INTRODUCTION

'Ladywood' is the best short title for this booklet. It is the name chosen for the CNW 1 Consortium to which all the schools belong. But the historical Ladywood covered a much smaller area. Herein the districts of Brookfields, Hockley, All Saints, Birmingham Heath, and north Edgbaston will also be studied, and there will be some reference to Gib Heath, Winson Green, and Rotton Park. The environs of schools in the west of the Consortium were considered briefly in 'Round Dudley Road' (1978) and the whole area in 'Rotton Park And Round About' (1968).

No prehistoric or Roman settlements are known to have existed in west central Birmingham. A Victorian attempt to make Caer Hill out of Key Hill and unearth an Ancient British stronghold thereon was mistaken. Until Anglian colonisation in the C6-7th, the only known settlement hereabout was a hamlet within the smaller of the two Roman forts at Metchley, which may have lasted for a century or so after the troops moved on. A Roman second-class road now called Ryknild Street (itself a corruption of a mistaken attribution) from Bourton-on-Water to Doncaster crossed Summer Hill Road, going north-north-east on the line of Great Hampton Row and Wheeler Street. Visible in Sutton Park, it has long disappeared across Birmingham.

When Anglian groups, probably descendants of direct immigrants, moved up-Tame to settle the central basin .of the Midland Plateau, boundaries were soon established between neighbour vills Those between Birmingham (home of Beorma's folk) and Edgbaston (Egbald's Farm) were made by agreement from the River Rea up a tributary which is now defined in part by Bell Barn Road, thence by a perambulation track of about a mile across a minor water-shed to a drowned point in Rotton Park Reservoir. Islington Row, Ladywood Middleway, and Reservoir Road follow this track, which formerly led to a confluence of three streams in Roach Pool, a fishpond in the Park.

Birmingham's north bound was Hockley Brook. The local vills became subject to the Kingdom of Mercia whose capital was Tamworth, and in its years of decline belonged to the Tomsaetan (Tame-dwellers) who probably banded together for protection against Danish incursions. When about 1000 A. D a defensive system of shires supportive of fortress towns was established in the Midlands, Coleshill Hundred went to Warwick taking with it Birmingham, Edgbaston, and Aston. Handsworth, across Hockley Brook (the Bourn or bounding brook), was in Offlow Hundred which was allotted to Staffordshire. The west bound of Birmingham, Shireland Brook, is the only part which also forms the city boundary. Birmingham has expanded in every other direction, but Smethwick declined the invitation to join the then Borough in 1889 and was not asked again.

Birmingham and Edgbaston belonged to the Earl of Mercia until he was dispossessed by William I. The Conqueror granted them with many other manors to Ansculf, a warlord whose stronghold was Dudley Castle. For several centuries the lords of Edgbaston gave knightly service to Paganels, Somerys and Dudleys, while the de Birmingham family served as Stewards of the Castle. When Domesday Book was compiled Birmingham had a population of about 50, all living near the manor house on the Rea valley side. Open fields lay in an arc west of the demesne, then the untenanted commons stretched to the borders. A fringe of wood occupied the ridge between two tributaries of Hockley Brook and extended south into Edgbaston. That manor probably lacked a village nucleus though it had its open fields.

Certainly in later times it had dispersed farms throughout its territory, with no more than a tiny hamlet by the church and another at Good Knaves' End (about the Swan Inn).