Medieval Scene

An effort of imagination is required to visualise the Hall Green its residents of five centuries knew. Let us make the effort, and visit the district during the Wars of the Roses. Haw Green is our starting point, a small pasture at a lonely cross-roads. Nearby is an old half-timbered and thatched house within a moat, whose rough footbridge is kept raised as a precaution. This is the home of the Haw family, who will not believe us if we tell them that one day an area 2.5 square miles will be known by a corruption of their name and place.

In their time the general name of the area is still Yardley Wood, though the forest survives only in and beyond the extreme south of the manor. From Haw House southward the prospect is of flat and bare heathland, save for a few enclosed crofts set well apart. (Near Ingestre Road 'the heaths' were recorded in 1366.) Beyond the great marshy trench of the Cole Valley, with flatboats and fish-weirs on the wide stream, the oaks and elms of Arden are obscured by the smoke from charcoal-burners' kilns.

To the east, where the common slopes gently away towards Kineton Green Brook, are the great moated stock-pound and large house of Broom Hall. Northward between the lanes we call Fox Hollies and Shirley Roads, is the fenced land belonging to Maxstoke Priory, whereon both Haw House and Hollies stand. West of this estate lies that of Shaftmoor : but for Henry VIII's seizure of all monastic land, everyone living in 1972 between Reddings Lane and Brooklands Road might be tenants of Studley Priory. The Sarehole property, including the watermill and extending across the river as far as Sherwood Road, and Fynchalls Radmore on the boundary (south of Baldwins Lane) also pay rent to the Prior of Maxstoke. These well-tenanted lands are in profitable use for crops and pasturing of sheep for wool. Scrawny sheep and cattle are browsing on the common, watched by shock-headed urchins.

A few peasants are grudgingly filling in potholes and drawing a harrow over ruts on the ridgeway we call Highfield and Fox Hollies Roads, for this is 'Via ecclesia' which leads to St. Edburgha's three miles away. Though the other roads including 'the highway to Henley' (ref.1350) may be and are neglected, this 'church way' is maintained after a fashion. South of Six Ways (ref.1382) is Stillfields House. Like others near Yardley's borders, this was an 'assart' made some generations ago by permission of the manorial lord : enterprising families cleared land in the waste, and those who prospered no have fair-sized farms and substantial houses.

Other buildings along the lanes were mere hovels, though each has its croft fenced against animals. These are 'squatters' homes. It is the custom in Arden that a man may gain the right to live on the common if he can erect a hut overnight and have smoke coming from a hole in the roof by dawn. He is also entitled to enclose land as far from the hut as he can throw an axe; clearly there are some Olympic-standard axe-throwers hereabout.

Standing at the Four Ways, where a bush hanging outside a tumbled-down house proclaims a tavern, we may watch the sparse traffic. Merchants to and from Birmingham will packhorses and guards, pilgrims travelling between Pershore Abbey and Maxstoke, peddlers, beggars, a band of tattered soldiers who are everybody's enemies, and assorted Yardleians speaking an uncouth dialect which sounds strangely familiar.