The Foreign

The built-up part of Birmingham was called 'the Borough' but this did not im-ply corporate status : it meant that house plots were held by burgage tenure, paid for by money rent not by service to the lord. All of the manor beyond the tollbars, which were manned at every entrance to the town on market and fair days, was 'the Foreign' which had a separate court. Beyond the open fields lay common grazing ground, steadily (encroached upon from the east during the Middle Ages. There is a first reference to hedged and ditched land in 1379.

The demesne, the glebe (church) land to the south of the town, and the property of St. Thomas's Priory to its north, already meant that there were no pastures nearer than Ladywood. When rich townsfolk enclosed pieces of common, with or without the lord's permission, they did not do so without protest from their poor neighbours : but enclosure continued if slowly. From 1313 if not earlier Birmingham people were paying rent instead of working for their lord, and the combining of strips in the Great fields to make compact holdings for stock-rearing brought an early end to communal farming.