| No other buildings are known until 1553, when a hamlet was recorded
at Hockley. The parish pound was there, exact site unknown. Hockley
was probably a group of squatters' cots on the waste. There had been
little earlier settlement in 'the Foreign' of the manor (everywhere
except the village and demesne) because dwellers therein forfeited
the villagers privileges in the market. When the last of the de Birminghams
lost his estates in 1536 the whole manor including Rotton Park was
hedged and ditched into small closes for pasture - except the Heath,
which was to survive though encroached upon for more than two centuries.
The roads to Dudley and Wednesbury were already badly worn by the
long trains of packhorses bringing 'iron and seacole' to Birmingham's
forges. The slopes down to Ladywood and Hockley Brooks were deep
and steep holloways where water ran. Elsewhere the 'highways were
usually strips of churned and potholed mud a furlong wide. Hagley
Road was then a little-used lane as the main road to the west went
by way of Edgbaston and Harborne churches. Loge Road, whose east
end later known as 'The Flat' was the dam of Little Hockley Pool,
went only as far as a hunting lodge whose site was near the canal
bridge.
In 1628 Sir Thomas Marrow, of the family which had bought Birmingham
in 1555, sold Rotton Park to Humphrey Perrott of Belbroughton. He
rebuilt the ruined Park Lodge (cor-ner of Gillott and Rotton Park
Roads) overlooking the silted Roach Pool, and laid out garden and
orchard The rest of the Park was let out to several farms. Birmingham
suf-fered several outbreaks of plague, that of 1665 causing so many
deaths that an acre of waste on the manor bound had to be used for
mass burials in great pits : this patch, 'the Pest Ground' was still
called Pest Heath in 1810 : Gamgee House covers it today.
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