The River Tame.

After Domesday there was a steady growth in the number of mills. Sandwell Priory, founded in 1112, owned three or four mills, Castle Bromwich mill was recorded in 1154, and in the thirteenth century (perhaps earlier) there were mills at Dudley Priory, Tipton, Bromford (Oldbury), Pelsall, Walsall, Warley, Bearwood, Minworth, Hams Park, Shustoke, Ouston Grange (Mervale Abbey), and Tamworth.

A mill was not only a useful asset in a manor, but a source of food and revenue. The lord either built it or financed its building, obliged everyone else to use it and pay to do so, and reaped the harvest of fish, especially eels, which were caught in the weir-traps. (Mill values in Domesday Book were often recorded as so many pence or shillings and so many sticks of eels at 25 to a stick.)

At Tamworth in 1334 there were three water corn mills and one fulling mill. This is the first local reference to the adaptation of a mill for an industrial process; by the end of the fourteenth century 12 fulling mills were at work, some adapted and some built for the purpose, like Holford in 1358. This figure testifies to the great increase in wool production during that period, with the accompanying decline in corn.

Meanwhile the mining of coal and the production of iron were developing about the Tame headwaters; the metal was smelted in small smithies using charcoal as fuel, and water-driven bellows to provide the blast. Shortages of charcoal and water were causing smiths to migrate downstream even before the end of the fourteenth century, and this was to continue.

The introduction of water-powered hammers on the Tame was late - they had been in use in the Weald from the twelfth century, but reached our area only in 1549, when Bromwich Forge was built. Holford was adapted to a hammer mill in 1591, and Bustlecholme three years later.

Perry Mill, a bloomery since 1538, using charcoal from Perry Woods, was rebuilt in 1597. This period also saw the introduction of blade-milling, at Oldbury, Bromford, 'The Mill', and along the Hol and Hawthorn Brooks.

There were four blade mills in Handsworth in 1561. Little power and thus little water were required for blade-grinding, so that quite small streams could be employed.

Forges needed plenty of power for their hammers and slitting shears, and were therefore usually sited on the main stream; thanks to its many tributaries from a large catchment area, this had an abundant and regular flow, tending rather to flood than to low water. But as speed of run-off increased with the cutting-down of woods, so did the supply diminish with the increased ponding of the river above the mill-weirs.

Bustleholme and Sandwell became slitting mills in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hamstead became a blast furnace. Meanwhile, two mills at Tamworth and one at Witton had converted to paper-making, and Shustoke was later to join them. Grist mills continued to work on most sites downstream from the Rea confluence, and at Bilston, Dudley, Bentley, Bescot and Walsall. Perry re-opened when Hamstead converted, and new grist mills were built at Tipton, Wednesbury and Walsall. But most corn grinding was now done in windmills, often sited near the watermills that had been adapted. Wm. Hutton's paper mill, built at Birchfield in 1759, was a windmill.

Hockley Brook provided power for Aston Furnace from 1615 and in its heyday worked six watermills. Soho Pool was made before Matthew Boulton leased the estate and built the Soho Works (1762). All the many small mechanical processes carried on there used power from wheels, and it was the annual inadequacy of the brook to keep the pool supplied that interested Boulton in Watt's steam-engine.

It was not then seen to be a form of power that would eventually make watermills obsolete, but as a means of pumping water from the tail-race back into the pool for repeated use. When rotary motion had been perfected in 1781, the steam-engine began slowly to supersede that waterwheel, but its early unreliability and unevenness of stroke balanced its independence of water supply, and the triumph of steam was still not complete by the time other forms of power became available.

Engines were sometimes installed at mills to supplement rather than replace the wheels; as late as 1889, Wednesbury Forge had five large breast wheels, which could be wholly driven by water in rainy weather. The supply for these, two large pools fed by leats from two source-streams of the Tame, had been improved in 1848; there are other examples locally of mills being made more efficient or rebuilt during the first half of the nineteenth century, which indicates a continuing faith in waterpower where supply was sufficient.

But the inability of the Tame to satisfy all the demands made upon it is shown by the closures between 1775 and 1816 of Rushall, Walsall and Hamstead Furnaces, Hateley Mill, and the Hol Brook mills, and the reversion of Bustleholme and Sandwell to grist milling. Tamworth's three Tape Mills were employing steam by 1845, and Shustoke Paper Mill became a steam forge four years later. Industry could have developed no further on the Tame without additional power. One example will show the potentialities of steam : in 1817 it had steam-driven helve hammers weighing 2-3 tons, a seven-fold increase in power.

The steam engine was not the sole cause of the steady decline of waterpower during the nineteenth century. The Tame and our other rivers were never made navigable by other than the smallest boats, so that local millers were spared the problems of the Avon and Severn; but the coming of the canals affected them most adversely. Between 1770 and 1790 the navigations came wriggling along the valleys, sending out their branches, altering drainage, diverting and absorbing streams, throwing banks across leats and pools.

Mining to diminished supply, both through surface subsidence which produced swag-pools or meres, and through seepage into underground workings. Quarrying caused abandonment of sites. Finally came the railways, paralleling the canals and altering landscapes still more drastically. The Oldbury Tame mills were all put out of action by the building of several canal branches nearby; Hateley Heath site is a huge excavation, Bescot Forge a railway marshalling yard.

Other sites are covered by large factories : Oldbury Corn Mill is still at work in Victorian buildings which have never used waterpower, 'The Mill' is Izons and Wednesbury Forge is Elwells, Horseley and Bromford Works are on those millsites.

Holford Mill is the ICI, and Bromford Forge (Erdington), the last mill to be converted from grist-milling, has been succeeded by the great Tube Works. Of mill buildings on the main stream only Bustleholme and Sandwell Forge remain within the conurbation. Kingsbury Mill no longer uses water for its power. Alder and Kettlebrook Mills, near Tamworth, are now large factories, Fazeley is derelict. Fisher's Mill has been demolished in river improvement works, such as were responsible for the disappearance of several mills north-east of Birmingham.