stream that once ran on the line of what is now St Luke’s Road that gave Pylle Hill its name. Pile Street was the name of the road that once ran outside the City wall and connected the Bedminster Gate close to Redcliffe Church, with Temple Gate which was near to what is now the north end of Temple Street. Pile Street formed a continuous highway which converged with the Bath and Wells Road. It seems likely that Pylle Hill and Pile Street once shared a connection in name.
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