Jacob's Well, Bristol facts for kids

Jacob's Well in Cliftonwood, Bristol, England is an early mediaeval structure thought to be a Jewish ritual bath.

The stone structure is built round a natural hot spring and on a lintel there is an inscription thought to be the Hebrew word zochalim, "flowing". This led to the theory that this was a mikveh or Jewish ritual bath. The interpretation of the inscription has been challenged and the alternative theory proposed that the bath is too deep for a mikvah and may have been used to cleanse bodies before burial in a Jewish cemetery at Brandon Hill – there was a small Jewish community in Bristol from about 1100.

The spring became the property of St Augustine's Abbey in 1142 and the exterior was rebuilt in the 18th or 19th century. Jacob's Well was rediscovered in 1987 and is now a scheduled ancient monument.

In February 2011, the company that now owns the well applied to the Environment Agency to extract and bottle up to 15 million litres (3.3 million imperial gallons) of water a year. Water from the well was previously bottled and sold in the 1980s.

Sources

• R. R. Emanuel and M. W. Ponsford, Jacob's Well, Bristol, Britain's only known medieval Jewish Ritual Bath (Mikveh) (PDF), Transactions (Bristol: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society) 112 (1994) 73–86
• J. Hillaby and R. Sermon, Jacob's Well, Bristol: Mikveh or Bet Tohorah?, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 122 (2004) 127–152