| What is now north and east Birmingham had been settled by Anglian
folk, probably moving up-Tame from settlements made generations earlier.
It need not be supposed that they came into an empty region. There
may well have been clearance about river terrace hamlets during the
Roman peace if not before. Nothing certain can be said of it, however.
British tribal remnants had moved out altogether or been absorbed
into the more numerous Teutonic groups long before there were written
records; they bequeathed favoured sites to the newcomers, and names
for natural features and Roman towns.
The Anglians had been established in their small vills on the south
bound of the kingdom of Mercia for perhaps two centuries before Danish
incursions obliged them to band together in an alliance called Tomsaetan
(Tame-dwellers), first recorded in A.D. 849. Estonians, with all Anglian
inhabitants south of the Tame and some others, belonged to the Hundred
of Coleshill, a nominal ten tithings (ten householders) who met at
Coleshill for purposes of administration, justice, taxation, and war.
About 1000 A.D., as a measure of defence against the Danes, their
Hundred was included in the artificial grouping called a shire,
based on and tributary to, the fortress town of Warwick. Offlow
Hundred, next northward, went to Staffordshire. Thus the north bound
of Aston from the Bourn to the Tame via 'Shire Brook' became a shire
boundary and so remained until 1911.
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