16TH TO 18TH CENTURIES

In 1538 William Wyrley owned Hamstead Hall, (which had been regarded as the manor house for nearly three centuries), two watermills, a pool and moor (boggy meadow), four cottages and a fishery in the Tame i.e. a fishweir. His land included 300 acres of park, 500 of pasture, 40 each of meadow and wood, and 100 acres of heath. The Hall lay in the damp valley, where it had originally been sited for defence like Perry and Erdington Halls, inside moats. Since there were only four cottages, presumably for shepherds and keepers, it would appear that there was no village of Hamstead, and it is possible that here as elsewhere the tenants had been turned out and their cottages razed so that the estate could be emparked or used for sheepwalks.

The sixteenth century saw increased use of the available water power. By l56l there were four blade mills in Handsworth, using the Tame's tributaries. Oldford Mill had been adapted to fulling, (the cleansing of wool) in l358, and as Holford Mill it turned over to hammer-milling, (the hammering of iron sheets and billets) in l59l. Outside Handsworth Perry Mill became a bloom smithy in l538 and was rebuilt in l597. Aston Furnace, first to use Hockley Brook, was at work from l6l5. Hamstead was always a corn mill until it went out of use in 1920.

By Tudor times the trade in 'iron and sea~coal out of Staffordshire' was well established, and packhorse trains crossed the south of the manor to the Hockley Brook ford at the foot of Soho Hill. The stony heath was moderately firm and resistant to centuries of wear by foot, hoof, and wheel, but the descent to the brook was a gorge-like holloway. There was a little cottage industry in Handsworth, reference being made to two nailers in the C16th, and increasingly the small population turned to backyard iron-working.

There was no large nucleated village anywhere in the manor. There were straggles of cottages along Hamstead and Soho Roads and Field Lane (Church Lane) and Birchfield Road, but these could hardly be called hamlets. The shrunken open fields were surrounded by individual farms : Manwoods in the far north-west was founded in 1680, being then known as Bayes Hall. The manor pound for strayed animals stood where the church school now is. Handsworth had no market charter, though the open space beside the 'Old Town Hall' looks as if it might have housed a market. The Hall got its name because from the late C16th it was used by the 0verseers of the Poor and as a gaol and workhouse. Large manors were often divided into 'ends' with separate overseers for the poor and highways, hence Bristnall End in the south-east.

The population of Handsworth in 1600 was no more than 200, and it changed little in two centuries : there was little work, and the unemployed went to Birmingham, their families following them. Hockley Great Pool was made on Hockley Brook in or before l659, as a fishpool, not as a mill reservoir.

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